sublime

Jack Raines Verified account @Jack_Raines · Sep 6

On cognitive decline, information overload, and the death of reading:

@patrickc linked a really good article on the implications of the death of reading as a culture (and also how TV actually started this trend, not phones and social media, though now doomscrolling has kicked it into overdrive).

I'm acutely aware of the adverse effects of extended social media usage in my own life. I've told myself that social media, and Twitter in particular, is "useful" for work as a VC (which it is, to an extent), and certainly I've had to maintain an active social presence to market a book.

But the constant access to "the feed" is, without a doubt, a cognitive drain. You start reading a difficult paper, researching a new market, looking into a new company, etc, and it's quite literally "too easy" to "check Twitter" (or your inbox, etc) when the knowledge work is being done on the same device where you access the dopamine factory. Throw in Slack, Teams, imessage, etc, and the problem compounds. Too many distractions from deep thinking.

This is also a limiting factor for LLMs as a "knowledge factory."

LLMs are a godsend for an aspiring autodidact, but when you're using ChatGPT or Claude, you still face the cognitive load issue of social media existing on the same machine.

Even if you don't succumb to it, or if you use app and social media blockers, there's a cognitive load involved in resisting the dopamine. This also highlights an emerging value prop of books as a form factor:

Books, of course, aren't the most efficient way to retrieve data, LLMs are better (and they're trained on basically every book).

But books are a much better harness for "learning" than any online format, because they give the reader a distraction-free medium for gaining knowledge.

Yes, in an ideal world, an "isolated LLM" could be used as an "everything tutor," but the temptation of the internet will limit the ability to "think deeply" when working on a laptop.

Books (and e-readers without other internet access) remove that distraction, and they allow you to really "sit with the words," whether you're reading a memoir that really draws you into the author's world, or you're working through McKinsey's Valuation book and struggling to understand DCFs and cost of debt.

I think you can "create" environments to better digest digital content as well though.

Something I've started doing to get "more" out of my reading is bookmarking everything with @wwwsublimeapp, then using Sublime's MCP to push all of my bookmarks to my personal website library: jackraines.blog/library

I have an iPad with no social media or imessage, and its only email address is a separate inbox I use to subscribe to all of my newsletters.

On weekends, I'll read through the bookmarked library on the iPad with my phone and laptop put away. Much better experience.

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