How I made 2024 my most productive ever year

Stop reading the news...

As Morrissey says "the news contrives to frighten you... to make you feel your mind isn't your own". With that in mind I took out a lifetime subscription to app and website blocker freedom and permanently blocked the misinformation & disinformation that is the news media.

What I achieved in 2024

Now I wasn't wasting time reading the news I had the time to achieve the following.

1. Published my first academic paper The State of FaaS: An analysis of public Functions-as-a-Service providers in the proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 17th International Conference on Cloud Computing, one of world's most prestigious academic journals.

2. Gained the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification, arguably the AWS certification that requires the most detailed and broad knowledge.

3. Read 19 books, mainly historical non-fiction & biography but also the first four of the Harry Potter series.

4. Found a new job after my previous employer lost their minds and decided they wanted to enact a digital transformation with fewer Software Engineers and put us all at risk of redundancy. Good luck to them, they will need it.

Why I blocked all news websites

A few years ago I read Michael Crichton's observation on what he terms "Gell-Mann Amnesia".

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

There are three areas where I have an unusual amount of knowledge, it is not expert knowledge but in these areas I observe this effect in almost every piece of news I read, so as Crichton asserts there is every reason to think that this effect also predominates in the news subjects wheres I have no knowledge.

The effect of Gell-Man Amnesia

The consequence of Gell-Man Amnesia is that by consuming the news we actually make ourselves stupid.

If there is a subject that a person knows nothing about then they can be consciously ignorant, however if they have consumed news media on this topic they will have fooled themselves into thinking that they have at least some knowledge of the topic when in fact they are now more likely than not misinformed.

Counter intuitively consuming more news "information" makes you less knowledgeable.