[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of inf...
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Ask HN: Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information?
In the pre-Internet era, when you were curious about tech X, you'd
walk to a store, skim through a bunch of books, pick the one you
liked the most, and take it home. The whole process of searching
took less than an hour, and then you were committed, because back
at home, it was the only material about X you had physically
available. If something wasn't mentioned in the book, you couldn't
Google it, tough luck. And reading that book was genuinely
exciting, because with TV and offline games being the only
alternatives, it was your strongest source of dopamine. You'd be
picking it up instinctly, just like today you pick up a smartphone,
because it was the most mysterious thing to explore within your
reach. These days, you type X into Google, and you get hit with an
avalanche of tutorials, ebooks, video series, paid courses, online
lectures, all available constantly and immediately. Then you fall
into the rabbit hole of ratings, reviews, comments, forum
discussions, opinions, endless comparisons of X vs Y vs Z, and so
on, and so on. Right from the beginning you get analysis paralysis,
FOMO, and anxiety. When you finally pick something up, the amount
of material about any given topic, unconstrained by the volume of
paper, seems impossible to get through in a single lifetime.
Instead of peacefully exploring, it feels like you have to force-
feed yourself just to get to the end of it. All of that while
trying to ignore that video in your recommendations about the
latest breaking news, or the other one promising to teach you
quantum physics in 15 minutes. Does anyone else feel like this?
Btw. you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a book, but
can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long can you stick
to it?
Author : johnny_castaway
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-04-27 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
| hi_im_miles wrote:
| I feel the opposite actually. I'm super hungry for information
| provided in good faith, but there's an overwhelming amount of
| copypaste crowding it all out.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Exactly. I'm hungry for information and much of what I find is
| non information poorly researched and placed in SEO friendly
| listicles posing as information.
|
| The challenge is sorting through that to find real information.
|
| Sometimes I secretly wish the entire internet would burn to the
| ground and we'd get to start over clean. (Of course then I'd be
| out a job so I don't really wish that, but the thought has
| crossed my mind).
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I read _Future Shock_ by Alvin Toffler for the first time a
| couple of years ago, on its 50th anniversary. It 's an
| interesting read on a number of points, both in documenting the
| history of information overload, but also in laying out
| predictions for what the future might hold. As with most sets of
| predictions, some are more accurate than other, though the
| patterns there are themselves interesting.
|
| Ultimately, time is finite, attention is rivalrous, and
| information is not infinitely actionable. It also varies
| tremendously in quality, and different filter and incentive
| systems modulate that quality strongly. (This last fact itself is
| part of the pattern of hits and misses in Toffler's list of
| predictions.)
|
| I've started to note that the DOI is the new URL. With all the
| issues of academic publishing, there's still generally a higher
| signal:noise ratio in that than in general Web content. Likewise
| books and other forms of traditional, gate-kept publishing. Much
| of the better online content itself is itself extracts or
| adaptations of such material.
|
| What you note about physical places and being _committed to your
| mission_ when that involves actually going to a place and being
| in the moment _is_ valid, and is hard to replicate online ---
| networks obviate space, and records obviate time. But you can at
| least be cognizant of that and try to recreate the experience in
| some manner.
|
| The _Getting Things Done_ model of time-boxing, defining core
| tasks and objectives, and recognising that _you can only achieve
| a very finite set of tasks in a day_ is useful.
|
| There's feature of a newly-developed browser, Einkbro, that I've
| come to hugely appreciate: save page as ePub.
|
| Unlike "print to PDF", Einkbro lets you save multiple articles as
| "chapters" of a single book. That book might be a day's reading,
| or a compilation on a specific topic. It recreates the
| affordances of _a bundled publication_ as with a print newspaper
| or magazine, in which a single issue has a finite collection of
| articles which can be read, and when you 're done, discarded. The
| Endless Scroll model of the Internet doesn't offer this. Compile
| your ePub, read it, highlight and/or take notes using your ePub
| reader. And when you're done, discard without regret.
|
| (Other tools, such as Tree Style Tabs on Firefox, at least allow
| grouping of articles related to a given task.)
|
| The first rule of research is to _define your goal or objective_
| :
|
| - What are you trying to learn?
|
| - What is a sufficient level of depth?
|
| - What measures or indicators of quality are you looking for?
|
| One of the tricks of literature research is to try to go directly
| to canonical sources. This is usually:
|
| - Original books or articles on a topic.
|
| - Textbooks or assigned reading from uni courses. Looking for
| course syllabi is tremendously useful.
|
| - State of the art rarely proceeds especially rapidly, and even
| in the information technology / comp sci arena, landmark texts
| can be years or decades old. Present churn is most often self-
| promotion and product advertising rather than useful information.
| Another challenge is that many businesses treat support and
| documentation as monetisation flows (Red Hat, Oracle, ...), and
| choke off useful information. My take-away is to avoid their
| offerings entirely.
|
| - Otherwise, official documentation is almost always preferable
| to alternatives, though there are exceptions with specific
| independent high-quality publishers. E.g., O'Reilly technical
| books of old (pre-2010), etc.
|
| - Most technical knowledge tends to be far more modular and
| accumulative than is generally recognised. A 20- or even 40-year
| old Unix or C reference, plus a few specific updates on
| particular new developments, can remain surprisingly useful
| (Kernighan & Pike, _The UNIX Programming Environment_ , Nemeth,
| Frisch). You _do_ have to keep an eye out for dated information
| however. Even modern machine learning techniques largely date
| from the 1980s --- hardware made previous theory viable.
|
| - If you _do_ find yourself reading recent publications / web
| references, _look to see what sources they cite_. Those will most
| likely be the true canonical sources, most especially if several
| references point to the same sources.
|
| - Beware _information_ vs. _mythology_. Claims or recommendations
| made on the basis of tradition or present fads are _not_ true
| information, and should be heavily discounted. This is a case in
| which more-recent (though not necessarily _current_ ) responses
| to canonical / original works may be of higher value.
|
| References such as Mortimer Adler's _How to Read a Book_ and
| several variants on how to read a scientific article can also be
| useful for both identifying useful sources and most effectively
| extracting useful information from them.
| contingencies wrote:
| _Ultimately, time is finite, attention is rivalrous, and
| information is not infinitely actionable._ ... added to
| https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Incidentally reflecting one of the better mechanisms for
| information filtering.
|
| Party A states some claim / makes an observation.
|
| Party B curates that as relevant.
|
| This isn't _always_ viable, and can of course be gamed or
| subject to low-quality curation. But it at least
| disintermediates interests.
|
| The Internet Archive uses a similar mechanism in choosing
| which YouTube content to archive. It monitors Twitter for
| YouTube links, and uses that as a filter for curating YouTube
| content. (Brewster Kahle in an interview or documentary I'd
| watched / listened to recently. Probably a video as it
| doesn't seem to be in my podcast episodes index.)
|
| Oh, and thanks ;-)
| sorokod wrote:
| I think of this as all you can eat restaurant, just because the
| extra helping is free doesn't mean I should have it.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I was born before the internet. I was in high school when Ward
| and Randy decided a Computerized Bulletin Board was a good idea.
| The internet was a thing after I was into my adult life. I'm 58,
| and NO, I don't feel overwhelmed. In fact, it is surprising to me
| the quantity of things that have not made it online.
|
| You would not believe how many daily social events made it into
| the local newspaper in my home town. There are accounts of my
| recent ancestors comings and goings, the family party that likely
| resulted in my Father's birth 9 months later... ;-)
|
| There are whole swaths of things that never got recorded, and
| never will. The gatekeeping functions of publishing have been
| replaced by the savage and random fates. History of my family
| from Europe is gone, blown up, bombed, etc.
|
| The internet makes sharing widely possible. It changes the forces
| that limit the availability of information. Sometimes getting rid
| of the gatekeepers, and replacing them with propaganda spewing
| fountains of drivel, sometimes enabling the common person with a
| knack for telling stories to connect with an audience that would
| have never found them before.
|
| I'm glad the Internet Archive is here, trying to compensate for
| the loss of the wildly generative early internet.
|
| >Btw. you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a book,
| but can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long can you
| stick to it?
|
| If it weren't for my current eye surgery issues... yeah, books
| are cool. Could I turn it off, and do without? Only if it's a
| challenge... and surely I can outlast anyone who grew up swimming
| in the internet. ;-)
|
| Example: I still know how to drive from coast to coast using only
| paper maps and written directions.
| [deleted]
| stefanos82 wrote:
| I feel you 100%! This is the topic we discuss with friends on a
| nearly daily basis.
|
| We loved the whole idea how we had limited resources and we were
| forced to read the {man | info} pages, at least in a UNIX-like
| environment, and of course visit university or public libraries
| to use them as our source of valuable information...plus we would
| use it as an excuse to meet with other like-minded people.
|
| Now we feel completely disconnected and detached from each other,
| hiding behind emojis and smiley faces.
|
| It's a sad SAD world we are currently living in and the majority
| of people I personally know are looking for an escape plan to
| give up technology as a whole, (well as much as possible) so we
| can retain some form of attachment to our previous way of life
| that felt more humane.
|
| Enough is enough for me...
| jbirer wrote:
| Today I struggle much more with finding relevant information and
| having to sift through endless SEO crap and fake articles. Back
| in the days (early 2000s to early 2010s) I would have enjoyable
| information consumption and discussions with people freely,
| nowadays I have to filter through a lot of crap and have to be
| careful how I speak in order to have discussions.
| wetpaws wrote:
| No
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Same. I feel the Universe has exactly the precise amount of
| "information" required to make it operate until exhaustion ;)
| codingdave wrote:
| I like the plethora of information available because it shows
| many different takes on each tech you might want to pick up. But
| I do understand that it can be a bit much. I tend to cope with
| that by starting at the documentation for the tech and look for
| any 'Getting Started' materials that come directly from the group
| responsible for the tech. I'll get the basics down there, then
| branch out to the rest of the online info when I hit roadblocks
| on the learning curve.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| I don't think so _exactly_. I was born the same year as Google.
|
| I thrive on information, I might make 20+ different Google
| searches an hour on a random assortment of topics.
|
| Modern smartphones + 4G really is a blessing in that regard. If I
| was born a decade earlier, I most likely would have read many
| more books.
|
| I will say social media _does_ overwhelm me, as a lot of it is
| low density information with very short lifetime. Facebook and
| Twitter are the worst, certain parts of Reddit as well.
|
| I think I survive because my internet usage is heavily question
| driven. So it is very transactional rather than passive.
|
| HN can be great as it can offer many jumping points for new
| questions.
| silisili wrote:
| I do, and don't have a good solution unfortunately. I'm more of a
| short attention span reader - I'll read a few paragraphs on
| something but usually not more.
|
| But I find myself reading constantly. So much so my wife keeps
| asking me to take a break and rest my eyes.
|
| As a result, I feel like I actually know a little bit about a
| whole lot, which isn't that useful other than maybe trivia. Also,
| my memory has become pretty bad, which I attribute to reading too
| much, but it could just be age catching up with me.
| ed-209 wrote:
| Not much pre-www experience here but I'll say "usually not". As a
| software dev, my approach has always been to just start doing the
| thing and search only when I get stuck on a specific concept.
|
| And I say "usually" becase right now I'm learning a new cloud
| (Azure) and the docs insist on force feeding me, with equal parts
| minutia + core knowledge. I am indeed overwhelmed, trying to
| separate and apply the useful bits.
| kromem wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| Over the pandemic I got interested in late bronze age history,
| and I've been finding all sorts of interesting things cross-
| correlating papers in the past decade or so in different domains
| with ancient texts, etc. Fascinating stuff, and a lot I think is
| currently escaping the specialization blindness of modern
| academia.
|
| There's no way I could have done any of that before the current
| plethora of information.
|
| In fact, for one book series I had to contact the publisher to
| get a PDF version so I could search it for fragmentary names of
| sea peoples.
|
| If anything, what I'm growing more wary of is the increased trend
| of gating information behind paywalls, and the signal to noise
| ratio caused by blogspam.
|
| It's arguably much easier to find out what a Luwian bilingual
| inscription about Mopsus from the 8th century BCE says than it is
| to find out which application tracing provider has the best
| pricing model for small businesses.
|
| I don't think that's a healthy direction for information, and
| suspect it's about to get MUCH worse as AI generated text becomes
| an increasingly low barrier to entry and increasingly higher
| altitude.
| javajosh wrote:
| >Does anyone else feel like this?
|
| I have, and I called it "info gorging", and I would occasionally
| indulge in it. But the problem is that you don't fully integrate
| what you've seen with what you know or believe. At best, you've
| accumulated a set of superficial ideas to be fleshed out later.
| At worst, you've given yourself a feeling of preemptive failure,
| looking at all the things you could do, and yet not doing them.
|
| _> Btw. you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a
| book, but can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long
| can you stick to it?_
|
| Old fashioned discipline starts in the mind. You must be ruthless
| with yourself, and make a determination: I'm reading this book,
| and if I'm not doing that, then I'm staring into space. There is
| no third option, no fidget spinner, no screen, not even useful
| distractions like cleaning. If you accept your wayward thoughts,
| but not indulge them, they will pass.
|
| In many ways, information is like fast food in that it can
| overstimulate you, yet leave you wanting more. There is no other
| way out of this cycle than to acknowledge this condition and cut
| yourself off. You need strong faith in yourself and in the wisdom
| of the path you've chosen.
| johnny_castaway wrote:
| > Old fashioned discipline starts in the mind. You must be
| ruthless with yourself, and make a determination
|
| Well, I think we're kind of in agreement here. I'd now need to
| essentially torture myself to do something that used to be a
| fun hobby, and required zero effort.
|
| > I'm reading this book
|
| Ok, but the problem is, _which_ book?
|
| Let's say you search for a JavaScript book on Amazon. It seems
| to yield more results than all the books they had in my local
| computer bookstore! Pick one at random? But what if it has low
| reviews? Pick one with the highest rating? But maybe it was
| published 2 years ago, so maybe it's already outdated? Anyway,
| I saw on HN that everyone is using Rust now, so perhaps instead
| I should read a book about that? That's the analysis paralysis
| I mentioned.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> torture_
|
| It's not torture though, its a fight. Your mind is lying to
| you. Right now, you're not in control of your attention, and
| your mind doesn't want to give up that control. It's a
| mutiny! And you'll enjoy being the captain!
|
| _> Ok, but the problem is, _which_ book?_
|
| It seems you're a beginner programmer; you could do worse
| than "Eloquent JavaScript":
|
| https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=eloquent+.
| ..
|
| The tricky part is that you'll want to do some exercises,
| which means turning on the computer, which means a risk of
| distraction. Go ahead and turn off the network when you're
| not using it; you can also modify your hosts file (look it
| up) to "uninstall" distraction sites by redirecting their
| name to 127.0.0.1.
|
| You may also want documentation while offline. You can do
| this by following the instructions here:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/plus/docs/features/offli...
| conformist wrote:
| Sometimes it helps to decide on one book and go and read it in
| a public space like a park, library or museum. That can reduce
| the required discipline somewhat. Ideally a place where it is
| socially less acceptable or inconvenient to stare at a phone,
| but these are rare. Also taking notes can help.
| jleyank wrote:
| The firehose aspect of Google makes it hard for me to separate
| the wheat from the chaff for any "popular" topic. Ad's, trolls,
| ... They're ordered by the magic, not by the correctness or
| usefulness.
|
| When I went into the bookstore looking for an Algorithm book, I
| went to the computer section. I didn't start at the first rack of
| books and scan until I found what I wanted. Nor did I look at the
| best-seller list.
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(page generated 2022-04-27 23:01 UTC)