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by obelix_
2922 days ago
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Everyone these days is being overloaded with an amount of information - they will never be trained to handle that no previous generation has ever handled What we are watching unfold across any and every issue, are symptoms of people breaking down due to that overload. To handle this new over saturated info environment (which up until now has been sold to everyone as a good thing) one must look to professions that are trained specifically to handle such overload. And there are many. |
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Here are my own 2010 suggestion for helping deal with information overload: https://web.archive.org/web/20130514103318/http://pcast.idea... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
Another version of that proposal: https://web.archive.org/web/20160206184804/https://www.newsc...
Some thoughts by me on applying that to health sensemaking: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104203536/https://www.newsc... https://github.com/pdfernhout/health-decision-support-tools https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1897006&cid=34459370 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openvirgle/QukA-eEPX... https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sense...
Anyway, still plugging along on all that in some of my spare time.
Another aspect of the challenge is having a mind tuned for a scarcity of something like information being having difficulty coping with an abundance of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published ... in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today’s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets"
"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
"The Pleasure Trap" http://web.archive.org/web/20160418155513/http://www.drfuhrm... "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response "In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore posited that watching television affects the orienting response, an effect similar to vicarious traumatization."
And how this overload is even harder on young children, as described by Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D.: https://drdunckley.com/reset-your-childs-brain/ "Because electronic screen media is unnaturally intense in terms of sensory, cognitive, and psychological input–designed to keep the user engaged–it tends to overstimulate nervous system. The brain interprets all this stimulating input as a form of stress. ... Over time, these changes lead to chronic stress, resulting in blood flow shifting from the more developed part of the brain (frontal lobe) to the more primitive parts of the brain. Because the frontal lobe governs emotional regulation, attention, creativity, and social behavior, any of these areas can become impaired. Chronic stress also raises cortisol levels, which complicates frontal lobe functioning even further. High cortisol impairs the hippocampus (needed for memory), disturbs sleep, and eventually causes atrophy (shrinkage) of the brain. ..."
More and more we need a browser-like tool to protect us from the web and (anti-)social media. These would be tools that are designed to work within human limitations. They would help people deal with being sprayed in the face with a firehose of information designed by highly-paid specialists to trick us and exploit our basic reflexes for someone else's gain (e.g. filtering out or summarizing news tickers or videos with scene changes every few seconds that exploit the orienting response, or summarizing those clickbait headlines tuned to exploit our primal drives, and so on).
Something like uMatrix is just the beginning. It shows where browser vendor's loyalties are (even Mozilla's) that such tools do not come built in. Very recently there is the Brave browser with some ad blocking and also Google turned on a limited default adblocker within Chrome -- but those are small steps and don't address the bigger picture of information overload even when not looking at obvious ads.
People need a whole suite of related FOSS tools for dealing with the web, email, social media, and so on -- to help filter and organize it for ourselves according to our own priorities and respecting our human limitations.
I comment from my bias as a software toolmaker though. Alternatively, a high level of self-discipline and healthy routine can also help manage information overload. And the professionals you reference probably can supply some of that (e.g. Alan Lakein's 1973 classic on setting priorities "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life").