Today, my middle child, aged 6, penned and illustrated a graphic novel about a superhero cat fighting against a supervillain wolf. It was incredible; action-packed from cover to cover. My son, aged 5, is also rapidly increasing his literacy: he wrote “I see the little cat” without any prompting and understanding what the sentence meant. He wasn’t repeating a sentence he had seen, he actually assembled a complete and coherent sentence from words he knew.

Literacy is The Great Threshold. It’s the marker between being dependent on the direct attention and teaching of others for all your knowledge and being able to just go binge information on whatever you want. One of the greatest miracles in history is that someone actually managed to slip the printing press past all the tyrants and despots of the world. I wonder if they truly knew what they were unleashing.

Never forget, it’s some people’s job to overreact about things.

If your job is to look for signs of sharks at the beach, then you never get scolded for overreacting to the threat of sharks. If you spot a dark shape in the water and you blow your whistle to make everyone get out of the water, you’re commended for being diligent no matter how unlikely it was that the shadow was actually a shark. It doesn’t matter how much time you waste or fun you ruin. The only thing that matters is that it could have been a shark.

There’s not much that you, personally, can do about this. One thing you can do, though, is remember that there’s no shark. Don’t get swept up in their hysteria. Keep a cool head. It’s not much, but it’s something.

I find humans as a whole fascinating. When it comes to individual humans, the only ones I find interesting are the real ones.

What is a “real” human, you ask? Well, that’s different for everyone, because everyone has a different frame of reference, but the criteria are the same: real people exist in your real life.

When I think about “humanity,” I’m thinking about the emergent properties of how people will react en masse to things. When thinking about that, individual humans are rarely good data – each human is an anecdote, after all. So if a public figure, someone who exists to me only on a screen, does something weird then I’m rarely curious. They have their reasons, and I’m probably not going to figure them out. But more importantly, I don’t care – that person’s life doesn’t affect me, we don’t know each other, I can’t do anything to influence them. They aren’t real – to me.

Now, an individual in my actual life – the principal of my child’s school, a professional colleague, the owner of a store I like – these people are interesting to me, despite being individuals. I care about their lives, and their lives intertwine with me. I have the motivation to understand how they as individuals “work,” even if that provides no greater insight into humanity as a whole. The principal of my child’s school could be a total outlier on the Bell curves of many psychological profiles, but knowing their unique brain better might provide more benefit to me and my family than knowing more about the general cases.

A celebrity, political figure, or athlete doesn’t hold that same interest for me. And when I see other people feverishly discussing a person like that – someone who might as well be a fictional character in terms of actual impact on their lives – I often find myself feeling very distant from that part of humanity’s day-to-day.

The lesson, I think: strive to know your neighbors very well, and strive to know the eddies and currents of humanity as well as you need. But pay no attention to those men and women behind the curtain. If you must be on any side of gossip, better to be the person gossiped about than the person spilling the tea. At least then you’re probably doing something interesting.

My kids hauled in over sixteen pounds of candy tonight. Two of the three were injured, bleeding and all, during the night. None of them quit. They were on a mission, and that mission was accomplished.

Happy Halloween, everyone. May all your days be as joyous as kids with bleeding lips and knees holding up sacks of candy so bulging they can barely lift them.

We are social creatures. We highly value the esteem of our peers. One of the reasons for this is we evolved in an environment where “esteem of our peers” was the primary currency used to get pretty much everything else. We got better food, mates, living arrangements, etc. from being well-respected and highly regarded.

This is one of the reasons why our egos are so dangerous to us today. Imagine getting into a public argument with someone and defending your position in a heated manner. After, someone says to you “If you publicly apologize and admit you were wrong, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.” For many people that would genuinely be a difficult decision!

But why? The apology costs you nothing, and the argument probably wasn’t important. You don’t even have to mean it when you apologize! But our evolutionary wiring still screams at us that “status” is the most important thing, so we’re loathe to do anything to diminish it. That same evolutionary wiring hasn’t quite caught up to money, yet.

This is how you cheat at the status game. If you recognize that status isn’t actually the end goal and never was, but rather that status was always a form of currency used to get things we want, you can skip that part. You can recognize that a thousand dollars probably buys you much more of whatever you want than being right in an argument ever could.

Some version of this happens to you all the time. You get in an argument with a spouse, for example, and then you barricade yourself behind your position. What you actually want is a peaceful home, a pleasant mate, etc. You will get that stuff by just apologizing because you don’t live in a cave on the savannah. But the evolutionary wiring still thinks you do, and tries to convince you that the way to all your true goals is simply to be the ape with the most status.

Opt out, my friend. Abandon the status game, especially when it’s costing you something real to play it. Carve out your beautiful bubble and within it, be happy.

If you ever want to explain the rules of something to someone in a way that will make them stick, you absolutely cannot just start with the rules themselves.

The first thing you need to do is give the context. Then you can provide the goal. And only then can you start working through the rules.

I’ve seen middle-school principals welcome a whole new crop of fifth-graders by just listing rules, and even the kids that would actually care can’t even process what’s happening. If you start a conversation with “Whenever you’re moving between classes, you always need to take the right-most hallway,” you will get absolutely zero retention when you’re done.

Start with the context: “Welcome everyone! This school can get pretty crowded, especially when the bell rings and we’re changing classes. It’s easy to get lost and even easier for everyone to get in everyone else’s way. We don’t want it to turn into Black Friday at Wal-Mart in here, so we’re going to talk a bit about safe movement.”

Then give the goal: “We want to make sure, when the bell rings, that everyone can get where they need to go. That means sometimes you may have to do things that seem strange from the perspective of just going from Point A to Point B by yourself, but it’s designed to make sure we all get where we’re going safely and also keep things from becoming a huge mess. We have a few rules and if you follow them, everyone will be able to move around these halls.”

Now, you can start listing rules. You’ve explained why they exist and what they’re meant to do. You’ve gotten some buy-in and given people time to form a mental “box” in which to put those rules; something to connect them to.

Now they’ll stick.

Context – Goal – Rules. Follow that order and explaining things, especially to a large group of people, will be miraculously easier.

Here is an unfortunate truth that will nonetheless make your life better if you accept: Being “informed” about something takes a lot of work, and that work is generally not worth it.

Have you ever heard the phrase “know enough to be dangerous?” It refers to the fact that knowing a little bit about something often makes you more consistently wrong than just knowing nothing about something. I don’t know anything about nuclear reactors. If someone asked me a question about nuclear reactors, I would answer that I didn’t know. If someone asked me to make a decision about nuclear reactors, I would immediately demand that they find someone much more qualified. Therefore, I don’t pose much danger in that area.

I know a little about baseball. If you asked me a question about baseball, I’d try to answer it – with a good chance that I’d be wrong. If you asked me to stand in and be an umpire in a minor league game, there’s some chance you could convince me to do it, and I’d certainly foul it up (ha! baseball puns!). I’m aware of this, but that’s because I’m currently thinking about it. I might have missed it if I had been unprepared. That’s “knowing enough to be dangerous.” I know enough to think I know a lot when in reality I don’t know much at all.

Intellectually, you know this. If you think about any topic in which you’re a true expert, you know that it can be fun to talk to people who know nothing about that topic, but incredibly frustrating to talk to people who know “enough to be dangerous.” That level of knowledge is an essential step on the way to true expertise, but you have to maintain intellectual humility while you’re there. It’s also essential to recognize that the first step is only the first step, and only worth it if you plan to go further.

If I read one book on the Spanish-American War, that won’t make me an expert. In fact, it will probably make me more prone to mistakes regarding the Spanish-American War than if I hadn’t read any books on it, for the reasons I explained above. So there are only two good reasons to read such a book: Either I’m just curious and am reading it as entertainment while maintaining a firm grasp of my own lack of true knowledge, or because I intend to go much deeper and become truly informed about the topic.

Here is a bad reason to read just one book about the Spanish-American War: “I want to be informed about the Spanish-American war so that I can discuss it and have opinions on it and maybe even influence others about it, and I think reading that one book is sufficient for this.”

So if learning only a little bit about a topic and then staying there is worse than either learning a lot about a topic or learning nothing about a topic, what would you think about someone who knows only a little about a lot of topics?

That person is definitely not “informed” in any sense of the word. That person is just systematically wrong about a lot of stuff. They don’t even know it.

But what I’m describing is the median person who just casually consumes news. It’s bad enough if they’re reading a range of topics in actual news sources; it’s much worse if they’re getting this “news” from social media or things like that. It’s better to have no opinion on most topics than to have bad opinions on most topics.

So if you spend an hour every day (or more!) reading the news, paying attention to trending stories on social media, or other such activities – all you’re doing is training yourself to be wrong on a wider range of topics. The people who produce those things aren’t any better (journalists aren’t experts in those topics either, after all), and they’re passing their error, bias, and noise onto you.

Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. Listen to me: Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. If you have not worked hard, then you are not an expert. And if you aren’t an expert, then you’re probably wrong about a lot of stuff. You should not consider “a little knowledge” useful for absolutely anything except gaining more knowledge. Reading that one book on the Spanish-American War is a great start to becoming an expert, but it doesn’t qualify me to do anything else.

Now again, remember that it’s also okay to just read a book on the Spanish-American War because I want to, because I find it interesting. There’s no purity test there, and if you just genuinely like watching the news because you find it entertaining, go you. But I’ve never met anyone like that. The people I know who relentlessly consume “pop news” do it because they think it’s making them smarter, more informed, and more justified in having strong opinions on things. I’ve never met anyone who watched two weeks of news coverage on a political event and then calmly said “Well, I don’t actually know enough about the details of this event to form a strong opinion.” Could you even imagine that?

Whatever topics you find important enough to become an expert in will never be covered accurately and in sufficient detail by “news.” In fact, if you’re an expert in something and the news happens to cover a story relating to that topic, you will inevitably laugh at how wrong they got it; that’s the nature of “enough to be dangerous.” So don’t fall into that yourself. Be an expert on a few things, and be humbly and nobly ignorant on the rest. Live a happy life.

There’s a lot of money to be made telling losers what they want to hear. If you ever hear a public figure of any kind telling you something just oh so comforting about how the problems you’re currently facing aren’t your fault and you shouldn’t have to take responsibility for them… run.

Those people don’t want to help you. They want to drag you screaming into the rocks so they can loot your corpse. They want you to empty your vaults of money and attention, heaping it all onto them. They tell you that you you can’t solve your problems so you shouldn’t try, but that’s okay because they aren’t your fault anyway, and what you should do instead is just wallow and make the wallowing a little easier by voting/subscribing/buying in whatever patterns they tell you.

Look, I’m not trying to be deliberately brutal. Not every single bad thing in your life is your direct fault, obviously. But it’s all your responsibility, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to shake you down. It’s a grift. No one ever improved their lot in life by listening to people tell them that they have no agency, that they’re simply victims of forces they can’t possibly understand or control – only blindly and impotently hate.

Don’t fall for it. Keep your rudder straight and tie yourself to the mast if you have to. Only go toward hope and life, not despair and death.

The signal-to-noise ratio is real. If you want to hide information, the secret isn’t to… well, hide it. The secret is to bury it. Make the information you want to keep hidden part of a flood of information so banal and uninteresting that no human mind can penetrate it.

You can even do this by accident, that’s how effective it is. Want someone to miss an important update from you? Easy, just send them ten updates a day, and call all of them important. If The Boy Who Cried Wolf was around today, he’d mark every email “urgent.”