The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of reality, of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvi... See more

If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.Make no mistake. For the conscious news consumer, there has never been a better time to be alive. Th... See more