I would have thought reading about The Collector’s Fallacy would make me feel good about the stack of information I’ve collected and never processed. Instead, it made me feel worse.
Collecting, just as Eco warned us, does not magically increase our knowledge. We have to read a text effectively to assimilate its ideas and learn from it. Reading effectively means the text changes our knowledge permanently. Only when we learn from it and begin to work with the ideas it presents. We need to extract what’s inside and write things down.
I never thought collecting increased my knowledge, but now, as I start into the mounds of information still to be processed, am I to take notes on it all as well? The problem has become worse.
I am ok with reading something and not retaining it all in detail. Normally I’m reading not to learn but to find the nuggets that connect with what is meaningful to me. Trying to capture everything I know is a fruitless exercise as Nori Parelius has also learned.