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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?
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
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