Slashdot Mirror
Having Too Much Information Can Narrow Your Focus
CeruleanDragon writes
"This excerpt sums up Dave Pell's article at NPR pretty well: 'Google's Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who has got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these tweets coming in?' It's a valid point. If it's not tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else. Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things."
I will come back to the thread later, when there are several hundred comments to read.
perspective is import... OOOHHHH, shiny.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
sounds like a day in the life of average slashdotter. honestly this is too many days of my life lately. I think I'll go write some code.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
If it's not Tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else
RIght, because before the information explosion on the internet, people never watched TV from the time they walked in the door until they were ready for bed at night, accomplishing nothing. The newest shiny toy is always a distraction, if you aren't going to learn to overcome being distracted, there will always be a new thing to ruin your productivity.
And if you disagree with me, by golly, I'll stay here and argue with you until the sun goes down if I have to!
Qxe4
When faced with an engineering problem, I can dip into the vast sea of information at my fingertips and instantly find answers instead of spending all day flipping through hardbacks at computer literacy, bullshitting with local sales reps to try and get copies of data sheets faxed to me, or just plain wasting time figuring out something out that's already been solved. This leaves me more time to work on the interesting stuff, or fart around on Facebook if I feel like it. I'm failing to see the downside. If you're a distractible person you can be even more distracted if you want to. If you're a productive person you can be even more productive if you want to. More information, please.
The bulk of information created before the advent of the Printing Press has been lost. We only have fragments of data from the Roman Republic and Western Empire. Same goes for a host of empires and states.
We create more bytes of data and more copies of data while we track things much closer, we really don't know what was created before. We don't know all the works of art, mundane information and data saved by the Romans, Greeks, Han, Aztecs, Maya, Egyptians or Celts, or any of the thousands of other civilizations.
Huxley feared we would be drowned by a sea of irrelevance
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
-- Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001)
Yeah it gives a new meaning to ADHD. You start reading something on slashdo.... Hey ars technica is reviewing tha.... oooo gotta retweet thi.... dammit! I missed my vanpool. It almost happened.
For the longest time I couldn't understand why anyone would troll the Slashdot news articles. It's relatively easy to get positive mods on your comments if you can post something half intelligent in the first few minutes of an article going up, as long as you write in a clear and concise manner.
Except today I realized something;
No one upmodded my comments, so there weren't as many responses to my comments. There weren't as many responses so I didn't visit slashdot as much. I didn't visit slashdot as much and I actually got some coding done today.
It all makes perfect sense to me now. By having a lower karma on /., I'd be a better employee. I'm surprised it took me so long to see it.
The world is an information-rich place. It was before we showed up and after we leave. The only difference we make is that we intentionally record data.
When you walk on the beach your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
One problem is that "information" is largely supposed to make things easier by giving you access to something that was already done: someone else already went out there and collected meticulous information on frog populations, so it's easier to get access to that information than go out and count frogs yourself. But as information multiplies, sometimes it really is easier to just count the damn frogs instead of making sense of the voluminous and often inconsistent frog literature.
Diderot noticed this in 1755, in a famous passage:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You want to have fuck all three of those things? I mean one is ethereal, one is a long-dead man, and one is a religion. But hey, what rings your bell man. I am sure there are many Muslims who may not swing that way, but who appreciate the thought. How can one person have so much love in their heart?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
One of the major things that annoy me about networking services like Facebook and Twitter is the amount of useless information that is generated. Just generating information is not good enough, it needs to be useful, beneficial.
I was listening to an interview on NPR while in my car. The point made was that most human beings have to work to pay attention, and can be easily distracted. It does not come naturally. As an example they explained that listening to the radio while driving made you a poorer driver. This is because most people's brains are incapable of processing that much information at one time. Just as this was said I started hearing car horns behind me. I had switched my attention from driving to the radio interview about paying attention while driving. I had stopped at a green light.
I believe that most of us have a physiological limit of how much sensory input we can process at once, and how fast we can switch our full attention from one task to the next. The distractions I have right now: the blackberry dinging, the "new mail" flag popping up, the "bell on screen 1" messages, gathering status of several simultaneous running jobs, and writing this post. Something has to be tuned out or lots of work is completed with little progress. I often use music (without lyrics) to drown out distractions, simplify the amount of messages going to my brain, allowing me to pay attention to one task at a time. I usually do this when the "background noise level" is so severe I finally recognize what is happening.
This is why I love /. Summaries for the weak minded and highly-distracted, like me!
Or is that Information Data?
Whichever, Schmidt has it wrong.
We're producing reams of data. Its information content is probably log(log(O)) as great as its data content, since log(O) is pretty much how information and data relate in the first place, and we're keeping what seems like exponentially more data than we would have thought to save in the pre-nearly-free-storage days.
So this explains why the Global Warming groups hide their data/programs.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
information makes you smarter and less likely to be a good slave to the spiritual barenness that is western materialism.
What a shame. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Tweets are twaddle.
Perhaps we're all easily distracted - or need to be distracted. Perhaps wars half a world away or end-of-life issues are too sad, distant or abstract, to be a priority for thought, but they are there and they are real.
As I've mentioned before: I know the world simply disappeared for me when my wife was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in November 2005. All I could see and hear was her for the next seven weeks until she died in my arms. Twenty years together and a simple headache changed the course of two lives forever. Now I have trouble seeing or hearing anything. The future is gone and my star shines no more.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A boat being a hole in the water that you pour money into.
For those of us who can't afford such things, we are in the process of discovering that finding information is no longer the valuable skill that it used to be; now the skills are in demand are in filtering the info to get to what is useful. And that seems to mostly be a matter of anti-informing: deliberately choosing to be ignorant about things that just don't matter.
Of course there is the problem of determining what does matter. But that was probably always the case.
Will
We RECORD more information. Information has been produced in rough proportion to the population at pretty much the same rate as ever.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We probably spend more time thinking about victims in Afghanistan than we did before we had the Internet.
We do not create much information each day. Information is actually useful stuff.
What we create tons of each day is useless data and distractions from reality.
Tons of BS and actual anti-information (lies and errors).
Tons of anti-data.
Tons of anti-reality.
Like for instance the title of this thread...
or most anything else on slashdot...
wake up and hold your nose
Reducing my information intake is precisely why I never RTFA.
He has a valid point. More information != better informed. I could spend all day following celeb drivel and not know what days it is.
BUT I object to the "caring about some victim in Pakistan". I can be very well informed, and still not give a shit. Why does being informed having to mean I should care? There are plenty of rich muslim nations, let them donate some for a change. They wanted their own Red Cross, let it take care of their own. You see, being well informed means knowing that the Red Moon isn't all that well organized and Muslim nations that insisted it be created are very poor donors (pledges mean nothing, money actually paid out counts).
So, if Iran doesn't care, why should I?
Being well informed I also know that any money I donate personally in such a country will not reach the people I intend it to go to. An uninformed person might think ten bucks goes to feed a starving family. An informed person knows it goes to some tribal chiefs new car.
It is tricky isn't it? An uninformed person doesn't have a bleeding heart because they don't know about it. An informed person heart isn't bleeding because he knows the background.
Perhaps what the article writer wants is to have people informed JUST enough so they agree with his vision of the world. After all, someone who thinks exactly like me must be very well informed and highly intelligent. If a person who thinks exactly like me was a blittering idiot... well that just isn't possible. I might be thought to be a blittering idiot and clearly I am not!
Just what is living a life. What is an accomplishment? If a person enjoys twittering, then isn't that living the life he wants to life? Some say an achievement is to go forth and reproduce. If you haven't got a dozen kids or more, you are failing. But because someone else thinks that, does that mean everyone should think that.
Life is futile. No matter what you do, you die and the way our society works we need more passive people then revolutionaries. If everyone made a difference in the world, we would never get done reading the newspaper.
99% of people life in their own small part of the world, barely touching the rest of it. They collect matchboxes or know every soccer match ever played and then they die and it is gone. They mattered in their own little world but in the global scheme of things? Not so much. That is life. Learn to accept it or run for president... and what will Clinton and Bush be known for? Getting bush in and global war. I think someone scoring 1000 tweets is a lot less harmful.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One problem is that "information" is largely supposed to make things easier by giving you access to something that was already done: someone else already went out there and collected meticulous information on frog populations, so it's easier to get access to that information than go out and count frogs yourself. But as information multiplies, sometimes it really is easier to just count the damn frogs instead of making sense of the voluminous and often inconsistent frog literature. Diderot noticed this in 1755, in a famous passage:
"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."
I disagree. What we actually find is that paragons are held up and improved upon and our search skills have exceeded what Diderot expected. Diderot foresaw in a library of a billion books that if you wanted to know how tall the local mountain was, it may actually be faster to simply go to the local mountain and plot it's height than to actually wade through all those books for the precise piece of information.
However, in reality, it didn't end up like that at all. We type "What is the height of Blue Mountain?" in Google and the first link spits out "2320 feet." It isn't faster at all to go examine nature for myself. If anything in spite of increased information our speed of going through books has been amplified to an even greater degree.
And as for frogs. There probably are paragon studies of them, best-done studies. There are also probably studies where people spent 20 years studying local frog populations and things do time-consuming and in depth that it would take a whole life to replicate, but which can be called up on a whim in seconds.
Diderot was really, really wrong.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I haven't heard about any bus accidents in India lately. Have they stopped driving buses in India? I'm concerned about the current lack of such information coming out of India.
E Proelio Veritas.