Status Updates From The Age of the Infovore: Su...

But what's the book actually about? After beating around the bush a bit, Cowen says that "my message is more straightforward. The web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism--". The subtext here is that this is a good thing. & what are some of those cognitive strengths? The tendency & ability to consume, synthesise, & order information. But mostly he refers to mental ordering, to making big data useful.

An example of an infovore & probably an example of why Cowen believes being an infovore is a good thing is Patrick Collinson whom Cowen has worked with & interviewed & holds in high esteem. Collinson is a very successful software entrepreneur who's also a voracious reader whose aspirations extend far beyond the confines of money-making into a deep & animating desire to improve the world, the desired end of infovorism

I decided to read this book when I heard him say in an interview with the co-author of his blog that the central mission of his career was to encourage more people to be infovores. This was a typically Cowenesque remark: his coauthor gave the noble but less intriguing answer of wanting to spread good economic ideas, whereas Cowen's was more obtuse subtext-heavy. Infovores obsessively consume & synthesise information.

Reading Cowen's book Stubborn Attachments changed my life: it remains one of the most impactful books I've ever read. Since then, I've haunted his famous blog Marginal Revolutions daily, and the more I learn about the man, the more I feel like he's a version of myself, in many ways a smarter and more compelling version, who for various trauma-related reasons I left behind in my teens and early 20s.

'our contemporary culture has become more like marriage in the sense that we are trending in some experiences for a better daily state of mind.'

Very interesting discussion about the importance and transformation on the culture consumption and how the technology is transforming the way we consume and interact with cultural goods. Here is two quotations I think is remarkable:
'We don't always recognize or appreciate intelligence when it appears in unusual or nontraditional forms {...} we also tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty.'

Very interesting discussion about autism, avoidng the classical approach to this condition which often tends to characterized the autists as low-cognitive capable and callous people. Rather Cowen try to draw a parallel between the way autist people realize and interact with data and the way the new digital world (and economy) works.

"One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistic to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting. memorizing, categorizing and listing. Austistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately."

"This book will start and end with the idea of the value and creative power of the individual. This is the ultimate driver of prosperity in the modern world."