How Information Makes You Stupid - And What To Do About It

welcome back to another video and today I'm super excited to talk about this topic of attention how do we apply tension in the 21st century and what is the importance of attention in the 21st century and how do we recultivate that attention when we're just distracted all the time when we want to pick up our phones every every two minutes and how do we rescue that sort of free space for us to critically think and to be content with ourselves without a million distractions distracting us all over the place I'm going to draw a lot of my ideas from my recent substack article on the importance of attention or how to cultivate attention in a distracted World which you can read in the description down below this video is going to give you like a grand overview of the article but if you want to find nitty-gritties check out that article it's free for you to read the basic consensus here is that the way that we deal with information right now is drastically different from how people used to deal with information or from how people used to treat learning without the Advent of Technology people sort of learn through books or course for listening to advice or if they're just sitting down with something for long periods of time take the form of the novel for example in order for you to really extract the moral lessons from the novel you have to sit down for a few hours to slowly let those insights penetrate you or slowly assimilate those insights into into your everyday life but now we sort of have this craving for instant information or instant gratification for information where instead of reading a novel for a few hours we want to know the more of the story in less than two minutes and the same goes for reading philosophy reading history or reading anything that takes a long time for you to digest and even worse this is how we're teaching a younger generation to treat information instead of trying to really get down to the root of a mathematical theorem or the root of a philosophical concept the general consensus is just find the solution in the quickest fashion possible and just try to turn yourself into a solution finding machine instead of a genuine and curious thinker so now we have this roaming generation of information finding machines where solution finding machines where we've domesticated ourselves to basically think in those rapid terms with virtually no time for sustained engagement with any kinds of philosophy literature or any educational material the 19th century writer gusta flabel had a huge beef with mass media of his time which was the newspaper if you look up any pictures from 19th century you'd realize that the streets were just packed and littered with newsprints people were reading newspapers essentially everywhere when they're waiting in front of a store when they're at a cafe when they're on a bus and there's a striking similarity between that and the way that we check our phones right now so flibel noticed this kind of addiction that we have for information instead of trying to engage with something for an extended period of time we just want that information instant information and instant gratification right here right now and in flubel's days that was manifested as obsessively checking newspaper stance or obsessively reading the news but in our time because the physicality of the newspaper is no longer such a big factor so now we can get all of our news from this little box in our hands wherever we go some nostalgic people might look back into the 19th century and say something like oh it's so wonderful and that people are reading all the time well people were reading all the time but if you take a closer look well we were all after the same thing as distracted people but there is something quite concerning for flibel and for people of our time with this kind of Rapid doses of information that are instantly gratifying slavel considered these newspapers as a new source of stupidity and in French he called it Le Betis take the Paradox with social media or with newspapers during flibel's time is simply that they deliver these quick doses of information in such a way that gives the reader an illusion of understanding so people can routinely head to the frontiers of information or frontiers of world events frontiers of science philosophy frontiers of the latest release from the newer time bestsellers or reached the very frontiers of human knowledge without necessarily understanding what to do with that information all that we're Gathering are not necessarily understanding but pure bits of information and information in this day and age does not equal to understanding at all whereas true understanding really stems out of a place of applying sustained attention to a text or sustained attention to a collection of data in order for you to extract some conclusion out of it to extract A Life Lesson or a moral or something that you can apply into your own life so in our hyper distracted World we're always hopping from one source of information to the next with no sustained engagement with any of them so that creates a situation where a lot of people can know a lot about a certain thing without necessarily taking that thing to any anywhere clever so with that entire observation out of the way how do we cultivate attention and how do we bring more attention into our lives and how do we create that space to have those sorts of sustained hours of Engagement with something that we want to learn about for that we have to talk about a somewhat obscure teacher that lived in the 20th century named Simone this woman is perhaps one of the most educated philosophers of our time she graduated from the economics which is such a famous School in France that produced many of the greatest thinkers in Paris at the time and just like many other graduates from that school she took up teaching as a profession after acquiring all these learning and the way she taught her students was something completely out of the norm instead of letting the students find the standard answers to geometric problems she actually encouraged her students to seek out problems of geometry without worrying about funny and answer her teaching style really focused on exploration over finding a set and certain solution and of course as the nutcase teacher that she was she refused to give out grades to any of her students and many of the head Masters were not very happy with that and I think the lesson that we can draw from that entire story is that sometimes true learning comes at the expense of not finding a certain answer right off the bat if you really want a deeper understanding of a subject you really have to spend a long time considering the root of what you're learning considering what it is that you actually want out of this learning experience instead of just leaping onto the latest and hottest solution out there and simulved stories by no means the only example in history where people prized exploration over finding Solutions during the Italian Renaissance around the 14th century the cultural ideal of the study of the humanities also known as estudia humanitares tutors require their pupils and their students to spend an extended period of time with just a few books and this entire idea surrounded this idea of cultivating humanitas in the students and the pupils and this was achieved through a process of total immersion where the students would spend basically years reading just a few books while allowing these antiquated the books to really penetrating to their souls and to really reform their characters and to really make them more of a human being which is such a historic contrast to how we deal with information nowadays now every article that you write on the internet has to be quick has to deliver what you want in two to three sentences instead of you know pricing that sustained attention to allow something that you've read to completely reform your character to completely deepen your sense of humanity so what's the takeaway here I'm not the one to supply it with a bunch of answers but in my personal life recently I really started to cut down on the number of books that I'm reading instead of prizing quantity now I prize a really extended period of time of engaging with one text of one really good text and the process of selection is something that I'm putting a lot of focus on the question that I ask myself all the time is how could this book concretely transform how you understand the world or how could this book make a dent in your life in a very profound way if you are willing to spend that much time with the book and if you have have your personal strategies of how to bring more deliberate attention into your life feel free to leave them in the comments section down below I'd love to read them and I'd love to respond to them anyway that's all I have for today's video of this little exploration into the nature of attention and of course I have my rest of my articles on my sub stack and if you've enjoyed this video I'm sure that you will also enjoy many of your articles on my newsletter check it out and that's all I have for today Robin Walden here and I'll see you in the next one take care and goodbye

Channel: Robin Waldun

Views: 73,969

Keywords: how to focus on studying, how to focus on your goals, information overload, stupidity, literature, critical thinking, how to think critically, how to pay attention, how to cultivate attention in our distracted world, rc waldun

Id: ly_zPBrl6P4

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023