Defending our minds

Your mind is a delicate device, evolved over nearly 14 billion years.

Spend time reading, listening to, and interacting with that which will make your mind—and you—better.

Avoid reading, listening to, and interacting with that which will make you—and your mind—worse.

Share only things that will make others better.

Avoid mental contamination.

Everything changes your mind

Whenever someone reads something or listens to something or has a conversation with someone, it changes the contents and structure of their mind.

Of course.

Some interactions are neutral. Most interactions change minds for better or worse.

If our minds are made worse, we are made worse.

If our minds are made worse, we need to repair the damage, or our minds will remain worse.

We can keep ourselves from things that make us worse.

We can avoid connecting others with things that make them worse.

What makes us worse

An interaction that delivers false information makes us worse.

An interaction that delivers misleading information makes us worse.

An interaction that adds useless information makes us worse.

An interaction that misplaces importances makes us worse.

An interaction that produces unhelpful emotion makes us worse.

An interaction that distracts us from productive activity makes us worse.

An interaction that creates confusion makes us worse.

What makes us better

An interaction that corrects an error makes us better.

An interaction that helps us represent knowledge more simply makes us better.

An interaction that adds useful knowledge makes us better.

An interaction that helps us organize knowledge makes us better.

An interaction that helps us think more clearly makes us better.

An interaction that helps us focus on what we deem important makes us better.

An interaction that produces helpful emotion makes us better.

An interaction that creates the optimal balance between order and disorder makes us better.

An interaction that builds our cognitive skills—attention, perception, reasoning—makes us better.

What does not make us better makes us worse

Any interaction costs us the time that we spent in that interaction.

If it does not make us enough better to offset that cost, then we are worse.

The harm done by an interaction that will persist until we spend additional time undoing the harm.

If we do not have the necessary skills, we may not be able to undo the harm.

Avoiding harm is better than repairing it

When we carry out an interaction that causes us mental harm, we’ve wasted the time spent in the interaction, we’ve cost ourselves the harm to ourselves, and will cost ourselves the time we will need to spend undoing the harm.

When we expose others to a source of harm, we risk causing them to waste time on the interaction, the harm to themselves, and the time that they must spend undoing the harm.

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