information diet management

To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because

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spending too much time in the big algorithmic feeds winds up being a form of intellectual monocropping. It’s not terribly diverse or surprising. It’s not that the stuff in your feeds is all bad; some of it’s great! But it’s got a deadening sameness to it.

We live in a time when more interesting ideas, concepts, people, and places can fly by in the space of one 30 minute TikTok binge than our ancestors experienced in the entirety of their localized illiterate lives.

1/ Lemme do a 1-slide presentation since I'm feeling job sick. Title: How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin

In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford called attention “the thing that is most one’s own” because what we pay attention to determines what is real to us, what is “actually present to our consciousness.” Just as we become what we eat, our reality becomes what we pay attention to. And just like our appetite has been hijacked by food... See more

Avoid content made after 2016 - Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a distinct flavour of strangeness that has vanished. My favourite hack for this: Find a book or essay you love. Open up ChatGPT deep research. Ask for 50 similar books or essays, all created before... See more