Drowning in a Sea of Information | Hacker News Reader

Drowning in a Sea of Information

digitalculturist.com

166 pointscjdarnault60 comments

I think that if there were a clear outline at the beginning of articles, essays or blog posts like this I might waste less time trying to skim them for the point. I didn't read nearly enough of it to find the author's point but personally I've started skipping over content that doesn't present clear goals up front. If I want suspense, mystery and surprise endings I read fiction.

I would think that "Deep Reading" isn't something you can't do today that you could do yesterday but something that has to be prioritized. I never could find time for fiction in my life today like I could chew through books as a kid. I have to divide my attention now because I have taken on responsibilities outside myself. I simply cannot get lost in a book unless I've planned to get lost in a book that day.

I'm writing awfully different than usual today. Oh look my phone is blinking.

Tl;dr: infinite information and social streams satisfy our needs, TODOs carry a mental tax, http://project.wnyc.org/infomagical/ worked for the author.

I really wish this was framed differently, so I'd know there was an answer buried in there. I read this as an informational article, and didn't realize there was a "solution" until paragraph 33 out of 35.

Question, did you count the paragraphs or do you have some extension that does it for you? That sounds helpful..

I think I got the point pretty quickly: there is too much useless information out there that we swallow up regardless of value. So I stopped reading after a paragraph or two.

I would love to see a writing format with something like the following structure: 1) A TLDR of Twitter length 2) A paraphrase of the key concepts and point argued in the article 3) The actual full-length article

This way you could ramp up at each stage and decide if it's valuable to keep reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

I actually agree with your list; I think the inverted pyramid is really about prose construction in an age where print space was at a premium. We can be a lot more free with formatting or redundant information (if it is clearly marked as such) on the web.

I mostly wanted to point out that the concept is not new, but as far as I can tell, it has been pretty much forgotten in most modern web journalism.

I've been reading some academic papers recently and taking notes in org-mode.

What I find is that a lot of information expressed in solid paragraphs becomes a lot easier to parse once you convert them into an appropriate list, tree or graph structure. A surprising amount of the text I've been reading is lists that have some relation ("x is used in x_1,...","x consists of x_1,..."). This ties in to authors deciding to shake things up by adding unnecessary complexity to these simple lists. This kills the reading comprehension.

For example

    K. Merton developed in the 1940s his nor-
    mative framework for the conduct of sci-
    ence based on universalism, communalism,
    disinterestedness, and organized skepticism

becomes

     K. Merton developed in 1940s a formative framework of scientific conduct based on:  
     - universalism : <definition of universalism> 
     - communalism 
     - disinterest : <note on disinterest> 
     - organized skepticism : <example of organized skepticism>

A nice bonus is that that allows me to annotate specific items in these lists very easily, and visually match up items to notes quickly. (Note how that statement itself is a list due to being joined by an "and").

I've been thinking similar things. Also, diagrams are underrated.

Maybe "reading" is a low tech invention that we just don't have the patience for anymore. Instead we want to "explore" a theory or network of statements or social graph.

It's pleasant to click around in Wikipedia and get a sense for how different topics relate, but reading the (often turgid and boring) prose seems like work.

I have to admit, diagrams are a bit harder to do in text, especially interconnected graphs. That said, I could imagine something that uses triples to define a rendered graph, similar to how RDF for the semantic web works. Say

     #BEGIN_GRAPH
     'Paul Graham' founded YC 
     'Sam Altman' leads YC 
     YC funded AirBnB
     YC funded Reddit
     AirBnB <> Accommodation
     #END_GRAPH

Leads to a graph like

      [Paul Graham]----founded----->[YC]------funded----->[AirBnB]<------>[Accommodation]
      [Sam Altman]-----leads------->[  ]            `---->[Reddit]

Now that could be prettier, but I am too lazy to copy and paste box drawing characters. With a simplified form like that, all the data is in the form of subject predicate object sentences, which makes for easy parsing. The data could also be fed into a diagram making application like yED for pretty graphical output.

Great idea. With the flexibility of org-mode, you could even turn those notes in spaced repetition flashcards using org-drill.

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.

Agreed. I often find myself clicking directly through to comments to gauge whether it is worth my time to read the article. An (optional) 200 char. summary would likely increase my willingness to actually take a look at the source article.

> 1) A TLDR of Twitter length 2) A paraphrase of the key concepts and point argued in the article 3) The actual full-length article

Otherwise known as "real journalism". You know, that thing we collectively decided we don't want to pay for.

You just described the "lead, intro graf, story" structure that newspapers have been using for decades if not centuries.

Lots of prestigious journalism fails at this, or has different goals. Most magazine articles don't start with a concise thesis statement, instead they try to hook the reader with something like "As I made my way up the stairs in the convention center, a stocky man with pale blonde hair stopped to ask me for directions to the men's room." and keeps going with this kind of enticing pseudo-fictional storytelling.

> Lots of prestigious journalism fails at this, or has different goals.

The answer is exactly that "or" of yours. Informing the reader in an efficient and useful way is a very distant, low-priority goal, and we're all aware of that and yet still somehow pretend journalism is about informing people. It's not anymore.

Otherwise known as the specific inverted pyramid style historically used by newspapers specifically for technology reasons--so the story could be more or less cut at any point. Many magazines don't follow this format.

That said, as I've written before, a lot of longer pieces ramble around and take way too long to get to the heart of the matter. And there's certainly nothing wrong with a short paraphrase whether it's literally an abstract or a bit more of a teaser (especially if the main point really does need some build-up).

I have a very similar problem of 'get to the main point' in videos. That is why I've built BriefTube (brieftube.net). It gives you instant automatic summarisation of lengthy youtube videos (with more platforms on the way).

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, people are very bad at editing in general and editing video in particular. They post 4 minute videos of something cool or funny, where it realistically could have been trimmed down to 10-20 seconds.

On the other hand, this constant need to condense everything, including complex topics, into 10 second sound-bites is problematic, in my opinion. Some topics can't be properly understood without more background or explanation of a position.

I'll have to check out your site. Looks like a cool idea. I just hope it doesn't go too far!

Good point. My app doesn't replace the video as the source, but rather creates a smart way to navigate it. Give it a try. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts.

Dude you misspelled extension on your site. Ctrl + F for "exstension" to fix.

Thanks! also, thanks for actually reading my explanations :)

I'm with you! I complain about this a lot. You go to an article looking for say "A recipe for Kombucha" and, instead of a recipe for Kombucha, you find 6 paragraphs about how great Kombucha is and how the writer's kids love helping them make it and how easy and fun it can be and why it's good for you and stuff.

NO. I came here for a Kombucha recipe not to read this fluff crap.

One of the best articles I've read on this topic is here: https://next.ft.com/content/009050e4-75ea-11e2-9891-00144fea...

"we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. I feel this market failure keenly each day when I recommend a fine piece of writing that deserves to be read for years to come and yet will have at most two days in the sun.

You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year,” or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month.” Why are we so much less interested in journalism that’s a month or a year old?"

------

Hacker sidenote: surely there's a market for an app that combines your read-later lists, a gentle timer like that in the headspace meditation app, and duolingo-like gamification.

Someone ought to build it.

A much deeper discussion in that article - thanks. However you really should warn others that your link is going to old 2013 content and may have been super-seeded by newer blog, twitter or snap-chat posts ;-)

FYI: You presumably meant to write “superseded”. I spent more than a few seconds wondering how the verb, “to seed” would make sense in this context before figuring it out. :)

This is a great article, thanks for sharing.

For me, this is the crux: You can call up a year-old piece as easily as you can call up a day-old piece. And yet we hardly ever do so, because we are so hardly ever prompted to do so.

HN does a decent job of getting old stuff reposted and discussed on the front page, but the internet's main curation process (Google/major media sites) inhibits the discovery of old material. Walk into a library and you're immediately surrounded by old texts ripe for the browsing if you want to walk up and pick on off the shelf.

I can feel it already:

"Show HN: Chrome extension that randomly inserts read-later links from Pocket into the HN front page."

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.

If you think that's bad, do not read USA Today. It reads like the target audience is the 5th grader bracket... only more naive & gullible.

Fwiw, I just copied that link into my 'bookmarks' Evernote note. :)

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.

I totally agree. I've noticed this in my own reading pattern - when I'm linked to an on-line article, I first skim it very fast to identify if there's even anything worth reading in it, and if I determine that there might be, I go back to beginning and start reading.

It's a pattern born from experience - I've wasted way too much time reading through articles only to discover half-way that they could (and should) be summarized in a Tweet.

I first noticed that when I realized that I wasn't doing it with familiar authors. If Bruce Schneier posts something, I'll dive right in without skimming, but if "random Medium user" posts something it gets a TL;DR treatment first.

I can recommend "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Made me realize how distracted I am, and how much can be gained by focusing on "deep" work. A quick read, but describes the problem and coping-strategies well.

Got that book a month back but had no time to deep read it yet due to various distractions every day. It appears to be a great book.

It is. I can recommend it having read it a few weeks back.

I've also found helpful to use task systems that impose a hard limit on current work. I use a simple kanban table in org-mode and it works great to get me doing important stuff.

I have profited from reading Derek Sivers' notes about some book, when available, to get a feel about what is inside and if its worth the time.

The one you guys are talking about: https://sivers.org/book/DeepWork

Meta: something I found interesting about Derek is that he welcomes mail from anyone: "Please email me at [...] for any reason. I reply to all, and much prefer email over social networks. "

I've read "Deep Work" a month ago and by now it's single highest ROI on a HN-recommended book I've ever gotten. Not joking.

I know three weeks is not enough for the habit to make itself permanent, but those last three weeks were for me one of the most productive periods in the last several years. Something must have clicked for me in that book.

In particular, I finally stopped being afraid of the calendar - I now follow the idea of "scheduling every minute of your life", but treating that schedule only as a guideline - i.e. tasks you pre-plan to be doing, but can rearrange at any moment if you see the need. And at least for the last three weeks, that process alone pretty much single-handedly solved most of my procrastination issues :).

(Time to go off HN, btw., my break slot is coming to an end ;).)

The second point that helped me tremendously was on cutting out distractions. After reading the book I've made a resolution to unsubscribe from every newsletter that comes across my mailbox and to turn off any but most important push notifications. With my daily load of e-mail coming down from a hundred to just a few, I feel much less distracted and pretty much got over compulsive checking of the mailbox.

I've also went ahead and read Cal's other book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work". I also recommend it strongly, it has some really good (and come to think of it, obvious) points about approach to work life.

A great companion to "Deep Work" is "Hooked". The second is more of a how-to guide to developing products that become habit-forming. But in seeing how it's done, there's the potential to free yourself from it's grasp.

After reading these books, OP's article feels a little under-researched. Content aggregators like HN, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter are essentially using reality as a content generation algorithm. The content provided by reality is the variable reward component of the hook model shown in "Hooked".

It's not just that there's tons of information, it's that we're wired to seek novelty. This is also seen with pornography addiction, which is a more widespread phenomenon than most people realize, or admit.

From a product perspective, is it possible to take advantage of this wiring of the human brain to perform useful work? In other words, if we're wired to seek novelty, and we can create information products that are highly addictive, can we direct human attention to particular problems?

That's not to say that comment chains on Reddit don't provide value, but so many human hours of effort are spent glued to these novelty engines. It all seems inefficient, unpurposeful.

But then again, if the wheels of the economy keep turning, that's all that matters, right? Where are we headed?

Who's the author of "Hooked"?

I found this section from Laudato Si pretty striking and relevant to the authors experience:

"47. Furthermore, when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.

Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature.

Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise."

source: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docume...

This is my favorite point in this article:

In addition, the rate at which information is created and shared, dictates the rate at which it is consumed. This encourages a shallow culture that skims, snips, and divides content into small “digestible” pieces that lack depth, all while utilizing technology as a creative crutch to create said content.

I think it well-illustrates this hole we've dug for ourselves and makes it clear that it's pretty hard to get out of. Personally, I'm not really sure how to increase my attention span. I think a big part might be allowing my "queue" of emails and phone notifications to grow and only check my phone at designated periods in the day, e.g. 30 minutes after waking, after the stand up meeting, at noon, at a coffee break at 3 p.m., after getting home, after dinner.

That way, at least, it's checking the phone maybe ten times a day, as opposed to 80 or more. I wonder if there are apps that can suppress notifications (using Android administrator API?) until specific time periods.

"Just" turn off the ringer and put it in a drawer. And close that open e-mail tab in your browser. (If you try it, you'll likely find that it's a rather hard thing to do)

As it turns out, none of the notifications (and very few of the e-mails) are actually relevant to most of our daily lives.

Well, we're drowning in a sea of nearly identical articles about information overload, at least.

It's time we had some novel contributions to the genre: this is not one.

Fear of missing out? Dread of constant repetition.

Recently quit twitter other than to @ at people directly. Was never a heavy user a Facebook, but came to conclusion that checking it once a day was sufficient. No more RSS - just typing in HN, The Register, and TheVerge a few times a week to catch up. I listen to music instead of podcasts; Apple's Beats 1 station and some local jazz/classical stations.

This has worked wonders for my latent anxiety. I finally feel free.

I very much recommend it, if you feel overwhelmed.

I took it a step further, and just closed the majority of my social network accounts. The main culprit being Facebook. I also put away the phone on the charger before bed, and don't pick up until after my day has started. Now I read more books, go on long hikes, and have more time for my personal projects.

If the nunit test adapter for visual studio ran just a little bit slower (than it already is at < v3.0) I would get through much more of the HN articles than I currently do.

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.

I find it helpful to externalize my self-control, and one of my favorite tools for that is the ironically named OSX app "SelfControl." Essentially, the app modifies your host file to block certain domains for X amount of time.

All of my regular distractions are in the block list, and if/when I get frustrated with myself, I turn the app on and voila - 12 hours of inaccessibility. This limits my infotainment to an hour at day at most.

(Of course, there is always the phone, but I find it easier to not get lost in it. There's also an app called "forest" which gameifies not opening the phone, which I turn on if I know the meeting I'm going into is dull.)

Posting as this may be of use to others. The article led to me reorganizing my phone.

The author recommends something called Infomagical, which is a five part podcast aimed at reducing digital distraction.

Haven't tried that yet, so I can't comment. But day two is phone reorganization. You can see a preview of the process here (not my site):

http://www.kennethbills.net/blog/infomagical

Basically, you move all your apps to folders, move them off the home screen, and then open them with spotlight (I think Ok Google would be the android equivalent?)

I've tried a few different distraction reduction methods, and none stuck. But this one appealed to me because that's actually exactly how I use my computer. And it works well. I just never thought to apply it to my phone.

So I:

  1. Moved all apps to folders, on the second page
  2. Identified the four apps with the highest signal to noise. For me, that was whatsapp, messages, google now (I use it logged out), and calendar. Choose whatever you like – the important bit is that none of those have proven compulsive for me
  3. I set my background to a nice nature scene near where I live
  4. I also turned off most notifications, except those for messages and whatapp. None of the other phone notifications were actually important. For things like Slack and Trello, I usually see those on my computer.

One guiding principle is that I should not be doing most things on my phone. I'm significantly more productive, say, answering email on my computer. So I should mostly do it there. I don't have the kind of work where I need to respond to anything within 1-2 hours, so this works.

Obviously, I just tried this, so I can't know if it works long run. But it's what I already do on my computer, so I suspect it will work better than past attempts. My phone already feels calmer.

Link to infomagical itself: http://project.wnyc.org/infomagical/

The fact that a task has been "done" in my team in Trello leads to an automatic email thanking the people who made it happen.

I think we need to communicate more about the things that have been done. We only tend to celebrate only the really big things. The challenge is to appreciate the small things you have done or experienced in a day.

The feeling of fulfillment is a feeling that requires to be taken serious!

I personally love feeling crushed by the vast surges of information that surround me, being able to let go of the need to understand it all, or to ride my hunger for information right down to the very moment before it consumes me.

Basic physics shows there will always a disconnect in the way information flows and the obsession over controlling all information is in my opinion physically impossible.

Tangential - I wonder what's responsible for that downwards spike in "number of indexed webpages" graph?

As the editor of a daily digest about the web platform, I can witness that there are so many new posts, discussions, resources each day, that there is barely enough time to properly process all that content if you do nothing else; I have no idea how web developers cope with this (^_^;).

If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed.

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.

"You got played, son."

The people who profit from your attention have tried like hell to insert themselves in your life and to make the experience as addictive as possible. "Surprisingly," this turns out not to be in your best interest.

This guy is talking about some very low value information. If social streams are the central axis of your life, you're doing it wrong. There are more interesting ideas to be had.

The Amazon Rainforest is larger than I thought.

This is what Xanadu was all about...

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