The Library for the Study of What We Are

Signal in a world of noise

One of the cool things about the internet is that it is increasingly expanding as the ultimate library of human knowledge.

Physical books are being scanned by Google Books. YouTube is full of famous content creators who you’ve never heard of. If you wanted to get a cursory understanding of any one subject, Wikipedia is a great place to start. But the abundance of information is a double-edged sword — for the internet is also full of spam bots, phishing schemes, false rhetoric, censorship, and is increasing becoming the battle field for the information war.

Naval @naval

Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.

In the attention economy, the internet has been largely monetized by advertisements. This means that internet companies have been forced to optimize their services to get us to spend the most amount of time possible, on their social media and entertainment platforms. By grabbing our attention, these companies can show audiences advertisements, and capitalize on our attention. If these companies don’t like what you post, you get banned and your content gets removed from the platforms.

Balaji Srinivasan @balajis

The internet is increasing variance. From 30 minute sitcoms to 30 second clips and 30 episode Netflix binges. From a stable 9-5 job to a gig economy task or a crypto windfall. From a standard life script to 30 year olds living with their parents and 20 year old startup CEOs.

In a world of ever-increasing variance, its becoming harder and harder to find signal - a true composite of information that we know is worth spending our precious and limited time on. Hopefully, we can identify the “correct” signal to spend our time on. Ultimately, learners want to reflect and adapt our lives based on new knowledge, which can help to make our lives better, in some real or tangible way.

An example of this is the fitness industry. Plenty of people want to get more fit and lose weight. There’s an abundance of online influencers, bloggers, and YouTubers that are willing to promote and sell fad diets, supplements, and gym apparel to a hungry and vulnerable audience that is really just trying to live a healthier and more active lifestyle.

However, a quick google search can easily lead to mental exhaustion. Much of the diet and fitness industry will give contradictory advice, and for someone just getting started, they can get easily overwhelmed, misled, and demotivated from ever starting.

The Library

In the last few months, I’ve been fascinated by this one subreddit, r/thelibrary.

Its a small community of like-minded individuals that have a thing for internet archiving and amalgamating knowledge and information.

The project is really the amalgamation of one user, u/Nuetrinostar, who personally curated a lecture library of 2000+ videos on Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy.

Nuetrinostar has dubbed this “The Library for the Study of What We Are”, and the library includes hundreds of hours of video lectures from some of the smartest people in their respective fields.

The Library is split up into three primary categories:

• Neuroscience, Biology & General Science

• Philosophy, Society & BLM

• Psychology

Here’s the complete/exhaustive list of all sub-categories:

Neuroscience, Biology & General Science:
-Ambient Intelligence
-Brains, Minds, and Machines
-Carl Sagan's Cosmos
-Cognitive Neuroscience Course
-Evolution and Medicine: Stephen C. Stearns
-Ex. Variations of the Mind
-Imaging the Brain
-Individual Lectures: Neuroscience
-Intro to Computational Neuroscience
-Jeremy Nathans
-Nancy Kanwisher
-Neuro2020
-Neurobiology Course
-Principles of Evolution, Ecology And Behavior
-Richard Feynmen
-Robert Sapolsky
-The Neuroscience of Creativity
-The Open Question In Neuroscience
-USMLE Neurology

Philosophy, Society & BLM:
-African Culture & BLM
-Contrapoints
-Daniel Bonevac: The Analytic Tradition
-Daniel Dennet
-Dante's Inferno
-David Chalmers
-Death: Shelly Kagan
-Douglas Hofstadter
-Eastern Thought
-Hegel
-Individual Lectures Philosophy
-John Searle
-John Vervaeke
-Nietzsche
-Noam Chomsky
-Philosophy of Human Nature
-Slavoj Žižek
-Western Philosophy 1-3

Psychology:
-ABA, REBT & CBT
-Cog Sci Psych
-Individual Lectures Psychology
-Interviews & Symposiums
-Intro Courses
-Person Centered, Social & Positive Psychology
-Personality, Psychometrics, & Statistics
-Psychiatry
-Psychodynamic & Neuropsychoanalysis
-Psychology Documentaries

The Library is just under 1.0 TB in file size. What I’ve done is download a copy of the library, and save it on an external hard drive. Any time I’m traveling or without internet connection, I can easily plug the drive into my laptop and use the downtime to learn from some of the greatest in the world. By having an offline copy, I avoid the attentional pull of social algorithms, advertisements, online distractions, and the possibility that the information will one day be deleted or wiped off the internet.

The Library is extensive, so I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly go through every lecture and video and vet this entirely. Going through the library is perhaps a life-long exercise of visiting and re-visiting certain lectures, topics, and theorists, and I don’t think it’s something that is meant to be rushed through. Intellectual growth comes with time, contorted effort, reflexivity, and open-mindedness to seemingly contradictory ideas.

In any case, I wanted to share this library with my small audience, as a digital archive with high signal, in a world of ever-increasing noise.

-A browsable Google Drive version of The Library can be found here

-The complete downloadable torrent archive can be found here

-The community for The Library can be found here

Onwards and upwards.