
The Collector’s Fallacy - ingve
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/
======
jcrites
It's absolutely true that to be most useful, knowledge needs to be absorbed
and integrated directly into the mind. But there's a large constellation of
useful information and data out there too, and you can't and shouldn't
memorize all of it.

I collect a lot of links to articles that I've read using pinboard.in.
However, I fairly frequently end up searching through those bookmarks to find
the article that I remembered reading. I suppose once or a few times per
month. It's especially useful for bookmarking specific scientific studies, or
papers presenting engineering techniques, etc., where it's useful to remember
"I recall reading about that" and be able to get back to the original.

~~~
fao_
> there's a large constellation of useful information and data out there too,
> and you can't and shouldn't memorize all of it.

Not only that, but also

> Just knowing about a thing is less than superficial since knowing about is
> merely to be certain of its existence, nothing more.

Sometimes just having a sketchy map of the territory is infinitely more useful
to learning than knowing nothing at all. Of course we should strive for more
than that, but when push comes to shove, a person with a rough map will waste
less time in learning what they must, than someone who has no map at all.

------
kev009
I definitely have hoarding tendencies. I have 100s of vintage UNIX computers,
1000s of books on CS and EE topics. I mostly find the idea of them
inspirational, even if I rarely get to explore them in the depth I wish to.
But the hoarding tendencies don't seem to show up in my work product, i.e. I
am very deliberate and keep a small stack of active projects/tickets/emails. I
guess I am good at compartmentalizing?

OTOH people often seek me out for pointers to code/libraries/tickets/books etc
at work and in my circle of professional friends. I'm kind of like a
librarian.

------
pretty_dumm_guy
This strikes a chord with me. I do the same with the hacker news posts. Every
time, I open quite a few tabs with every intention of reading them. However,
due to time constraints, I don't. Eventually I just "onetab"(firefox addon)
them. This fear of missing out on information that might be valuable is
troubling me a bit.

~~~
dvtv75
Much the same here. I have six windows open, while only a few of the tabs are
Hacker News, one of them has more than 100 tabs in it and the others have
about 40 tabs. That's just on this computer. My laptop has another dozen tabs
open. Eventually, Firefox will crash and I will lose all my open tabs when
"Restore Last Session" fails on me. Hundreds of PDF documents, about 25 on my
reader, dozens of songs in sheet music some as much as half-learned.

I have a Commodore 64C, monitor, floppy drive, and a pile of disks, I've used
that once. I've two ZX Spectrum machines (one in a dk'tronics keyboard,
nonfunctional) and a Spectrum 128, with 50 or so tapes and one of those
Microdrives plus some cartridges.

My father is the same with DVDs, he has a couple of thousand. The dad of one
of my friends has double that. His lounge has a wooden shelf hacked together,
that thing stands floor-to-ceiling along one side of the room, wraps around a
corner, and is packed solid with DVDs. Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, Monkey, the
Goodies, Paint Your Wagon ("Gonna paint that wagon, gonna paint it good, we
ain't braggin', we're gonna coat that wood"), the list goes on.

To me, my collecting and never doing anything with the items seems almost like
a sickness. I still have all my University texts - I justify it to myself by
quoting a friend of mine who said "I don't believe in selling textbooks, they
might come in handy some day." They won't, most of them are more than a decade
old, but I still can't bring myself to get rid of these books that cost me
hundreds. It was hard enough dumping those ISA cards that were no use to
anybody - and I still have a stack of 500 megabyte IDE drives somewhere.

~~~
wellboy
How do you get any work done. My pretty fast Macbook, 3y old, becomes really
slow after only 15 tabs open in 1 window.

~~~
Kliment
Do you use chrome or something? Firefox is excellent with hundreds and
hundreds of tabs (on my 2011 linux machine)

------
aaachilless
One of the rationalizations I use for collecting books is that, by organizing
them in a certain way, I can constantly reinforce my model of the structure of
certain topics. On top of that, the physical presence of certain books is
intermingled with what they contain in such a way that I think it_might help
retention.

That said, I've given away a ton of books lately, and plan on keeping the
books I own to a minimum until I have the means to construct a really strong
library, which I do think is a positive endeavor.

Also, tangentially related, does anyone have any suggestions on a good org to
donate books to? I've seen one too many awesome sets of books mangled in
Goodwill bins, and am looking for a new option.

~~~
martinpw
I believe public libraries are usually happy to accept book donations.

~~~
votepaunchy
Which are often immediately sold to the general public in a used book sale.

~~~
Naga
I have no problem with that. Selling used books as an individual is hard,
since people will not pay a lot of money for them (since brand new books are
cheap), so at least for me I find its not worth the time to sell them. At
least then the public library benefits from the donation.

------
skybrian
On the other hand, if you save something to read later, this is a way to avoid
reading it now. Might this be better than getting too distracted? Maybe you
won't need to read it at all?

Also, it's a way of collecting things you _could_ read; a wishlist, if you
like. Having a wishlist is fine for things you don't need to do.

A couple of things I do:

\- I don't buy books on Kindle. I just send a sample to my tablet. If I finish
the sample, maybe I'll buy it. Otherwise, I avoided paying for it.

\- Similarly, for any purchase on Amazon that's not urgent, I just add it to
the shopping cart. If I decide I don't want it later, I avoided buying it.

------
GuiA
Ironically, Umberto Eco (quoted in the article) had a library of 30 000 books
at his primary residence and 20 000 books at his vacation home. He probably
hadn't read most of them :)

~~~
soneca
And Nassim Taleb has a take on this fact that makes it a feature, not a bug.

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-
antilib...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/)

~~~
fjsolwmv
But that "feature" was from an era before the internet and Amazon and Google
Books, back when not-buying a book meant the information would likely be lost
to you forever.

------
EtDybNuvCu
Books, as traditionally written, are too big for the amount of information
which they typically contain. We need knowledge representation which is
capable of coherently and consistently storing information in a more direct,
relational format.

~~~
aaachilless
I've seen this sentiment many times before, and I usually respond with a
variation of the following point:

If I took a book and stripped it down to the bare information, as you'd like,
and then read this new information-pure skeleton, I wouldn't remember it as I
would if I just read the book. I might only remember a few facts about Thomas
Jefferson after reading a bio about him, but I wouldn't remember any facts if
I just read the facts.

My hypothesis as to why this is true (disclaimer: this comes almost entirely
from introspection): My mind doesn't store memories like a hard drive, you
have to tell it a story (so to speak) to get it to remember what you said. My
mind doesn't integrate purely relational data, it integrates narrative data.
Yes, an important part of a narrative is context and relational information,
but another key part of it is the cadence, the spaces interleaved between the
stuff we remember. Unless your point was that we actually need a new
architecture for our brains, I strongly disagree, albeit on a purely anecdotal
basis.

~~~
marklgr
You don't have to do away with the storytelling structure; just make it
significantly shorter and designed for information retention. Quite a few
books contain a good deal of filler to reach the 250+ page threshold for
marketing purposes.

A longer book is correlated, in the audience mind, with more content, more
research done, more of an investment to read it hence more of a payoff ("it's
a book you have to study"), and also more time spent reading it so potentially
more pleasure, even for non-fiction.

Unfortunately, when you read a lot, these propositions start to become cons,
and you'd often rather have just the meat--granted, not in a plastic plate, to
run the culinary metaphor, but not with the three-hour ceremonial of the
(would-be) fancy restaurant either.

~~~
mercer
I agree to an extent, but I've come to believe that the 'padding', often just
examples that are variations of each other, is much more useful than it
appears at first.

When I think back to books that I've read that felt like they had too much
filler, I have to admit that many of the memories are the concepts _via_ the
anecdotes.

~~~
marklgr
So perhaps the author shot a lot of anecdotes at you and a few stick, but
another author could have done the same job with half as many pages. Again,
I'm not against storytelling or anecdotes.

~~~
mercer
Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I've all but stopped reading the books that
are mostly anecdotes with about an A4's worth of actual information.

------
dasil003
Meh. This is certainly something that can happen, but on the other hand a
well-curated and indexed set of bookmarks can serve a purpose that even Google
with all the personalization it can muster can't touch. As in all things, you
need to be honest with yourself about how your habits serve your goals.

~~~
QasimK
Absolutely - just recently on two separate occasions I spent half an hour to
an hour searching Google for particular website that I was a fantastic
resource on a topic.

Yesterday that was
<[https://www.homenethowto.com/>](https://www.homenethowto.com/>), where I
eventually gave up on Google & DuckDuckGo and instead went to the home
networking subreddit that I thought _might_ just have it because it really is
a great website. They did (and its probably where I found it originally).

------
catnaroek
How shallow are the books that the author of this piece reads, that he can
keep their entire contents in his head? I am pretty sure I can't keep the
entire contents of my personal library in my head. And I don't even have that
many books. (Around 20, between CS and math books.)

~~~
ctietze
I don’t keep them in my head at all :) In fact, my memory is quite bad except
for procedual stuff like programming techniques. That’s why I process and
store notes so extensively.

------
projektir
I'm not sure about a lot of these suggestions. They always sound like they're
aimed at a specific group of people who only collect things, and never use
them. What about people who collect things, and then use them just fine?

And me reading an article is not too useful if I can't find it later.

------
buildbot
While extremely guilty of this, I see it as a cache of good knowledge in
different areas - I can generally remember what I’ve saved - their general
titles and genres. If I need to dive deeper into something, I already have
good starting points saved.

------
smadge
This looks interesting. I should bookmark it for later.

------
jimmies
At one point I was buying/trying a lot of new stuff, shiny new hardware,
gadgets, software, technologies, frameworks, etc. But now I don't care about
learning/collecting new tools anymore unless I have a really good reason to do
it.

For me, creativity seems to spur from mixing and matching a minimal amount of
basic elements. Creativity is very close to mastering a computer programming
language. In general, you only need to command a paintbrush well to compose
great paintings. You only need to know 30 keywords to make amazing programs.
It's better to make use of general purpose tools really well to my specific
needs than to employ a whole bunch of specialized tools. Having specialized
tools is the answer only when I need to copy and mass produce something.

One of the trends I have seen lately is some people have the tendency to
branch out to make new gadgets and teach very specialized tools nowadays
without merit. For example, the amount of javascript frameworks is absolutely
mind-blowing, there seems to be a new javascript way to achieve the same damn
result every minute. Someone recently bought me a sous-vide cooking device
which both before and after having it, I still have a really hard time
justifying having it in my home: What couldn't I do without it and with just a
thermometer? I cook sous-vide exactly 0 times before I got it, and do it 3
times in 6 months since I had it. When I do it, I could as well enjoy and
watch the thermometer instead of having download an app to my phone that I use
once every 2 months to watch the temperature for me.

It's not just in tech -- I understand they need to sell shit. Even in
education, there are courses of "data science in X" or "X statistics" offered
at every university for every field. One of my friends (who is doing a PhD)
recently asked me to help with one of her assignments for her course.
Basically, it was just two hours of boring shit teaching her to use graphs
with various examples in her field X, I just jumped in and helped with what I
knew, which has nothing to do with her field X. Why can't it be just a
general-purpose data science or statistics course?

With this rate, sometime in the future, we'll have sous-vide device just for
20-year-old blonde people who are married instead of just a thermometer that
works for everyone. Rand's razor and all that.

------
djsumdog
With things like Hackernews and Reddit, there's a lot of stuff we tend to
skim. I tried more often than not to actually read a paper if the full text is
available, but that can be difficult to do too.

I like writing, and sourcing things I've read into new work seems the best way
to learn, retain and think critically. Essays from high school and
Universities need not be an end. Having a professional blog where you organize
your ideas and opinions means you have to put some real research into them.

[https://battlepenguin.com](https://battlepenguin.com)

Party conversation opinions are backed up with real stuff you look up, and you
can feel more confident in expressing a critical opinion instead of parroting,
inaccurately, something you may have read

------
aaachilless
The author says we shouldn't keep books, we should assimilate books into our
model of the world, and then dispense with the book. To an approximation, I
agree. I also agree with the idea that sometimes collecting books and
bookmarks can lead to a false sense of satiety with our intellectual progress.

I disagree with his point that notes actually do represent assimilated
information in a way that the books themselves don't. Notes might guarantee a
certain level of assimilation, but they don't qualify as "knowledge" in the
way the author maintains. There's other good reasons to keep notes, but not
because they're more a part of your knowledge base than the book itself.

~~~
ctietze
I do struggle with the information/knowledge distinction as I never researched
that field in detail. Would love to hear about some helpful alternative!

I can imagine a primary source that’s important in your life becomes part of
your knowledge, too, because you ... well, got to know it so well. But that
really isn’t the point, since mere collecting is the opposite of familiarizing
yourself with the material.

~~~
aaachilless
My point isn't really about a distinction between information and knowledge.
While high quality notes might witness the existence, or creation, of
knowledge, that knowledge is not contingent on the notes' continued existence.
Put another way: If the note-taking process results in the creation of
knowledge inside my head, why should I keep the physical notes any more than I
should keep the book?

Edit: I should say I thought your article was interesting and useful in
general, and I don't think my disagreement takes away from the general message
that owning things is pointless, what matters is engaging with the world.

------
kirkules
Sure sounds nice to have a perfect long term memory and have no need to use a
quality source to refresh on any topic you ever once actually understood.

------
galfarragem
I recurrently think about these topics and my opinions have adapted from:

No notes -> wiki -> searchable flat wiki(s) (TXT note on a text editor)

Collect most -> collect relevant -> collect relevant and recurrently digest it
(manually throw away what became irrelevant)

Some extra thoughts:
[https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder](https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder)

~~~
ctietze
I like that project status approach to filing!

------
danidiaz
Old problem. The book "Too Much to Know" by Ann Blair is about how
intellectuals dealt with information overload in early modern Europe:
[https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-
know](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know)

------
marze
Makes me think of a t shirt I received as a gift many years ago. It said:

“So many books, so little time”

~~~
kirubakaran
That's a Frank Zappa quote.

~~~
twic
It's also not far off Hippocrates:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis)

------
txsh
To combat this, I’ve started going through all my old bookmarks and compiling
my own repository of knowledge on a self-hosted Bookstack. I highly recommend
doing this. I feel like I assimilate a lot more knowledge than before when I
would just read something once on HN and then bookmark it for posterity.

------
ssalka
Bookmarked

