Comment by Retra
10 years ago
Or you could find something that's 95% shit and learn from its 5%. You can't learn everything, so why would you spend your time learning the 1% good things and dealing with 99% shit? There are too many easy ways to find value out there to be spending your time panning for scraps in sludge.
What's your search cost? If you have to hit "back" on 5 articles that were 99% shit to find the one that's 95% shit, you were better off just taking your 1% tidbits.
(In practice, I've found that anything that's >50% shit or so isn't worth wasting time on. Stuff that's >50% good, informative stuff is usually qualitatively different from stuff that's 5% good informative stuff; go where the former is.)
I think that's really a matter of what level of mastery you are looking to achieve, and how broadly you intend to achieve it. If you're looking to be the best of the best in one single, narrow subject, you might quickly run out of <50% shit resources and need to dig into some really bad stuff to find little, rare bits of good knowledge.
If you want to be the best of the best in one single, narrow subject, then listening to what other people think is useless. Rely on direct experience instead; perform your own experiments, test out your own ideas. That's what it means to be the "best of the best": you're the one injecting new data into the ecosystem.
Well, I was referring more to the situation where you're already reading something, or finished reading it. Obviously there is an opportunity cost that you could have sought out something better to read, but now that you're there - take what you can from it. In my experience a lot of people will dismiss an entire article based on one wrong fact or crazy opinion.
And when extended to people - just because someone says something stupid or wild doesn't mean everything they say is that way.