Drowning in Information: The Solution
If you haven't yet, check out the first part of the series Drowning in Information here!
On with the show.
We've talked about useless information, or information that informs or entertains but is devoid of context and relevance. This kind of information is endless, be it the 24 hour news cycle, anything on social media, or the next mediocre marvel movie. Useless information consumes our attention (and our life, by extension) offering very little value in return. Think of useless information as the information equivalent of "white bread" or junk food. Yes technically bleached, ultra processed, white bread has calories and is "food", but it's pretty dismal nutritionally speaking. In the same vein, useless information can entertain, but that's where the benefits end due to its lack of context and relevance. What then is the equivalent of "whole, nutrient dense" information?
Enter useful information.
Useful information, predictably, sits on the opposite side of the spectrum of useless information. Where useless information is devoid of context and irrelevant, useful information is rich in context and relevance. Where consuming useless information results in increased anxiety, decreased agency, and (maybe) a new opinion, useful information is information that precedes action. useful information is information we can, and do, act on.
Why is useful information so important? While useless information reduces agency by consuming attention without informing action, useful information enhances agency by being relevant and actionable. Some examples comparing the two:
Useless information: A news report that crime is on the rise in Florida (when you live in Oregon).
Useful information: Bicycle theft has increased 20 fold in your neighborhood in the last month.
You can't do anything about a rise in crime isolated far away from where you live (except maybe have an opinion, and maybe vote for someone every 4 years). However, you can take action around local crime; you can make sure you store your bike(s) indoors, start a neighborhood watch, inform the police if you see anything suspicious, etc.
Useless information: You learn on a documentary that an interesting fish called a "tripod fish" exists on the bottom of the ocean. It walks on long stems attached to it's fins. Interesting!
Useful information: You learn from a book on nutrition that certain kinds of fish have less mercury in them (as opposed to tuna) and are still nutrient dense.
The useless information may be interesting, yet still is devoid of relevance beyond mild entertainment (and that's being generous). The useful information informs action that you can take to improve or alter your life. You can swap out all that tuna you eat for a different kind of fish or other substitute to get your protein without the high mercury levels. You can take action on the information to better control your environment and achieve more desireable outcomes.
Useless information: You learn that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a uniform temperature of 2.7 Kelvin.
Useful information: You read in a set of religious scriptures that individuals wishing to be good people should "mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort".
I get this one is a little on the nose and provocative (sorry, not sorry). Of course, as a scientist, I use physics and advanced math daily. I obviously subscribe to the scientific method and its conclusions. I am an ardent anti-fundamentalist, if such a thing exists. Within the realm of specialists and professional scientists, information about the workings of the world is highly practical. That said, outside the realm of scientific specialists, much of what is taught as science is, in fact, useless information for the average person. What is someone to do with knowledge of star formation or how sand is created? What about the periodic table? When was the last time you cared about how many valence electrons an element has? This is why the middle schooler's refrain, "When will I ever use this?", is so poignant. The answer for a non-trivial amount of what we learn in school is often "never." As an aside, because of this I often advocate for more trade-focused education, giving young people skills to directly affect their world. Deep specialization in the sciences is vital, but it should come after a foundation of practical, useful knowledge is established.
Religion, very often, jumps straight to practicality, to application. The whole point of religious morality is what people "should" do, informing action. Whether or not someone believes and subscribes to the "shoulds" is another topic, however religious information is very often dense with relevance, and very "useful".
Thinking of Christianity or other religions often quickly leads one to consider the rules they teach their members to follow. "Thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots", "love your enemies", "turn the other cheek", all get straight to the point. The punch line of most religions is "this is how you should act", immediately providing individuals with calls for agency and action. Will you care for the poor? Will you be honest? Will you love your enemies?
The useful info about useful information
Just as how nutritionally we don't need to only eat whole, nutrient-dense food (though that would certainly be good for us), it isn't necessary to only expose ourselves to useful information. The imperative facing us is that some sources of information (social media in particular) consume vast amounts of our attention while offering very little benefit, and often significant harm, in return. As such, we should seek to reduce the amount of useless information we consume, and increase the amount of useful information in our "diet". This is not a hard fast rule, but a rule of thumb. Reducing useless information and increasing useful information will help us decrease anxiety, and feelings of helplessness and enjoy increased agency and ability to influence our world.
How do we even do that? Asking ourselves "Is this information useful to me?" may be a good start, but could quickly become exhausting, and more than a little obnoxious. Here are three guidelines to help decrease agency reducing information, and increase agency promoting information.
Choose your content
Social media algorithms are terrible. As Spencer Cox, Governor of Utah has said on many occassions, "social media is a cancer", and I couldn't agree more. While there are many odious aspects of social media, the worst by far is their algorithm. If an algorithm chooses your content, you are being manipulated. You are being coerced into wasting your life on its platform.
They spend billions of dollars and hire brilliant scientists to turn their algorithms into slot machines, providing you with clinically precise doses of dopamine in order to ensure that when you have a single spare moment, you turn to their app to get your hit. And once you are in their app, they manipulate and reduce your agency (through dark and addictive designs) to keep your attention in their app for as long as possible. No matter how much these companies advertise or want you to think they are providing value to you, their one goal is to get you looking at their feed for as long as possible, because the more you do, the more money they make. They don't want you doing things with your life, because if you are out there living a good life, you aren't looking at their feed.
Just like how potato chips are literally precisely engineered so that you "can't eat just one", social media apps are exquisitely tuned to guarantee that you spend as much time on their as possible. Hence, algorithmically currated content, where a billion dollar supercomputer chooses what will be shown to you, is explicitely designed to reduce your agency.
The solution? Choose your content. Yes, this effectively means getting rid of algorithmically driven feeds. If you want to increase your agency and control of your life, delete algorithmically curated content from your devices. Of course that sounds melodramatic, but if you doubt it will give you time, attention, and control back, just check out the screen time stats on your phone. How many hours a day do you spend on trivial, useless information?
The best thing would be to delete your social media accounts, but that's a personal decision. Second best is to introduce deliberate friction into the mix by not having access to social media feeds on your phone or tablet. That means also blocking the website in your browser.
This way if you need some useful information, like finding a local volleyball group, or finding out where to meet for Tuesday night cycling, you seek it out and have to overcome your deliberate friction. This gives you more balance between the information you want and the information that social media companies want you coerce upon you. I cannot stress this enough, our devices should not vie for our attention! They have no business drawing us in. That intuition we have all had for years that media and phone addiction is bad for us? Listen to it, because it's spot on.
Choosing your content by eliminating currated content increases the amount of useful information in your life. This way the access to information is need and agency driven. This is how it should be. You should want or seek out the information first, then get access to it.
Slow your content
Once we've reduced currated, algorithmically driven content, what kind of content should we choose? Another guiding principle is to choose content that takes longer to consume. I've discussed elsewhere the differences between "high frequency" and "low frequency" information, but it suffice to say, if it takes you less than 10 seconds to consume, it is largely trite, trivial, and useless. It also very likely contributes to increased anxiety and depression, as evidenced by the side effects of social media and 24hr news consumption.
The solution? Fill your life with "slow" content; ideas and concepts that take much longer to consume. The rule of thumb? If it takes you more than three days to get through, it's more likely to be good for you.
But, three days?! That's so long!
Yes, that's the point. I'm not saying three straight days of constant consumption, just something that takes long enough that you probably can't finish it in one sitting. This encourages a few things, including helping us "reset" our addiction to rapid, constant stimulus. This improves our tolerance for less stimulating material and, most importantly, increases our odds of encountering meaningful, transformative information. What information you consume is up to you, though. We will discuss in more detail another time, but the constant barage of perpetual stimulation (i.e. always being "entertained") has conditioned us with a low "tolerance" for less stimuating material. This low tolerance for "slower" content is very similar to being raised on the "standard american diet" and subsequently finding whole foods such as fruits and vegetables much less appealing. This happens because the constant exposure to highly processed, "delicious", and addicting junk foods makes other foods, which are much better for you, significantly less appealing.
The solution? Slow down your content. Reduce your exposure to "junk food" entertainment. The more that can be replaced with "slower" content, the better. If you haven't found a good book, or something else slow to fill in the TikTok-shaped hole, spend some time being bored, it's good for you. You'll build up your "bored" muscles, which will allow you to expose yourself to more important information than whatever junk-food-slop and rage-bait we find on social media these days.
Pay for your content
This one is short and sweet; paying for content, whether it's through actually buying a book, audio book, or something else, helps us avoid ad-based business models and the dark incentives involved. Just as junk-food companies, who couldn't care less about your health, shamelessly manipulate and engineer their food to be addicting, ad-focused companies also skew heavily to trivial, outrage inducing, sensational, and useless information to keep you watching. Paying for your content, as it is an investment of resources, encourages you to seek out useful, meaningful, and high-quality content. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, it forces you to choose your content, instead of having it chosen for you.
We've been conditioned to believe entertainment should be free. But what is the actual cost of 'free'? How much of your time is sucked away by YouTube, in exchange for those cool recipe ideas you got from it? How precious or valuable is your life and attention?
Think about it this way. Let's use the example above and say you like to use instagram to get meal and recipe ideas. How much time do you spend on instagram per day? One to two hours wouldn't be surprising. Now let's take a conservative hourly price for your attention, say, $80 an hour (though your attention and life is worth way more than that). At one to two hours a day, that adds up to more than $4,500 worth of your time spent per month to "catch up" with friends, be entertained, and get a couple mediocre recipe ideas that use way too much garlic.
On the other side, take just 1% of that cost, $45, and invest it monthly in recipe books. You'll have hundreds of new recipes you could browse through, many of which have been more thoroughly tested than anything some fledgling influencer can put together.
You also can take advantage of the content you already pay for in taxes; check out your library! You can leverage apps like "libby" to access gobs of digital books and audio books, effectively for free. Free, and they aren't trying to harvest your attention for a profit.
So What?
We live in an attention famine, where our most finite resource is being perpetually consumed by the sea of information around us. As Herbert Simon said, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it".
When faced with the infinite supply of information, we will always be rejecting some information sources in favor of others. Why not, then make that decision ourselves? If we don't, the decision will be made for us by companies that have a chronic disrespect for your life, your goals, and your values. Let's seek out sources that are useful to us, not sources that use us for their profit.
Choose useful information. Choose to have agency. Choose to not be consumed.