Another short post today, this one about a recent tweetstorm by Venkatesh Rao.

In it, Venkatesh argues for building the muscles to stay connected to all streams of information - from the high-latency, live, and lower quality (e.g. the so called “toxic twitter streams”) to the low-latency but higher minded (e.g. philosophy books).

He maps the information types on a spectrum in this graph:

I agree with the spirit of it, and believe we do need to adapt ourselves to be able to process the information onslaught instead of taking a “log cabin” approach and retreat towards only higher-order thinking. Also believe there’s a natural ebb and flow up and down the “plugged-in turnpike” that the mind will naturally take, and we need to follow it there vs. trying to stop it.

It also requires a level of self awareness about your own learning framework to understanding how your brain best processes information, and act on it proportional to where you are on the turnpike.

Read the whole Tweetstorm and additional commentary here.