A bicycle for the mind - how to find useful knowledge in a flood of content

How the mind works

It's easy to think of the human brain as a computer. Perhaps for us technologists it feels natural. But we should remember that (brain == computer) is a model (don't forget that all models are wrong). We don't learn stuff by programming our brains.

There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of models for how learning works. Many of them are wrong too.

One thing I've found that works for me is reading widely, consolidating and interpreting the things I read alongside other information, then putting that knowledge to practical use. Learning is hard work and takes practice. Sometimes you need help with that.

As easy as riding a bike

You're probably aware of the Steve Jobs quote,

What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds

I love this bicycle metaphor because it suggests a computer can be an efficient force multiplier for human activity. And I want to think about the tools we create in that light.

My 240+ browser tabs are one of my learning tools. Part of a process that ends with practice. Often that practice is delivering one of Instil's training courses, but today it's writing a newsletter.

Writing stuff down and sharing it with people is a superpower. Giles Turnbull has some advice for your team on starting with Weeknotes.

Perhaps like me you too have a problem with too much information. Richard describes how a note-taking technique like Zettelkasten can help you make sense of it. “Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia”.

Maybe your problem is being stuck in an echo chamber? Austin Kleon quoted from an interview with Four Tet describing "swimming upstream" as a technique to broaden knowledge,

If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.

And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.

And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.

Come on in the water's lovely

Wrapping up with a collection of links we've found interesting this week

• Why male allyship is important – everyone benefits from a more diverse and equal workforce

• Just use Postgres for everything – on avoiding over-engineering solutions

• Github is starting to feel like legacy software - when corporate strategy and individual needs diverge

• Make kin not nets - how to approach networking

• Zig has become the highest-paying programming language - I hadn't heard of Zig until this article

• Building a serverless connected barbecue - remember when I mentioned avoiding over-engineering?

Thanks for reading, normal service will resume in 2 weeks time.