My own information supply chain state:
Reading:
Books: I know what to read
News/essays: 10% signal: noise
Tweets: potluck/lottery
Writing:
Books: I know what to write
Essays: No idea what to write
Tweets: spray-and-pray
Conversation
A meta parameter I'm evaluating is: how important/urgent/valuable is my kind of reading/writing right now, and how important is it to just shut up to avoid adding to the noise.
The value has fallen at least 70%. It's like oil in this moment. Nobody needs much of it.
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But it's not particularly important to shut up either, because it is very easy to filter out/ignore.
But if I do figure out something to say that's important/useful, getting it heard will be a bitch.
Replying to
That's why, even though reading/writing is my primary shtick, I'm looking for other sorts of things I could do. Though even with my next-best skills/roles I fall below median. Others are far better at anything *else* I could be doing to the point that I'm better off just idling
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Books have a certain gyroscopic quality shorter forms don't. All my books-first writing friends are not even thinking of second guessing their projects. It's obvious to all of them that their projects still make sense, and they're just powering through. Most are accelerating.
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The the undermining of the motivation of several competing demands on attention accelerates book projects at times like this. Shorter length = shorter time constant of relevance in general. I'd say the typical good essay I write has a half life of 5 years. A typical book is 10y.
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This tells me that we are collectively intuiting that anything with a horizon of <5 years is of questionable relevance now, and losing motivation to pursue it. Motivational cache invalidation.
But anything where we are calibrated to a 5+ y horizon is still motivationally intact.
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