The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

Many things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more

When it comes to information consumption, it’s hard to tell that you’ve crossed the point of diminishing returns. If you’ve read this far you definitely have.

Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting o... See more

Idle curiosity is just as easily attracted to junk info as to good info, so passive browsing in polluted waters quickly leads to intellectual obesity.

Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychologist at Brown University Medical School, told me that as humans evolved, our scarcity brain developed a craving for information. Especially information that improved our life and increased our odds of survival. Having more information made us far less likely to die at any moment. It paid to figure out where our next mea

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