[tlb]

It's amazing how much the end-user cost of facts has dropped. I used to ride my bike across town to a library and spend an hour finding a fact. Now I can have them on my screen in seconds.

One might have thought that as the cost of obtaining facts dropped by 100x, people would consume higher-quality facts. But consuming higher-quality facts requires more effort, so in the end people consume more low-quality facts, like listicles of celeb gossip.

As a thought experiment, what is the cost per-fact that would make people consume the maximum quantity of high-quality facts? Too high and they consume less facts overall. Too low and they consume crap.

[mindslight]

I don't agree with this framework.

Even inside of it, there is obviously difference between the fixed cost of obtaining one fact, and the marginal cost of each additional fact. Riding to the library took time, but once you were there each additional fact cost less due to curation. In fact, the traditional library seems close to optimal for encouraging consumption of facts in volume (modulo institutional/cultural biases like the winners writing history).

Furthermore, while being able to look up a fact quickly ostensibly reduces the work to obtain that fact, it also discourages one's ability to perform educated guesses, reason from first principles, operate with uncertainty, etc. Intellectual effort/ability isn't zero sum.

[ashark]

It never even occurred to me to look up 99% of the useless facts I now can't help but look up on the Internet. The questions slipped out of my mind before they were fully formed, but now I think "who was that one guy in that one show?" and because I know I can find out in 30 seconds or less, I look it up.

This ability adds almost no actual value to my life, while taking time. But each individual thing is so quick to find.

It's also much easier to get lost trying to find the very best resource(s) for something, wasting time on that rather than digging into what's at hand. Because it's possible to refine one's selection now, it's so tempting to do so, even if a few hours' head start on lesser works would have been a better use of time. The same extends to entertainment.

What's lost is peace of mind, focus, serendipity, and contentment. I'm not sure the benefit's really been worth it, for me. Libraries were actually a pretty good solution for finding useful-enough information, fast enough, in most cases. How much would I pay for a mini-OED-style IMDB? TVtropes? Zero dollars, probably. I might not even keep them around if I received them for free. Not worth the fraction of a cubic foot each takes up. But I've got this Internet connection and all these devices anyway, so....

[EDIT] OECD corrected to OED. I've clearly wasted too much time arguing politics on the Internet.

[tlb]

Fair enough, a big component of the quality of a fact is how much context and related facts are bundled with it. A book in a library is one extreme, browsing Reddit r/popular is the other extreme. Perhaps the cost per-fact is similar, and what's different is the cost per context-switch.

[rdlecler1]

Information used to be expensive to produce. Today, facts are expensive to produce (although not as expensive as before) but other option floods the zone because it’s cheap to produce.

[pc2g4d]

The cost of high-quality facts should be minimal; the cost of low-quality facts should be higher. But how could such a thing be enforced when the marginal cost of all information regardless of quality is basically flattened?

[sanxiyn]

Well, search engine can rank high-quality facts higher and low-quality facts lower. It's rather intractable in general, but Google Scholar is one approximation, I think mostly using citation.