Lighthouse manifesto - Personal value matters more than general quality

Throughout the history of mankind there were always people who aren’t curious, people who are curious but don’t do anything about it, and then the ones who take the additional step to get the information they needed to satisfy their curiosity. People who gathered knowledge, and armed with that knowledge improved their own lives and the lives of the people around them.

Before the internet their main challenge was getting the information they seeked. Information had to physically travel in the form of newspapers and books, which made it hard to come by.

Today it’s different.

The internet, and all the wonderful products it enabled, have made information access and distribution as simple as a mouse click. No more physical travel. Every piece of knowledge mankind has created is instantly accessible.

This gave rise to a different problem: making sense of that information flood.

Now there is too much information, too much content. It’s impossible to read it all. Even if we only take high-quality texts, we still wouldn’t have time to read all of them. And by far not all would be valuable.

We have to focus. Focus on content that provides the most value for the time invested, and ignore everything else. It’s easy to find content that provides a little value, but continuously zeroing in on high-value content is much harder.

And the products that exist today are woefully inadequate. They surface information, but stop short of actually helping you focus on the pieces that provide value to you, as individual. The best they do is lump you into a group and show you content targeted to that group.

• Recommendation systems show you articles that people who are similar to you also read
• Voting platforms (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News) highlight articles that the collective group thinks are noteworthy
• Digest newsletters highlight articles that the curators think are important for their target group
• Feed readers list all articles of a feed without discrimination, even if not all of them are useful

Don’t get me wrong, they are very useful. They help you discover potentially great content. But that’s not enough. The more of them you subscribe to, the better the content you will find. But subscribe to enough of them and you’ll quickly get overwhelmed.

In the end, they’re all recommendation engines. Similar to friends or colleagues recommending a book. It’s just a signal that it might be valuable, but not a definite conclusion. Only you can make that.

You wouldn’t read every book your friends say are great. You also wouldn’t read every single newsletter issue you get, or every single post published by a blog. You see the title, maybe skim the article, and then decide if it’s worth your time.

We need a tool that helps us figure out which of the recommendations actually matter, before spending time on them. A place where they all come together, and are filtered for the value they can provide you.

With such a tool, you could subscribe to a lot more content sources without getting overwhelmed, and therefore significantly increase the value of content you consume. At the same time it would also make it possible to go directly to the sources (e.g. blogs), and avoid being reliant on others to find high-value content.

Quality vs. value

I wrote “value for you” a couple of times, and it’s time to explain what I mean by that.

The quality of content, be it a text, podcast, video, or anything else, is objective. If it’s written clearly or confusingly, if the arguments are true or false, if the form is readable or everything in one long paragraph. Regardless of who you are, you will be affected by it. It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or a student, if the article is confusing it will be harder to read.

But the value of content is highly specific to you. To your situation and your knowledge. Let’s take a scientific paper published in Nature, “Dynamic range and precision of hybrid vision sensors”. I have no doubt it’s well-written. But since I know nothing about vision sensors, I won’t understand a word of it. Additionally, I’m not interested in this topic, and it doesn’t relate to my work. Because of all these reasons, it’s of zero value to me.

Quality is the baseline that content must fulfill. But to be valuable, it must also be about a topic that’s interesting to you, build on what you already know, and expand it.

Ultimately you are the only one who can decide if an article is valuable to you or not, but software should support you. It should help you filter out most low-value content, so that you’re left with a manageable amount of highly relevant information.

Independence, transparency, and control

By relying on other people or systems you outsource judgment of value to them. If you rely solely on voting platforms, you rely on the collective judgment. If you rely on digest newsletters, you rely on the judgment of the curator. Even if you rely on friends or colleagues sending you articles, you rely on their judgment.

But no system or person can know if an article is valuable to you. Only you can. There are countless reasons why the value of content is low, even if it is high-quality. You may have read the book the recommended article is based on. Your interests might have changed. Or it simply doesn’t apply to you.

The worst consequence of outsourcing judgment is that a lot of high-value content will never get to you. It will never be recommended because others miss or ignore it, even though to you it might be gold.

To increase the average value of content you get, you have to be independent of third parties and go to the sources directly. That way you avoid the misjudgments of others and get the highest-value content possible.

In its purest form, this means combing through every article on the internet - obviously impossible.

But it is possible to get close. By automating your judgment.

We all have areas we’re interested in. They usually are quite specific, which makes it possible to filter for them. For example, I’m interested in finance, but only in long-form macroeconomics articles. A system can automate my judgment to automatically remove any finance article that doesn’t fit the criteria.

For such a system to work well and be trustworthy, it has to be transparent in how it works and give control to you, the user, while still providing the required automation.

Transparency and control work together. Both are necessary for you to be sure that it’s truly your judgment that’s automated, and that you can change how the system works when your interests change.

This is what Lighthouse aims to be. A system that helps you automate your judgment so you can find the highest-value information on the internet.

The value of information

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates belong to the most successful people in history, and both recommend reading as a habit. Crucially, they follow that advice themselves.

Over the last few decades life has sped up. In the past people worked at one company all their professional life, today 5 years is considered long. The rate of change increased dramatically.

But one thing stayed constant.

The best people in any field never stop learning. They continually learn and educate themselves, and a large portion of that is through reading. Lifelong learning has become a buzz-phrase, particularly in recent years, as it became clearer and clearer how valuable it is.

Just reading isn’t enough, though. Reading the right content is how you truly benefit from lifelong learning. High-quality texts that relate to your life. Not content that others find interesting, but content that truly benefits you.