EP. 98 – Is it better to be UNDER INFORMED, or ILL INFORMED?

[Intro]

"In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined - another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things."

This is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, page sixty eight, and this is my first reading of the year, actually this is the book that I started in January and I haven't finished yet. It's quite a dense book, a little bit difficult to read, and it's also very tiring. So I don't enjoy reading many pages of it, so I hope I can finish it by the end of February because I'm a little late on my schedule. But anyways, this is Antifragile, which is an amazing book. And among all the things that it says, because it's a very complex idea, it talks about the notion of cause, the idea of finding a cause for things. 

Can you understand why the economy collapsed, collapsed in 2008? Yeah, like there are some reasons which you can try to to to pinpoint and say, yeah, that's why. But there were thousands of things that happened at the same time. Can you pinpoint what caused the first, um, the first great World War? Well, yeah. There's this murder that happened in I don't I don't even remember anymore, but I think his name was something like Francesc Ferdinand and he was killed and that caused the First World War. But again, it was a myriad of things. And then you think, OK, can you pinpoint the reason, the root cause for the Second World War and say, well, yeah, Nazi Germany, yada, yada. 

But is it only that there's a myriad number of things and we tried to study those things in in history and we try to find and understand why everything happens. The human being is is very funny because we always try to understand why something happened. And this applies to human relationship, too. We say this person did this because of that thing. I did this because of that. But, you know, is it really? So this is a concept that I started really understanding because of this book Antifragile, and especially because of this passage. And I find I find it really interesting because I have always been that guy that tries to find the cause and the reason for things. So for me, you know, something goes wrong. Can I find what happened wrong so that I, I don't make that mistake again. Mistake again. And for most things, you know, say it's a personal life or business, you know, sometimes you can find a reason why something went wrong. But, you know, sometimes you can, you know, so it is not only that, we can break this this passage a little bit further.

So one of the lessons that it's telling us here, it's well, you know, don't try to find a cause for everything because you might go insane if you do. But the other part of this passage, the second part is it says it is nearly either it's either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined another reason to ignore - and that's the second part - another reason to ignore newspapers with their constant supply of causes for things.

So, you know, you opened the first page of the newspaper of your choice and it says, well, you know, this is what this person did, and that is why we have a shortage of this. That's why our economy is collapsing. That's why our economy is doing good, yadda, yadda, yadda. And I have been very critical of newspapers and any news source. And, you know, I'm really talking about any news source here. I don't care if it's CNN, Fox News, whatever. I've been very critical of them for a long time. But this last year, I became even more critic, and especially now after reading Antifragile and some other books. I've been incredibly critical to the point where and this is quoting some other authors, maybe even George Orwell, that said this to the point that if if you don't if you don't read the newspapers. You are uninformed. That's all right, but if you read the newspapers and if you read the news sources, you are ill informed, which are two very different worlds, you know? So if you don't read the newspapers. Yeah, maybe you don't know of many things that are happening. But if you read it, maybe you do know what's happening. But do you really know the truth? 

And that is the great point of this part here, because every time you read the newspaper and it has, again, as the quote says itself, their constant supply of causes for things, are you really learning the real cause or maybe are you learning it through the lens of a writer that has his own political and bias? And that political bias is printed together with all his words on that newspaper. So instead of maybe, you know, going for the newspapers to understand what is happening, like why didn't you focus on yourself first? Like, do you really need to know about the conflicts in Syria and have that discussion about it on, you know, on a Saturday evening with your mom or maybe, you know, just focus on yourself. Don't you have things to do? Don't you have to fix that... that, I don't know, fix that hole on the wall that you've been putting off, or don't you have to pay those bills that you have a stack of paper of on top of your or your office desk? So, you know, instead of going through the newspapers hours and hours every day and just trying to find the cause for things that, you know, that are not the real cause for the things that may not even be real, why don't you just focus on yourself first? So this is really what I think we can take from this quote. In a complex world, the notion of cause itself is suspect. So whoever tells you, you know, this is the reason. 

That's a little bit "sus". And if they tell you that they know the reason and here's why, and A, B and C, you can you can suspect a little bit more. So, you know, that's that's another reason to ignore newspapers with their constant supply of causes for things. Ignore newspapers, man. And if you need to know about something, research for five, 10 minutes. That's it. And if it's really important, if something is really important, then you're going to find out about it. You don't need to read the newspaper every day. This is something I changed my mind completely because in the past I used to say, man, read it every day. You have to know the news. No, you don't, because if you read, you are ill informed and it's better to be uninformed. Right, let's say. Let's say under informed, because you don't know everything, but you know some things, than to be ill informed. So that's it for today's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you start your Monday morning or your Tuesday morning, whatever day it is for you today in a very good mood. You know, ignore, ignore, ignore everything that doesn't help you. Move a little bit further and put the next brick on your wall that you're building. All right. That's it for today. I'll see you tomorrow. Cheers.