curation and decision fatigue

Decision fatigue is a cognitive shortcut that causes irrational trade-offs in decision-making.2 It emerges when mental resources are depleted after making numerous decisions, leading individuals to favor immediate gratification, oversimplify complex decisions, or default to familiar, less optimal options.

Cognitive load is like playing an iterated game of diminishing returns. Every choice—every click, every scroll—saps a little more of your mental energy. By the time you’re 20 decisions deep, your ability to make intentional choices is shot. It’s not that you’ve lost the game; you’ve been worn down by it.

In behavioral economics, this is known as... See more

y folk artist, I mean “an individual creating art reflecting a particular culture, society, or community.”

I argue that this digital folk renaissance, characterized by memes, viral videos, and grassroots content, faces an existential threat from artificial intelligence, much like folk art faced a threat from the First Industrial Revolution. As AI... See more

Culture is moving from productivity to creativity: I think there will likely be a pushback against AI slop by some members of the populace. AI makes content cheaper to create, but users will need new tools to help them build a sense of taste, of knowing what to create

Curators filter signal from noise in an increasingly noisy world. As the barriers to being a creator decrease, the internet gets even noisier and the need for credible curators increases. Algorithms will continue to play a role in aggregation, indexing, and personalization. But the best curation requires a human touch. You’re more likely to have an... See more

This recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms. Today’s automated social-media feeds deliver increasingly indistinguishable content now sometimes generated by artificial intelligence;

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