Curating an Information Diet

The status quo of the modern day is to absorb any information that is presented to you, and to expose yourself to these sources without much consideration. As a result, with practically unlimited supply, the amount of information people inhale a day has increased significantly. Even relatively smart people make the mistake of treating all information as useful and beneficial, just because it is factual. As has always been the case, most of this passively consumed information isn't retained, but even if it was, it wouldn't help most people. You wouldn't want to download the equivalent of a zip bomb to your mind every hour, even if the underlying information is technically truthful.

Why Curate an Information Diet?

Most people forget most information, even interesting information, fairly quickly. If you inhale an hour's worth of useless information, like reels, you're unlikely to remember any of it, even immediately after finishing your goyout. If you spend an hour with high-quality information, you'll be given the opportunity to remember it, but even then, it's not a guarantee. You have to make yourself think it's worthwhile to remember it. Unless you study a book at length, you'll likely only remember the key points, some particularly memorable moments, and your overall impressions. If you dig a little deeper into your mind, you'll be able to pull some more information out, but often this is only brought to the surface of your mind when you're exposed to it again. You might not remember a sentence in full, but you can magically fill in the gaps from your memory when given a framework or some hints. I find this phenomenon stupendously frustrating, because I know that the information is useful, and I know that I'll make good use of it, and I even know that I "know" it, but very rarely can I drag it from the depths of my mind. Sometimes my subconscious will find what I was looking for eventually, but that may only happen, for example, when I'm visiting the toilet, after an exam.

This is one reason why it's important to not drown out important information with junk. It's like smearing a painting with faeces. The original art may still be there, but you might as well recreate it from memory rather than try to retrieve it with your bare hands. Likewise, if your mind has been exhausted by a marathon of slop consumption, a goyfeast, there's no chance it will retain the actually important information. The first step to retaining information is to protect it from distractions, including other information. If you try to learn brand new things for a whole day, you don't get to decide what, if anything, you'll actually remember in a week's time. It might be that you remember bits and pieces of everything, including the useless material, which doesn't aid your depth and understanding of anything in the slightest. We have to consciously support our unconscious self to memorise information by curating what gets through to our long-term memory. The ability to ignore or discard useless information immediately can serve as a beneficial filter, protecting what matters most.

The best thing to do after learning something is to reinforce it, for which there are many strategies. You may look at, or analyse the information again, or depending on the nature of the information, use it to solve problems. You might try using a spaced repetition system so you continuously come back to the same information with a fresh set of eyes, serving as signal repeaters. This is the classical approach to academic study, and there's no reason to say it won't work for other types of information too. With some of the abundance of time granted by a well-curated information diet, go deeper into what information you continue taking in.

I've watched hundreds of YouTube video essays in my time, but without researching the topics further, watching the same video again (because that would be boring), or doing anything with the information, I forgot it all. This isn't such a bad thing, because there was nothing "to do" with the information in the first place, but it does mean that besides the temporary entertainment value I derived from each video, I got basically nothing in return for my time. It's easy to trick yourself into thinking you're being productive by learning things, when in reality, you're just burning time entertaining yourself, something you could do in a far better way and get far more value out of than watching or reading things.

A random observation I've made is that people like the social side of slop, sharing reels with friends. It's a low-effort method of maintaining relationships at a basic level, but with just a little bit of effort, you could surely reap much greater social benefits while consuming much less useless information. What a decent person will tell you in a face-to-face conversation will probably fit more of my "criteria" better than whatever they reroute to you from their algorithmic overlords.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence 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.

— Herbet Simon

My Criteria for Accepting Information

Typically, you can't tell exactly what you're going to learn before you learn it, but you can predict what some particular information is like, and what it's about. If you quickly realise you're wasting your time taking in some information, there's no harm in closing it, instead of sending hours of your life into the void. There are a few consistent questions to ask about information. If something satisfies multiple of my rules, it's probably worth a check.

1. Will it alter my course of action?

   If it won't, and you otherwise won't gain a benefit (like via rules 3 or 4) by doing anything about it, it might as well not exist. Asking if some information is actionable serves as a litmus test of the the information's importance. Maybe information, like an appropriate warning, will cause you to not do something, and this is okay, but even suitable warnings aren't always useful when you'll have to do the task anyway, only more frightened.



2. Is it vital and critical?

   Critical information concerns something taking place in the next hour, day, or other reasonable short time-frame. Maybe you just want to watch something which you won't get to see again. I wouldn't recommend missing the birth of your first child just because your presence won't create shareholder value. Even if something is actionable, if you aren't going to do anything about it for a year, it can probably wait. In fact, letting something ruminate in your mind for a long time, without being able to do anything about it, is one of the worst things you can do. Alternatively, the information may leave your mind, and you'll have to find it again anyway. If you're worried about losing something, keep it somewhere you'll look just in time to use it, like with a reminder system.



3. Is it relevant to understanding something I'm interested in?

   Some information might not be actionable in the moment, but will contribute towards your greater understanding, which will help you long-term. There's some value in breadth, but it's best to focus on going deep into a few topics, for which you can easily append new information to your knowledge base. On the other hand, if you don't care about something, you won't care to remember it.



4. Will it put me in a pleasant, or otherwise desirable mood?

   Unless it's relevant to rules 1 or 2, don't make yourself unhappy if you can't help it. On the other hand, if something will help your mood, it might be worth a look. Negative emotions serve as a psychological stimulus to change your course of action. If you get really upset reading something, it must be really actionable and vital for you to continue reading it. Of course, don't pretend everything is okay when it isn't, but work through problems incrementally, and don't let a flood of negative information overwhelm you. As a reminder, you get information from other people as well as media and the internet. Don't let them control your information diet for you, and especially don't let them offload their own problems to you.

   Don't spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don't like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

   — Sam Altman

Lastly, note that these rules may apply to very large chunks of information, which should be prioritised based on their ratio of time taken to intake against positive output (via the rules). Don't spend weeks reading a single book just because you found one valuable snippet of information in it, unless that's literally the best option you have, in which case I would suggest getting a hobby.

Important-looking Yet Useless Information

In 'Deep Work', and his other books, Cal Newport spends a lot of time writhing about email. He argues that most "knowledge workers" spend too much time taking in useless information, or even waste time reading text with no new information at all. Cal continuously emphasises how important it is to control where your attention is focused

Nowadays, we have unlimited access to information via the "information superhighway". Consequentially, we often waste time gathering tiny bits of it, which often aren't helpful on their own, instead of having to plan ahead and prioritise. Searching for something irrelevant doesn't feel like a waste of time in the moment, but it's a distraction, and the addition of this new information to your mind will probably replace some other information you recently learned anyway. In any case, the minor distractions accumulate and distract you from what you're supposed to be doing. Other peoples' information addiction can affect you too, either when they ask you for something and expect it in minutes, or when they show you something you really don't need to see. I'm all too familiar with people being surprised I don't know what the flavour of the day reels trend is.

Avoiding brand new information, just sprouted into the world, not your mind, is a decent idea. After all, if it's really forgotten in a week, and this is your only chance to learn it, the information was probably unimportant to begin with. That is, assuming the information isn't obviously critical and actionable for you. This is especially for true for the big scary headlines on the front pages of papers or websites. Everyone knows they're misleading, but most are still attracted to them.

I Don't Read the News

People might be startled if you announce your ignorance of current events, but ultimately, nobody cares, and the world will, beyond reasonable doubt, go on the same as it would if you were an active protester or even a politician. Your perspectives on the world may become slightly inaccurate, but as long as you're both socially and societally active, you'll have a better-rounded and more nuanced viewpoint than all those who feed off their designated media echo chamber. If you're not getting the full story, you might as well get hardly any of it, and you're **never** getting the full story, so give up on trying. Companies and individuals alike understand that to capture someone's attention, you must keep them emotional, and the best playbook is to keep them angry.

For the early 2020s, I was infatuated with politics. I followed the "culture wars" basically until their conclusion in 2024 (i.e. the logical closure of the "arc" beginning in 2014-2015), but by that point, the strongest soldiers seemed so delusional and ghastly there was no point in picking a side. You could focus on more important macro issues, but as I live in the UK, my apathy naturally shot up so high I stopped paying attention at all. I don't even believe this country's biggest problems (the pension system *cough cough*) can be solved, so why would I trust any of the media men or politicians? They'll continue latching onto the "next big thing", like your average reels scroller, and nothing good will ever happen whether I'm involved in the nothing or not. To improve my own life, I decided it would be much more productive to simply work towards moving out of the country. Since the standard in the UK is to look down upon anyone with ambition of any sort, particularly if they're breaching their "class boundary"; breaking free from the information sphere is a reliable first step.

As a rule, information, particularly information pushed by another individual or company, like the news, is less important, less actionable, and less useful than you are led to believe it will be. Maybe you'll strike gold once in a blue moon, but the only strategy to consuming this kind of information, with a non-negative expected value, is to consume nothing at all.

What Information Do I Allow In?

I have a much more robust cycle of learning something new on a topic I care about, and applying it to problems. The obvious subject to focus on is mathematics, but I try to consistently read one non-fiction and one or two fiction books at a time, reading for at least half an hour each day. If I found myself wanting to read two non-fiction books at the same time, I'd either keep pushing through with the one I'd already started, or simply drop it, because I wasn't getting much out of it. I also spend a lot more time having fun, playing games and talking to people face-to-face, for example, than I did when I spent my free time watching video essays. All these tasks which don't strictly involve consuming new information keep the valves shut, allowing what I have taken in to be stored in my long-term memory.

Tightly curating an information diet won't necessarily grant you with more knowledge. That would be paradoxical. But it could improve your depth and understanding of what you do have, and it will make you happier.