The point isn't expanding your knowledge, but doing so when there's other priorities.

But priorities are just a personal preference and ever shifting. Sure sometimes there are external forces driving our priorities, like needing to finish a work project to get paid, bur once you've taken care of those, it's totally reasonable for "knowledge acquisition" to be at the top.

It's not knowledge acquisition. It's a false sense of accomplishment. You feel like you've learnt something that will help you be more productive. So your mind justifies the time you've spent learning it by thinking you've paid it back.

So mentally, you don't feel like your wasting time. Thus you consume more and more. Which for some, can create an addictive feedback loop similar but exaggerated as porn. Which ironically is wasting time.

Everything in life is in balance.

As I said in my original post, I couldn't disagree more. It is knowledge acquisition. I've solved problems because of things I learned on HN/reddit/Twitter.

I've come up with novel solutions to things by combining ideas that I read on each platform.

Not everything you learn will have immediate value. Sometimes it takes a while for it to become useful.

The article is identifying a tendency for some people to over-explore (aquire knowledge) and under-exploit (apply knowledge). Specifically it's calling out when "exploration" is not being done in a structured way, and the result of that is slower / less effective skill acquisition.

If you want to learn to draw, you have a carve out time to practice and you need to learn a tree of sub-skills that may have interdependencies. Watching occasional youtube videos about drawing, or reading meta discussion about drawing is nice, but moves the needle very slowly. If your goal is a certain level of proficiency, you may not reach that level without a change in strategy.

I guess the author doesn't get all the way here, but by saying

    "Stop thinking (reading, listening, watching etc.) about how to do something and just go do it."

...I think what they are getting at is this logical progression to pursue more exploitation (do stuff / apply knowledge), and to allow {the act of doing} to structure your priorities for exploration. I think a lot of folks talk about this (e.g. the whole idea of deep work).

It's a useful strategy because by _trying_ stuff, you discover what you don't know / what you need to learn, and as you conquer those things, you discover more things you don't know & this dynamic perpetuates itself.

This doesn't mean random exploration can't be helpful (as you point out, it can be very helpful) -- however by itself it has limited utility, and many fall into the trap of doing _only_ that. The idea of "productivity porn" is just "I'm stuck going wide when I know I should go deep," and the author attributes this to the firehose of feeds, tweets, blog posts, videos, etc.

There are clearly people who have the opposite tendency and go deep (exploit) instead of wide (explore), and can benefit from more explorative behaviors, but this blog post is not speaking to them. Maybe you're one of those people :)

> There is also the notion of being able to make better decisions with more "connection material" in your mind. The more you know, the more likely you are to make a novel connection.

I completely agree with this, but I don't believe all blog posts and technical articles are written equal :)

You have:

1. Your garden variety tech blog post about somebody's experience using X or Y framework or just a general techy blog. (I'm thinking a joel spolsky or coding horror post here)

2. A technical dive into a specific problem/framework.

3. A raymond chen style blog post explaining the reasons behind some weird api.

And then you have the deeper material:

4. The Pragmatic Programmer. Not too dense and can still be enjoyed at a leisurely pace, but contains enough deep thinking type of material to motivate you.

5. A comprehensive reference book about a specific framework or concept (Game Engine Architecture and OpenGL SuperBible come to mind).

6. The Art of Computer Programming.

I only consider the last 3 productivity material. The first 3 can be helpful in rare instances, but they're more akin to watching a 3blue1brown video where I say "That was interesting" and proceed to forget all about that topic.

If we're talking about „reading a full article + following the discussion“, then yes.

But for me, 1.) has also been helpful for discovering frameworks or tools that I'm now using in my everyday work life (e.g. LogSeq, Prefect). I wouldn't count it as „productive” either, but just reading announcements or random tech blog posts sometimes translates into actually adopting the thing.

The problem is these "fake productivity" sources arent clearly identified. They are just referenced and then different people assume hes a talking about different things and no one realizes that we're all using different definitions.