Yuval Harari: The most important investment is building a more flexible mind

The lede and GQ's very regrettable headline suggest "mental flexibility" is required and primary. Harari's actual described practice contradicts this:

I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.

I try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure that I'm using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it to kind of shape my purposes for me.....

I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover.

That is:

• He jealously guards his attention and focus.
• He preemptively discards entire classes of useless information, distraction, and noise.
• He seeks intensive rather than extensive information. It's ... trivial to be bombarded with trivia today, or with second or third hand treatments of a topic.

(As in right here: GQ are discussing Harari, I am discussing GQ's discussion of Harari. Just read the fucking book.)

Going directly to sources, experts or authorities, data rather than opinion, etc., is vastly more informative. Media is intermediate agency -- it gets between and often distorts, attenuates, biases, or confounds the original signal. Where at all possible, disintermediate. You may discover something surprising.

The number of distracting and unnecessary elements that are part of this GQ Web article itself is all the more ironic.

We're in a period less of accellerating change than of changing woldviews and mental models. Human information processing ability, including flexibility, is limited. I'd suggest a far more applicable set of skills is:

• Recognise noise and distortion sources, and eliminate or block them.
• Identify a world model that is robust in the face of change. This should be one which identifies a set of commonalities across a wide range of phenomena and behaviours, simplifying your assessment of them.

The result is again trivial, or rather, trivium, a set of basic input parsing, logic, and transmission techniques and tools, or what used to be the base of the seven liberal arts: grammar (input), logic (processing), and rhetoric (output)

I've been cultivating both myself. The first involves avoiding or blocking most media, including news. The second has been tending strongly toward systems modeling, information theory, and cybernetics, along with a few apparently novel contributions of my own. It's largely informed by reading books and articles or essays, covering a span of thousands of years. Recent discussion (even academic books and articles) is proving almost wholly a distraction, with a few notable exceptions.

There is an element of flexibility involved, in testing, assessing, and retaining or discarding received wisdom and models. But that itself is not core to my approach.