Signal-to-Noise Filter

The Promise

Strip your inputs and your output to only what has been earned through experience. Treat repetition of what you have read as noise, even when it sounds true.

How It Works

• Apply the question: where did this come from? Can you set the source down and rewrite it from your own observation or experience?
• If you cannot, the material does not belong yet. Hold it until you have accumulated the experience to ground it. The "until" matters: material can move from noise to signal as experience accumulates.
• Apply the filter at output too. When writing or advising, ask: am I reporting something I observed, or repeating something I read?

In Practice

Running the filter across a year's worth of consumed material typically reveals that the majority of what is being carried as "known" has never been tested by the person carrying it. The filter is not an indictment of reading broadly: it is a mechanism for distinguishing what you know from what you have only encountered.