And all that other stuff about weight loss, too.

If you have a burning desire to follow every health rule in the book, there will be plenty of time to ponder the details of what to eat when — after you’ve mastered basics like exercising regularly and moderating food intake.

The way I interpret this post (and I could very well be wrong), Ramit is referring to minutiae as _trivial_ detail, rather than merely _small_ details. It is the fact that a detail is relatively incidental to the outcome that categorizes it as minutiae for the purposes of this post. So we might say that minutiae are identified not by scope (eg. specificity/ambiguity, or small/large), but by degree of relation to the main point or goal that is being reached for.
Am I on the right track?

Looking at personal experiences, I think that sometimes this stems from the pleasure we get from being ‘right’… it is easy to blind ourselves to the insignificance of facts if we’re (consciously/unconsciously) using our own knowledge of these facts to boost our own sense of self-worth. Eg. I might feel like I accomplished something if I read a book or skimmed a website and came away knowing a specific ‘fact’, and I’m not going to go out of my way to question whether this ‘fact’ is really important or not, because it will only do my ego a disservice to find out that I’ve wasted my time. And so we often come to blow out of proportion the significance of these facts that we’ve learned.

Some details matter, others don’t. No easy way to simplify this. I guess it’s just important to work at eliminating our blind spots — especially blind spots that make us feel better about ourselves, because those are often the most difficult to spot and face head-on.

I think this trait of debaging minutiae comes out in the culture of long meetings that is common in many (especially big ) companies. Meetings should rarely take more than 1 hour.