The Paradox of Abundance - David Perell

“Modern society is defined by an excess of opportunity. We have more information, more products, and more options than ever before.

As a result, curating, filtering, and refining are more important skills than ever before. Those who edit best will find the signal in the noise.”

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

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the whe... See more

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

Historically, you used to only have a few sources of news or information. Things that percolated through to your network or things you read in the news. Now information comes from all sides, hungry for your attention. And your “processing power” to make sense of this information hasn't meaningfully changed.

Imagine seeing the world from this vantage

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