
The Collector's Fallacy - _chu
https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-collectors-fallacy-why-we-gather-things-we-don-t-need-9a55ef9979ef
======
jasode
_> Put simply, Eco is telling us to finish what is on our plates before we get
up for more. Make sure you master what you have before moving on._

Everybody has their own angle on how to handle information overload. That
said, I'll offer a different mental model of managing the never-ending reading
list. The "reading list" includes the 50+ open webbrowser tabs of "stuff to
read later", the digital magazines on iPad, the printouts of pdf files (tech
whitepapers), and of course, a pile of traditional books.

For me, finishing what you already collected before starting on new ones is
not optimal. I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you _should_
eat the old food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes
sense to consume that first.)

Instead, I think of reading as a Priority Queue[1]. I let go of the idea that
the various reading piles must be finished in the order I added them to the
list. Many times, a more interesting article or book will go to the top of the
queue pushing back a bunch of stuff I added weeks or months ago. The priority
queue is in a perpetual state of being _unfinished and constantly adjusted_.
That's ok. It's the same idea as a priority queue for leisure traveling. Even
if I owned a $75 million Gulfstream private jet, I still couldn't travel to
all the places I wanted to in my lifetime. There is no sense of being "done"
with my "travel destinations collecting" and I apply that perspective to
reading.

The above doesn't apply to work email inboxes. I do get anxious if there are
unread items there.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_queue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_queue)

~~~
scryder
>I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you should eat the old
food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes sense to
consume that first.)

Based on this explanation, maybe you should. News and information often
decrease in usefulness and relevance the longer you wait to digest it.

~~~
hueving
Any information that decreases in usefulness very quickly with time wasn't
very useful to begin with. If anything, your argument supports the idea of
letting things sit in a queue for months to determine if it's still relevant
before bothering to consume it to begin with.

~~~
scryder
This logic is wrongheaded, as it ignores the context which causes information
to expire:

>Socially:

I'll expand this one the most, because a similar argumentative line will apply
to all the other ones.

Current events stories are a common point of discussion, and current stories
become less relevant over time.

For example, discussion about politics at this moment, during last October,
and during this January, are marked by such flux in notable talking points
that if you were reading articles from each time period during the others, you
will not be meaningfully contributing to any individual political discourse.

This is true in discourse about some (or many) other fields, including tech,
sports, and all modern forms of mass media, including film, television, and
literature.

People who sit waiting for others to collate their media decisions for them
while things wait in the queue for months will only be citing and capable of
discussing settled true-isms, which is far more useless and uninteresting for
discussion than being right or wrong. This is socially bad for you, and
sociability, for better or worse, strongly correlates with your life
satisfaction and income. In some sense, you're implicitly arguing happiness
and money aren't useful or important.

>Relationship-wise:

The difference between wishing a friend a "Happy Birthday" on their birthday
and a month later is in the latter case most people would recommend not
bringing it up, as you waited too long. Relationships matter to most people,
so shelf life on dealing with available relationship info is time sensitive

>Economically:

The moment you as a general person are aware of a major economic trend is,
roughly speaking, the moment when the best parts of it have already been
scraped over and most of the remainder of the trend will be late-comers
fighting over scraps (e.g, bitcoin mining, getting a law degree, web startups
in the 2000s, getting into machine learning and designing self-driving cars,
etc). True economic edges, the ones that make people extraordinarily wealthy,
come from knowledge that is going to be important but people don't currently
recognize yet as such. This means time is of the essence with regards to
economic information.

You can sit for months, but all you are doing is hoarding dead, useless,
historic arcana: Big abstractions and high ideals, but nothing new or
meaningful.

Living, useful information must be sought out in a timely manner.

------
deanCommie
As someone with significant attention problems, apps like Instapaper and later
Pocket were a LIFESAVER and probably saved my career from mediocrity.

My brain craves constant stimulation and distraction. Do 30 mins of coding?
Okay you've earned 5 mins of hacker news. The problem is those 5 minutes are
never 5 minutes when you come across a bunch of really interesting articles
that your brain is dying to consume instead of getting back to work.

In the old days, I'd use del.icio.us, but that got out of hand. So, more often
than not, I simply would take the time to read the posts, and my 5 minute
breaks would become 20 minutes. I was a young hotshot developer and I could
still manage to get my work done in half the day - truly. But I didn't grow.

So, first, I got older (and slower). Second, web articles got longer. And my
model no longer was sustainable.

Now, what do I do? I just skim the article, note if it's something i should
read, and add it to my pocket.

Do I then get the collector's fallacy side effect? Absolutely. But it's the
lesser of two evils.

~~~
djhworld
I like pocket too, but I think it suffers from the same issues as what the
article is describing.

Well, Pocket is not at fault, it's more me and how I use it, but I've got a
growing list of links that I've either read and enjoyed, or just saved and not
got round to reading yet.

I tend to read my pocket articles on the train via my phone, and sometimes
forget what I have and haven't read, or what the article was even about.

------
Kenji
I think the author neglects one point: Deciding what to keep and what to throw
away is a _really difficult_ problem. Why is that so? Because to do it 100%
correctly, you would have to know the _future_. Because only then you can know
for certain what is worth keeping. You don't know the future so you will err.
Now, in times where data storage is almost free, it makes sense to keep an
ever growing but well-ordered set of files or bookmarks. It has saved me lots
of time, just searching my bookmarks "I remember this article I once skimmed,
and it contains exactly what I need" or even "I remember this book I
downloaded, I'm sure the answer is in there".

~~~
gnodar
That's essentially what my bookmarks are. An index of self-curated articles,
tutorials, tools, books, etc. of things I'm generally interested in. Before I
put something in my bookmarks I do a quick skim and decide if has value, even
if it's not relevant right now. So that in the future instead of a Google
search, where I'd have to browse through a pile of results to identify the
gold nuggets, I can instead search through my bookmarks knowing that whatever
pops up is going to be immediately useful because I've already screened for
it.

~~~
Kenji
What you are doing is essentially using your computer as a memex (as described
in "as we may think"), like it is intended.

------
sorenjan
The dopamine point reminds me of something I read a while ago. It said that
when telling people about a new project you just started, or even just plans
to start, your brain rewards you with dopamine as if you just achieved
something. This can make you less likely to finish the project, since you
already got rewarded for it. Not as much as if you had finished it, but for
some it might be enough, so they start lacking motivation.

And that's one reason to not show your work off before it's finished.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Interesting, I made the opposite experience. I made sure to tell everyone
about a very ambitious project that I wasn't sure I could pull off. That way
there wasn't an easy way out, and that strategy worked extremely well.

~~~
rjeli
Until you find out no one really cares what you finish, and telling people
before you start gets all the positive feedback without the hard work

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
I see where you're getting at. I won't deny peer recognition is very nice, but
it isn't the sole motivation - its just booster rockets that I'm happy to use.

------
nikanj
Me buying books ensures books are going to be written. Even if I don't read
them, I've still supported the art.

~~~
GuiA
I buy all my books used :(

------
failrate
I see a similar phenomenon with meetings. Talking about what we must
accomplish for long enough leaves us with the feeling that we have
accomplished it.

------
wernsey
I recently realised that my articles in Pocket and the number of tabs in my
browser was piling up. This was a big cause of anxiety for me. In the end I
worked around the issue by just saving the links in Evernote, arranged by
topic.

I now have the comfort that those articles are still there if I ever need to
research that topic again, but they are out of sight and don't bother me.

------
kbutler
Marked this to read it later.

