Keywords and ideas

Quality → depends on your (life) goals; Final goals → your life goal; Instrumental goals → short-term goals meant to bring you closer toward your life goal; Opportunity cost → when an option is chosen from alternatives, the opportunity cost is the “cost” incurred by not enjoying the benefit associated with the best alternative choice; Pareto principle → for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes; Top-down approach → working toward a final goal; Bottom-up approach → more “organic growth” of final and instrumental goals; The 5-max rule → limit yourself to 5 instrumental goals that you work on either simultaneously (interleaving) or from most to least important; Acquisition rate + the 5-max rule → the rate at which you either acquire new items and/or replace existing items with items that have lower cost opportunities; Pyramid of Maslow → each of these individual levels contains a certain amount of internal sensation that must be met in order for an individual to complete their hierarchy; Long-term > short-term → the more durable certain data is, the longer its half-life; Half-life of knowledge → the rate at which knowledge becomes obsolete and/or gets replaced.

In this article, I want to present some guidelines that will gravitate you toward quality sources. Principles like the Pareto principle, pyramid of Maslow, and the 5-max rule will be used in this article to guide you toward more quality rather than quantity.

What can be considered quality?

The answer to this question is relativistic in the sense that, well, it depends. On what? It depends on what your (life) goals are. If your goal is to become a psychologist, it won’t help much to read and learn about things like astrology, which happens to be a pseudoscience too.

So let’s say you have a bunch of books in front of you, which are all about psychology, are they all “equal” in terms of quality? No. Then what makes some of them more qualitative than others? First of all, the closer a certain source is to your goal, the more qualitative it will probably be.

For now, we will refer to final goals as our ultimate life goals and instrumental goals as short-term goals meant to bring us closer to our final goals e.g. your final goal could be to add value to humanity, which can be done by being a psychologist, which, again, can be done by reading psychology books. In this case, being a psychologist and reading books are considered instrumental goals.

These definitions are derived from the field of AI such as the hypothetical paperclip maximizer, but they are also pretty applicable to humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence — Instrumental convergence

So to summarize, you could ask yourself the following question: “Does X bring me closer to my final goal?” If yes, then it’s considered qualitative on its own. If not, then it’s not considered qualitative, and even moves you further from your final goal. The closer it brings you to your final goal, the more qualitative.

Now, what are some tools we can use to assess the quality of X?

Tool #1: Opportunity cost and the Pareto principle

Let’s say you have two books in front of you about psychology, which one is more qualitative i.e. which one brings you closer toward your final goal? First of all, I think we are asking ourselves the wrong question right now, but we will get to that later.

So, there are actually brain regions assessing the “worth” of something like the ventral striatum, anterior hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, etc. See: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Pleasure_of_learning — Pleasure of learning, Supermemo

And:

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Knowledge_valuation_network — Knowledge valuation network, Supermemo

Now, the only way to assess the quality of these two different psychology books, is by reading (about) them. I personally like to read the front title, the first pages, chapters, the last pages, and summaries available on the internet.

What we are essentially doing here is assessing the opportunity cost i.e. they both bring you closer toward your final goal, but which one does that job better?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost — Opportunity cost

Now, I already said in the beginning that we are asking the wrong question, namely the question shouldn’t be “Which book to choose?” it should be, instead, “How to get the most value?”

If we ask ourselves the latter question and combine it with the Pareto principle, the answer becomes totally different, namely the answer is that reading both books partially might add the most value. All of a sudden, one book is not more qualitative than the other, instead, they both are equally qualitative in combination. It is a principle I have learned from this article: https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at-something-f1b658f93428 — How to Become the Best in the World at Something: With skill stacking, you don’t need to be at the top to be extraordinary

The Pareto principle essentially says that, if you want to learn a book with 80% accuracy, it will cost you 20% of the total time it would require you to learn a book with 100% accuracy (if that’s even possible). A more practical example would be that, to get in the top 80% in a certain game, skill or field, it would take you 20% of the total time it would require to become the best in the world. See this chapter for more in-depth information: 09/22/2019—Doing the Ordinary Extraordinary: the Pareto Principle, Diminishing Returns, Effective Hours, and Efficiency

So instead of trying to read everything in both books, you are better of reading only relevant chapters, skipping certain texts, and reading summaries online.

Read more about the Pareto principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle — Pareto principle, Wikipedia

Tool #2: Top-down > bottom-up

In order to really find and consume qualitative sources, one has to ask themselves the question “what is / are my final goal(s)?” Why? Because it has to do with the fact that we want to create a top-down approach. Let’s examine two examples to see its importance.

Bottom-up approach

How would a bottom-up approach look like? Let’s say you walk into a library with no purpose (i.e. no final or instrumental goal). What books, out of the hundreds of books, do you choose? It will take an awful long time and a lot of energy to find that out.

Now, a bottom-up approach isn’t always inferior, like in young children who can’t really develop a final goal.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_and_bottom-up_design

In a bottom-up approach the individual base elements of the system are first specified in great detail. These elements are then linked together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed. This strategy often resembles a “seed” model, by which the beginnings are small but eventually grow in complexity and completeness. However, “organic strategies” may result in a tangle of elements and subsystems, developed in isolation and subject to local optimization as opposed to meeting a global purpose.

The bottom-up approach makes you much more vulnerable to spending time and energy on irrelevant sources i.e. sources not bringing you closer to your final goal.

Top-down approach

This approach is completely the opposite of a bottom-up approach, you know your final goal and instrumental goals. In this case, if you walk into a library, you know which section to narrow yourself down to e.g. psychology genre. Instead of going through hundreds of books, you now go through a couple dozen, leave the library earlier with more time and energy left to read your chosen books, spend more time reading those books, while everything starts to compound over time together with the Butterfly effect.

Remember, we all have an equal amount of 86400 seconds a day and how you spend them will shape your future.

See this chapter where I explain the two approaches through a neurophysiological and computational basis:

08/31/2019—Top-down, bottom-up thinking, sorting algorithms, and working memory

Tool #3: The 5-max rule

There’s this rule I have recently developed, which I will call the 5-max rule. It simply means that you should limit yourself to 5 possible alternatives / instrumental goals, and work on them either simultaneously (interleaving), or work on them one by one.

Let’s give an example with Medium articles. There are hundreds of them that I think are interesting to read and I am sure most of them are qualitative i.e. bringing me closer to my final goal. I, however, don’t have more than 86400 seconds a day and even then I cannot spend all of it on reading Medium articles.

So what do I do? I apply the 5-max rule and limit myself to having up to 5 Medium articles bookmarked. Now, let’s say that I have 5 bookmarked articles ready to read, does this end the journey of me searching for more articles? No, because the 5-max rule applies to quantity not to the acquisition rate.

What I mean with the acquisition rate, is the adding of new articles as well as replacing already bookmarked articles. This means that whenever I see a very interesting article, I will look at my already bookmarked articles and ask myself the question, “Could this interesting article be of more value than any of my already bookmarked articles?” If yes, then I will remove the least qualitative article and replace it. If not, nothing changes no matter how much I would love to read hundreds of them.

Now, the 5-max rule is applicable to other things too, such as reading books. This is how my Goodreads to-read booklist looks like:

The idea is, of course, to read the most interesting ones first and work your way toward the least interesting ones, but I believe such things are obvious enough that they don’t have to be explained.

If you are interested, I am currently reading The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins

Tool #4: Pyramid of Maslow

We don’t always know exactly what our final or instrumental goals are or even should be, but I think using the pyramid of Maslow could be a good start. The aim is to align your final and instrumental goals as much as possible to the top of the pyramid i.e. self-actualization or even transcendence if you want to include that one.

It’s pretty simple actually, grab the source you are interested in and ask yourself, “To what hierarchy does this source belong?”

In fact, you actually are to some degree in control of deciding to which hierarchy something belongs. How? Well let’s examine an example.

Let’s say you want to lose weight, to what hierarchy does that belong? It could belong to “physiological needs” i.e. a healthy body. Maybe it could also belong to “love and belonging” i.e. you want to be accepted by society. We can name hundreds of examples, but you get the idea.

So how can we deliberately move an instrumental goal such as losing weight to a higher hierarchy? By continuously reminding yourself that you want to lose weight, because you want to finish your life as the best person you possibly can be. Or because you want to add value to yourself as much as possible, for yourself and no one else. Through things like these, you can slowly move your instrumental goals to a higher hierarchy.

Tool #5: Long-term > short-term

Lastly, tool #5 (pun intended to the 5-max rule), is to choose sources of quality that are durable in the long-term. In fact, you might as well try to create your final and instrumental goals as durable as possible too. There’s a difference between wanting to be rich versus wanting to add value to humanity, one is more durable than the other.

We can assess the durability of a source according to the Lindy effect. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect:

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.

Let’s say we have two philosophy books in front of us, one is 1 year old while the other is 1000 years old, and they are equally popular. If we follow the Lindy effect, we can see how that 1000 year old philosophy book is probably more durable in the wisdom it gives than that 1 year old philosophy book.

An example of a popular and old philosophy book is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Next, we can also deliberately create the Lindy effect by finding the principles and fundamentals of literally anything. In the extreme end we have the laws of physics, which are, well, pretty durable. In my opinion, everyone should know what entropy is, because it is applicable to many practical things such as psychology and intelligence, see: 10/04/2019—Intelligential Entropy, where a combination between entropy and intelligence is made.

Or: 10/09/2019—Psychological Entropy, Summary, where entropy and psychology are combined.

I will also refer you to this article explaining how Elon Musk finds the principles and fundamentals of things: https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/learn-like-elon-musk-fe8f8da6137c — How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better Than Everyone Else

Why should we try to find durable forms of knowledge? Because it has to do with the half-life of knowledge i.e. the rate at which knowledge becomes obsolete and/or replaced. I will refer you to this article for more in-depth information on the half-life of knowledge (Yes, I am pretty much a fan of Michael Simmons): https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-math-behind-the-5-hour-rule-why-you-need-to-learn-1-hour-per-day-just-to-stay-relevant-90007efe6861 — The Math Behind The 5-Hour Rule: Why You Need To Learn 1 Hour Per Day Just To Stay Relevant

Practice questions

What can be considered quality and how to assess the degree of quality? What are final and instrumental goals? What is opportunity cost? What is the Pareto principle? What is a top-down and bottom-up approach? What are their advantages and disadvantages? What is the 5-max rule and how does it make you strive for more quality rather than quantity? How does the pyramid of Maslow apply to final and instrumental goals? How can you shift certain final and instrumental goals through the different hierarchies in the pyramid of Maslow? What is the Lindy effect and how does it make you strive for more quality rather than quantity? How does the rule of finding durable knowledge apply to the half-life of knowledge?