Drowning in a Sea of Information

If the nunit test adapter for visual studio ran just a little bit slower (than it already is at To be serious, I definitely identified with some of the article, but it made me feel better because I'm not nearly as bad these days about massive backlogs and todos. I still accumulate un-read articles and ideas, but I'm better at mentally and emotionally shoving them in a virtual closet and forgetting about them.

I come up with ideas for short stories occasionally but I rarely sit down and try to write them, its hard to make time between the myriad of other things I'm interested in. This used to bother me, and the act of coming up with a story idea almost created a minute amount of stress when I didn't try to take it anywhere. I eventually came to accept it really doesn't matter if I follow through or not, if I accept early on what I really want to get out of it. The truth is the process of coming up with ideas and internally working through them is where I get most of the benefit, not in the process of having-done them. With this understanding, I realize I do get something out of the many ideas I have regardless of whether I follow them through, so I focus more on enjoying the internal problem solving/story exploring aspect and only try to follow through when I enjoy it, not to satisfy some need to accomplish things and be productive.

I'm not sure if thats a helpful concept to anyone else, but I've seen how other people get bogged down in unfinished projects, posts, stories etc and I saw myself going down that path as well. It ends up being very cathartic to physically box up a physical project, or delete a whole folder of bookmarks and just accept that whatever you absorbed was worth it and thats that.

Therefore if you want to be informed about something, you need to skim through at least a dozen of different newspapers spread over the political landscape, so you can have enough pieces of the puzzle to be able to put together in your mind something that resambles reality. We call this "being informed", and yes, it takes a lot of time and effort.

The challenge of our age is that there are virtually infinite opportunities to inform yourself about a legion of topics: Most of those trivial and/or frankly stupid, and even the worthy ones being too numerous for a single mind to feasibly grok a majority of them.

TL;DR - Choose wisely and triage like hell.

HN itself could really do with a description of 200 char to go under the link title, serving as a summary and contextualizing the title if it's inadequately informative. Timothy Gowers' Brexit blog post is an example of a non-clickbait title that just was not informative.

Generally I don't watch the nightly network news. Experimentally I've tuned in. It lives in a parallel universe, very weakly connected to reality. One has to invest many hours in its fictional narrative to make any sense of it, much like you don't tune into episode 50 of a pop culture TV show and understand any of it. You're no better educated given one episode of the nightly news than you are when given one episode of "breaking bad".

In that way one isolated pop culture clickbait artifact from a year or decade ago is useless. I need a package of ten, maybe a hundred hours worth of content to make any sense of the pop culture references and the self references.

From the front page of Reuters right now, clickbait era journalism that makes no sense without extensive background:

Texas 'affluenza' mom has curfew eased

Fiat Chrysler to investigate crash that killed 'Star Trek' actor

Wall St. rally holds steady as Brexit chances weaken

Myanmar's Suu Kyi reiterates stance on not using term 'Rohingya'

VLMs rule, clickbait expands until the content is indistinguishable from noise, without extensive experience and training.

First, I would note that this is one of the better pieces about attention problems and information overload. Far, far better than a work like Shallow, which weighs down a handful of actual insights with a vast collection of grumpy "good old days" rhetoric.

Having said that, I think the piece misses one key motivation for "TLDR culture": most online content is terrible. It is very bad and often non-obviously bad. If one starts reading carefully from the beginning, one will often (usually?) waste several minutes discovering that the article is not going anywhere good; that it explains a well-known idea, or is directionless, or is simply inaccurate. Skimming and skipping around are ways to avoid crappy content, and abandoning an article after reading a small portion is often a symptom of it.

I have not lost the ability to sit and read deeply. I may do it less than I would like, but that is a matter of time apportionment rather than capacity. But when I do commit that time, I will continue to do it with reputable, known-quality works instead of the average internet thinkpiece.