Don’t fill the machine. Upgrade it.

One of the easiest human temptations to fall into these days is the unlimited accumulation of knowledge. With the internet at our fingertips, we read hot takes from tech insiders, listen to podcasts, and watch TED talks. Perhaps all three at the same time. But how much do we retain? How much does our brain store and actually use?

“The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our ‘cognitive load.’ When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information — when the water overflows the thimble — we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory. We can’t translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers…We become mindless consumers of data.” (Nicholas Carr, The Shallows)

“Learning well is a combination of intense curiosity, extreme focus, repetition, and an almost involuntary yearning to make the information a part of your soul.”

Carr argues, as most do, that the difference between accumulating knowledge and learning is the magnitude of concentration and intimacy your brain experiences during an encounter with information. Learning well is a combination of intense curiosity, extreme focus, repetition, and an almost involuntary yearning to make the information a part of your soul. For example, you might never recall a single bullet point from “The Top 10 Things Successful People Do In The Morning.” However, you will certainly remember that surprise birthday party when your boyfriend proposed to you. This is just how memory works.

https://twitter.com/MikeNRSC/status/721377422441062400

Like everyone else, I am guilty of accumulating knowledge instead of learning. I fill my time with information and neglect intimate experiences. Between office work and the digitized social world, it is extremely hard to escape the domain of distraction. And what was once merely a “now…this” culture of distracting television has transformed into a peer-pressured: “did you see this?” It requires no effort or intimacy and attempts only to fill a disconnected boredom. Nothing is learned. However, the gum commercials and hilarious vines do stick with us because they use the same tell-tales of learning: focus, repetition, and intimacy.

“It is extremely hard to escape the domain of distraction.”

This brings me to Quantopian and Robinhood, a personal story I want to share about how I decided to actually learn something new.

Beginning last year, I had the itch to make money. Robinhood had just debuted their “commission free” platform and I could not ignore it. I had always wanted to start investing — or day-trading if I could — and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. But I knew nothing about the stock market and it seemed like all the financial information I was gathering fit in one of three categories: redundant, useless, or stupid (pro-tip: everyone in the financial media sector is lying to you). I finally got exasperated with the amount of shallow information I was having to read just to keep up with the contrived ‘markets’ and ‘trends.’ There was no enjoyment, no learning, and the money-making was sparse.

I was still trading a little when, in March, a friend of mine began bugging me about modeling. I decided to make use of that master’s program in economics, purchased for $20,000 and two years of my life but languishing unused. I gave stock prediction models a whirl.

After a few tries, we actually came up with some pretty impressive algorithmic models, predicting profitable trends. But what to do with them? Then I discovered — Robinhood has an API integration with quantopian, a data platform written in Zipline (based off of Python), that allows you to create, test and execute algorithmic stock trading. How convenient!

Or is it?

This is where the challenge starts. I will admit I am fluent in HTML, PHP, Javascript, SQL, and a few others — but as most coders can attest, every programming language is different, like a completely new (spoken) language, some of them like different dialects, each with their own idiosyncrasies. I had no familiarity with Python. But if I wanted to execute our ideas, I was going to have to learn it from scratch.

So I did.

16 evenings, 2 weekends, and a whole lot of copying and pasting later, I thought my wife was going to kill me. After all the long hours, searching the community forums, the tests, beating my head against a wall, there was this sincere longing like a scientist who was on the brink of curing his son of an incurable disease. It did not seem possible. And it was made even more sobering that what I was creating could, if it even functioned, lose me a lot of money.

As of Monday we’re in beta, forward-testing our algorithm, and thus far I haven’t lost any money (it actually works!). And I am now at a point where if you wanted to toss me a statistical model, I could convert it to Zipline (quantopian) in no time.

There are two concrete lessons I took from these two weeks. They are beyond the key foundations for learning I discussed earlier (curiosity, focus, repetition, and desire).

1. Immersion: Like birds learn to fly, smart parents throw their kids in the pool to help them to swim. I’d say that the majority of the practical tools I have acquired in my life have come from trench-warfare and doing. AKA, I didn’t know what I was doing until I finally just did it under pressure. This is not to buck reading, which I prize, but to say that most internet reading is cursory, unless of course, we strive for that same intimate immersion. Ultimately, any challenge sought lightly will be lightly achieved and any goal fought for with rigorous intent will be greatly rewarded and remain longer in our plastic brains.
2. Community: This is even more important than immersion. You don’t have to drown yourself to learn how to swim if you have others to keep you afloat. This principle is present in most good philosophies, religions and even civic humanism. When you depend on others, growth accelerates. Having a group of people to bounce ideas off of, take counsel from, and critique your shortcomings is the surest way to grow and achieve something phenomenal. This is why Aristotle says that man is, by nature, a political animal — one who seeks to commune with others and increase the good of everyone in a community. Without the Quantopian community and a good friend who helped inspire me to this end, I would not have reached my end goal.

As a self-taught web developer and graphic designer (as well as guitar and other skills), I can attest to the cliche that you can learn anything you put your mind to. But it’s the modern definition of the phrase “put your mind to” that I take issue with.

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“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows