The Curious Mind: Handling Information Overload, Adaptability Quotient, Enshittification....
On keeping your judgement when everything wants to do your thinking for you
If you missed last week’s edition, I got a lot of feed back on No Scoreboard.
We also launched the Curious Mind Research Letter, which you will hear more about in coming weeks.
Handling Information Overload
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
- Herbert Simom
“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”
- Nassim Taleb
“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.”
- Mortimer Adler
Summer gives me time to think and reflect. One of those reflections has been on the absolute deluge of information we live in daily.
Blogs, pdfs, books, movies, tv, digital messages in countless formats, emails, in person meetings, virtual meetings, Facebook, Twitter / X….. And each of one of those platforms is also getting bigger and busier and shittier.
What can we do to keep our sanity and not lose the signal in the noise?
If you reflect on it, most information is ephemeral and will be irrelevant tomorrow. We should ignore that.
A few rare things are enduring. Ideas, frameworks, principles that will stand the test of time and provide a latticework on which to build something real.
When AI first came out, my initial reaction was to try to fight the deluge using LLMs, you know the usual summarising tool that we have all used. Turns out it’s the AI gateway drug and a dangerous one.
The reason why it’s dangerous is that it makes you think you understood something or actually did something, but you actually just ate a ton of junk food. Cause distilled noise is still noise. These tools don’t have any judgement, so the more junk you feed them, the more junk arrives on the other end.
and you can spend hours reading those summaries and reports, but its still contextless garbage.
So here’s what I've decided to do last week for all digital communications, reports, blogs, emails.
DELETE - my initial reaction to any information is to delete it, remove it, make it go away. That’s the baseline and maybe you will delete this email.
Why?
Most things absolutely don’t matter, and it’s just my FOMO causing me to treat any single piece of data as important. Most stuff especially now days is slop and that is not to say before AI everything was amazing. Because its about the fundamental quality of what is produced, most things are ephemeral.
Now if you fall into the LLM summary trap, sure you might process more information, but in the end you are still consuming junk. Plus I think information / knowledge is only valuable if truly embedded deeply into your brain, not skimmed. Which is by the way why I have never been a fan of these book summary companies like Blinkist which friends keep recommending!
Now getting deeper, what you read impacts the rest of the network of knowledge in your brain - so if you are going to update that network of knowledge sitting in your neocortex, you need slower, deeper reading, learning, absorbing that actually impacts the rest of the network, rather than just inputting data into a system that doesnt know what to do with it.
Ok now for the real problem, going deep on anything builds focus and patience in the mind. It’s a muscle and I can feel it atrophying. Secondly, going deep builds judgement, which is again a muscle that atrophies.
I am trying to read or process far fewer things and hitting the delete button far more often. All of that means I just leave a lot more things undone. I taste a lot, I eat very rarely. Most things go into the deleted items. At the same time I am trying to have more real world experience, which remains unpolluted and enduring.
No, I am not being luddite and saying AI sucks, I am saying let AI do the building, but do not let it do your thinking.
Maintain your brain’s muscle tone, don’t let it atrophy.
I know if you look at your day, you can see where it’s already wasting away. Where some skill, patience, concentration has been lost.
As I have gotten older, part of me is also realising that even reading can be a distraction from doing. Why do we read: to be entertained, to be informed, to be moved, to live a different life. I am a fan of any and all of these, BUT as long as it is not getting in the way of actually living. When reading becomes a crutch to living is when it becomes dangerous and I am realising that I might have a lot of living to do still.
P.S. When it comes to books, one simply test is Lindy. Which means I am far more likely to read the old classics than anything less than 5 years old. It just hasn’t earned its place yet in what will endure.
The Adaptability Quotient
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
- Mike Tyson
Some conversations make you realise how stupid and unsophisticated you are. This conversation with Alec Litowitz (founder of Magnetar Capital, now QStar), was one of them. He made a ton of money and has now written book on his framework for developing a high Adaptability Quotient (AQ)—the capability to think clearly, act decisively, and pivot when navigating environments defined by rapid change and uncertainty.
A couple of lessons I will carry with me.
3 Buckets Of Opportunity: Risk: you know the possibilities and the probabilities — expected value works, IQ helps, the edge is small because everyone’s there. Black swans: you know neither — survive, stay convex. In between sits Knightian uncertainty: known possibilities, unknown probabilities. Here’s where real money can get made: You convert uncertainty into risk before anyone else. He had a great story from his time at Citadel learning merger-arb, on how that conversion looks like when you industrialise it. Everyone else called a DC lawyer who said a deal was 70/30 — “what am I going to do with that?” So he built a captive expert network, hundreds of consultants, calling the same customers and competitors the DOJ called, doing the government’s antitrust analysis before the government finished it. A production line for resolving uncertainty. Made me think about how the hedge fund guys who have made real money at platform level have figured out uncertainty resolution as an industrial process.
Diversification is an artifact, not a function. Real estate, power, semiconductors, software used to be a spread-out portfolio; today they’re all correlated to one hypothesis. Run the old risk tools and “you have the artifact of diversification, you don’t have the function.” His fix: diversify by hypothesis, not by asset class.
We Will Become Median: Social media was a twenty-year experiment: give up attention, get connection — except most people got the artifact of connection instead of the function. “I used to go on vacation with Dean, but now he shows me pictures of a vacation and I thumb up and like it.” Hence the loneliness epidemic. AI is the same experiment run on cognition because it compresses for you. On the internet, engagement-optimised feeds serve the extremes, an LLM serves the mean answer, so “you’re getting the worst of the polarized extremes and you’re getting the middle of the distribution.” The more you ask the LLMs for advice the more median your decisions become.
Where he’s putting his own money now: QStar (his family office) barbells “capability” (what humans can do — tech, healthcare, grid) against “belonging” (what makes it mean anything) — a soccer team, hospitality, five assembled city blocks in Chicago for a cultural arts hub. The implicit bet: when knowledge is free, gathering is the scarce asset.
The irreversible-option rule: if an opportunity can’t wipe you out and passing on it is irreversible, take it even though you can’t price it — that’s how he got into SpaceX, which only ever raised about $9 billion of primary capital.
Enshittification
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
- Charlie Munger
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification”; he’s an author of many books including the most recent: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
He’s a great presenter and worth watching or listening to.
Enshittification, is he describes it is platform decay, a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time (think Facebook, X, even Google). Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers.
Enshittification is a constraints story, not a greed story. Don’t ask why services got worse; ask why they were ever good. Firms were always tempted to abuse users and were held back by four outside disciplines — competition, regulation, interoperability, labor scarcity — each dismantled over twenty-five years. “We took away the reasons not to cheat, and then they cheated.”
Here’s a few things I will remember:
Why the stories keep getting bigger: a growth stock is currency — you buy companies by typing zeros into a spreadsheet — and when growth stops the currency dies and the collapse self-accelerates. So saturated firms must claim markets that don’t exist yet (metaverse, web3, now AI), because “who is anyone to argue with you about the size of that market opportunity? You literally just made it up.” “We are now at the peak of narrative” — except this time the narrative is chained to capex: $1.4T by Q2, Gartner saying $2.5T by year-end. And the state is already propping it. SpaceX was admitted straight into the Nasdaq-100 with no record of profitable quarters and a waiver of the insider lock-up, so index funds were legally obliged to buy while the insiders who funded Twitter and Grok cashed out into them. A bailout by regulation, with index savers as the designated bag holders.
Whether AI augments you or replaces you is not a fact about the technology. It’s a fact about your bargaining power. Radiology: the same software supports two sales pitches — ride shotgun and catch tumors humans miss (radiology gets slower and more expensive; no OpenAI investor wants that), or fire nine of ten radiologists and leave one to sign every scan and take the blame when someone dies of cancer. Radiologists are scarce, so they’re getting the first version: “Someone tells us that’s the new job, we quit.” Everyone without leverage gets the reverse centaur — the horse’s head on a human body, auditing machine output at machine pace, the “accountability sink” (Dan Davies).
AI Firings. Bosses fire people not because chatbots do the jobs but because “bosses are patsies for investor stories about firing workers” — like selling supplements to Andrew Tate’s audience, the product doesn’t have to work, the buyer just has to want the pitch. His sequence for how it ends: “We’re firing millions of people, we’re replacing them with defective chatbots that do their jobs badly, and then we’re going to turn off the chatbots.”