This is my take as well. I had a few periods when I was spending time trying to get good at chess, but after the initial enthusiasm evaporated, I realized that it's just a waste of time and energy. You only have a limited amount of peak mental performance per day, why use it for something that has questionable benefits over playing video games or watching Netflix? It's better to use my mental resource to learn and make stuff that has long-term value.
That's funny, because I'd just-as-soon historians never spent so much as a CPU cycle analyzing my posts. I've said some intelligent things, some popular things, some uncomfortable-but-I-suspect-true things, some well-reasoned things, etc.. I've certainly had an impact on the people in my real-life sphere and maybe something I've said online has helped a stranger, too. (Comments here on HN have certainly helped me.) But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too.
For some shorter reads, I saw this recommendation for biology undergrads yesterday:
> I would really love all biology students to read Elliott Sober's "Apportioning Causal Responsibility", Susan Oyama's "Causal Democracy and Causal Contributions in Developmental Systems Theory", and Richard Lewontin's "The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes".
