1: What is the best way to find and process information?
There's a lot of good information in the world, we have all of the world's knowledge at our finger tips. What's the right method for finding and processing the best content?
It can make your head spin, all the books, articles, podcasts and YouTube videos that you could possibly process, more than you could cover in 1000 lifetimes. How do you find the best stuff? How do you process it? and how do you act on it?
There are a lot of sources that provide exceptionally insightful information. I divide the content I process into a few main categories:
1. Books
2. Articles: Including Newspapers and Blogs
3. Podcasts
4. YouTube
5. Academic publications
Many others have spent a lot, lot more time thinking and talking about this, notably Tiago Forte, Ali Abdaal and David Allen in Getting things done. I’ll be describing the system that I use. Having a good system for finding and using the best information out there can improve our lives significantly.
There are 3 main steps to this process:
1. Finding information
2. Processing information
3. Actioning information
Finding information
If you can’t find information, the most useful and insightful content may as well not exist for you. I’ll go through my funnel for each of the main sources.
Books
As written in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: “The genuine love for reading itself , when cultivated , is a superpower . We live in the age of Alexandria , when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away . The means of learning are abundant — it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”
What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot—just read. Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
I divide the books I read into a few main categories: fiction classics, non-fiction classics, productivity, general interest non-fiction, fun fiction. The sources that I have for these are pretty varied. Because classics have been around for a while and have very strong cultural integration, it's not too difficult to come up with a list that should go into this. Books like this include The Republic, The Odyssey, War & Peace and Beyond Good and Evil. I also have a good book called The Penguin Classics Book which I skim for inspiration. Naval Ravikant also wrote how how classics are insightful and advocates for them very well:
“There is ancient wisdom in books. When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution. If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is great in the modern age. If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.”
I sometimes use a few reading lists from the websites of those that I admire. Including James Clear, Derek Sivers, Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday, Naval Ravikant, Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Ray Kurzweil, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk and Yuval Noah Harari.
Lastly I get a lot of good book recommendations through Goodreads (essentially Facebook for books), seeing what my friends are reading on there and what they think of them is a fantastic source of inspiration. It also offers pretty good recommendations based on what you have read already.
My method for consolidating all the books I plan on reading includes a reading list on my phone in Apple Notes with the next 100 or so books I plan on reading and my Goodreads account that has all books I ever want to read saved.
Articles
The sources for finding articles mostly include Twitter and Newsletters. Good Twitter accounts I follow are Stefan Schubert and Noah Smith for Economics and Geopolitics, Science is Strategic for Science and Business, Paul Graham for Startups. Mustafa Sultan, Chris Lovejoy, Eric Topol and Pranav Rajupur for MedTech and AI in Medicine.
Good Email Newsletters include Dr Penguin for AI in Medicine, TLDR for business and science and The Daily Stoic for daily reminders of stoic philosophy. Any time I see an articles that looks interesting, I save them to a fantastic app called Instapaper, which syncs across all your devices and lets you save any online article for reading at a later date and even lets you download them for use offline, you can even put them into folders by category and arrange them in the order that you want to read them.
Wait but Why is another fantastic blog, covering lots of topics around history and science. The author, Tim Urban was specifically asked by Elon Musk to write about each of his companies, best posts are: AI: The road to superintelligence, Neuralink and the brain’s magical future, How Tesla will change the world, How SpaceX will colonise Mars.
Podcasts
The quantity and quality of podcasts have exploded over the last few years, a wide range of people from David Tennent to Sam Harris host podcasts. I mostly find these through word of mouth and Twitter. I listen to them with Spotify because it allows you to listen to them at x2.5 speed and lets you have playlists for your podcasts. I've got my favourite podcasts below:
AI in Medicine
AI for Health - best episodes are with Eric Topol, Andrew Ng
NJEM AI Grand rounds - podcast run by the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals interviewing experts in medical AI.
MaML Podcast - Medicine and Machine Learning Podcast
The Computational Medicine Podcast - My own podcast where I interview people working on the overlap between AI and Medicine.
MedTech and Medicine in general
Big Picture Medicine - interviews with business leaders in the healthcare start-up space.
Huberman Lab - Andrew Huberman (Stanford School of Medicine Professor of Neurobiology) interviews world class experts on all aspects of health.
General Interest
The Lex Fridman Podcast - best episodes are Demis Hasabis (CEO Deepmind), Sam Altman (CEO Open AI), Elon Musk (CEO SpaceX & Tesla), Ray Kurzweil (Ex-Head of Engineering at Google), Max Tegmark (MIT Physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute) .
Making Sense with Sam Harris - best episodes with Stuart Russell and Tim Urban.
Hear This Idea - interviews with people associated with effective altruism, academia, AI safety. Best episodes with Anders Sandberg and Rory Stewart.
The Tim Ferriss Show - best episodes with Derek Sivers and Adam Grant.
YouTube
Similar to podcasts, there has been an explosion in what is out there. YouTube gives you the option to have a load of different folders, usually what I do here is when I see a video that I like the look of I save it to one of the various folders I have.
AI in Medicine
Chris Lovejoy: doctor turned machine learning researcher has loads of videos giving an overview of machine learning in medicine and some teaching about where to get started.
Big Picture Medicine: YouTube channel for Big Picture Medicine Podcast.
The Computational Medicine Podcast: YouTube channel for my podcast.
General Interest
Kurzgesagt: high quality video and content on the most fascinating topics of all types of science. Best videos - What is consciousness and Optimistic Nihilism (this was so good that the 8 minute video was my morning alarm).
Polymatter: top quality videos on Economics with great visuals, particularly a lot of content on modern China and a lot of the likely issues the country is going to face in the next few years and decades. Best videos - China’s Demographic Collapse, Ethos of Apple.
Nerdwriter: one of the best descriptions of art I have come across, absolutely sensational quality. Best videos are How Music Elevates the Story of Lord of the Rings, and Van Gough’s Ugliest Masterpiece.
Academic papers
My main sources for finding good academic publications that focus on AI in Medicine are Twitter, word of mouth and email newsletters.
Good Twitter accounts include Eric Topol, Pranav Rajupur, Chris NEJM, James Zou, Musty and Chris Lovejoy. Good email newsletters include The Batch, Doctor Penguin and GroundTruths.
Processing Information
This is where my system becomes a lot less systematic, I usually end up processing whatever information appears most interesting to me at any point that I have a free moment.
The most useful tools I have in this are my Kindle and Apple AirPods Pro. Anytime that I have a free moment to myself, I put the AirPods in and will either listen to an audiobook, podcast or an article (Instapaper now has an option to read out articles to your headphones). I don’t get too many opportunities to just sit and read something other than just before bed, which I try to do every day with the Kindle. However, I get a lot of times where I am doing an activity that can have information playing in the background. After reading a Newsletter from Ali Abdaal in May 2020, I listen to all my audiobooks and podcasts at double speed. It sounds a bit odd initially but I mostly listen to information now at x2.5 to x2.8 speed and slow it down when I get to a really good bit in a book or podcast. Frequent use of the back 15 seconds button is also essential to make this work.
When reading any of the information that really resonates with me I’ll try and capture that information for later use. For books, the kindle app has a fantastic feature where you can highlight sections and export them as a text file.
Podcasts unfortunately don’t have an easy way of effortlessly recording the information within them, it would be great to have an app for podcasts that allows you to open up to the transcript of where you are in it and highlight the part that you find interesting. Currently, if there is a part of a podcast that I find reality interesting or insightful. I paraphrase what is being said and put that note into my document that I have on that podcast.
Articles, YouTube videos and academic papers have a similar process. If I find any information that seems particularly interesting or useful, I’ll highlight it or write a quick summary of it and put it into my “In-tray” in Apple notes. Later, I’ll go through that information and add it to Obsidian, a note taking system that allows linking between notes. You can create a page for a topic and one for the information source and link between the notes to cross pollinate ideas between topic and information sources. A good illustration of this is written on this blog here. The main benefit is that it will future proof your writing because it saves all of the information locally as a plain text file making it significantly easier to export to other digital formats in the future.
Tiago Forte, calls collecting this information “Building a second brain". It allows you to externalise your memory, freeing up mental space. As David Allen wrote in getting things done “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them”. With improved organisation and retrieval, you can quickly access stored information allowing you to integrate various sources of information. You can capture insights and bring them together in one place. This integration helps cross-referencing, connecting ideas between topics, and synthesising new knowledge, leading to more comprehensive understanding and creative thinking. These two videos show how having a second brain can be useful for whatever you are working on.
The key here though is that your information is actionable, you want to collect information that is relevant to your projects and store it somewhere that you can find it easily.
Actioning Information
You don’t have to be a blogger or a podcaster to action content, most developed economies are becoming increasingly focused on providing services and most workers within those economies are knowledge workers, where your thinking is your main economic output. Storing your information based on projects means that you will have a direct link between the information and where it could be used. It’s great to collect interesting information but unless it’s used on a project, it isn’t serving us much purpose. Building up a second brain over time will allow you to have top quality information easy to hand for a project you are working on. This process can be useful whenever you are working on any kind of work that requires creativity. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Economics Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman argues that creativity is simply the ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated areas.
An additional type of information storage that I get particular value from is having notes on topics I really want to give a lot of thought to. These include considerations such as how to be happy, how to have great relationships with my friends and family, what my core values are and what my attitude towards money should be. Adding insights to these notes over time can help me think about these with greater depth and help me figure out where my own beliefs sit on these topics.
By building up a second brain you can enhance your creativity by increasing the depth and breadth of the connections you can draw between topics, allowing you to have exceptional insights that might not have been found before.
Quote
Language is the light of the mind - John Stuart Mill
Favourite information from the week
📚Book
Outlive by Peter Attia - An exceptional and very actionable insight into the steps needed to take to live longer. The most important takeaway is for me:
to measure my VO2 max every year.
get a smart watch to monitor sleep.
exercise exercise exercise, it’s one of the best longevity interventions.
get continuous blood glucose monitoring to have the Hoffman effect (where you change your behaviour when you know you are being watched, stops you bingeing out on unhealthy food).
🎧 Podcasts
Lex Fridman with Marc Andreesen - interview with the founder of Netscape and runs a large VC firm. Best insights were on what makes Steve Jobs and Elon Musk so effective. Also gave a good book recommendation for The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel which analyses the family and religious life among the ancient Greeks and Romans and argues this is the key to understanding ancient Mediterranean civilizations.
🎥 YouTube
Polymatter had a fantastic video outlining how the Chinese Social credit scores that made the front pages western newspapers was very misrepresented. It still doesn’t sound great and very authoritarian but it seems it was more like its main purpose was as a method of trying to inject credit and capital into the economy over a 1984 Big Brother monitor (which China also are guilty of but this wasn’t the main reason for the social credit system).
I’ve also binged out on history videos giving in depth analysis of naval battles from previous wars including WWII, WWI, Falklands.