information diet
People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.”
Kyle Chayka • 🟧 Aggregation theory
“Information, like food, has a sell-by date. Next quarter’s earnings are worthless after next quarter. And it is for this reason that the information that Zak and I weigh most heavily in thinking about a firm is that which has the longest shelf life, with the highest weighting going to information that is almost axiomatic: it is, in our opinion,
... See moreThere's no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place. I like to think of it as the productivity technique to beat all productivity techniques: finally internalizing the implications of the fact that what's genuinely... See more
Oliver Burkeman • Treat Your to-Read Pile Like a River, Not a Bucket
People often hope that search-mode reading will inspire them to new thoughts, and are disappointed to find that it doesn’t. Chase-mode reading, in contrast, requires constant thinking, in order to evaluate how the current source addresses your chosen focus. This tends to make it easier to notice missing holes in the literature, where your new idea... See more
Robin Hanson • Chase Your Reading
It's amusing to reflect that at an earlier stage in the history of the web, information overload was widely held to be a temporary issue.
Oliver Burkeman • Treat Your to-Read Pile Like a River, Not a Bucket
My information consumption philosophy is simple:
(1) It must have a long shelf life.
(2) It must have taken considerable effort to create.
With these two principles, you can cut out most of the junk from your information diet.
Nick Maggiullix.comCritical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.
Anastasia Kozyreva • When Critical Thinking Isn’t Enough: To Beat Information Overload, We Need to Learn ‘Critical Ignoring’
In chasing mode, readers are naturally more critical. When you are looking for something particular, it feels less presumptuous to stop reading when your source comes to seem irrelevant. After all, the source might be good for some other purpose, even if not for your purpose.
In chasing mode, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading... See more
In chasing mode, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading... See more
Robin Hanson • Chase Your Reading

Em termos de não-ficção, vale se questionar o porquê de estarmos lendo determinado livro; e saber que perguntas queremos essencialmente ver respondidas ajuda na decisão de continuar (ou não) lendo determinada bibliografia.