Ask HN: Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information?

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.

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.

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 da...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Learning with video series/online courses rarely works for me also. Although I do like good Getting started tutorials for topics with flat learning curve

When you did find something unusual or highly detailed, it was cause for celebration.

So no, I don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s a welcome feeling that I can get better answers than ever.

But I can't do more shallow reviews, I always have the feeling that I'm missing something out, and I won't get intuitive understanding of a paper.

Is there a good heuristic/middle ground of consuming such information?

For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problem has been too many calories, too much information. We have to adjust, and I believe we will really fast. I also believe it will be wicked ugly while we’re adjusting.“ — Penn Jillette

> you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a book

Yup. I could and I would say this. Because this works at least for me. Whenever I started back the habit of reading books (esp. paper books) it has worked just like this, like a charm. I stopped looking for my phone etc. Starting back on travelling and sports also help.

I (guess) am mostly full of doing other things that I don’t need Internet to fruitlessly try to fill the empty parts because there isn’t or less empty parts - free time, need for gratification, need to tire my body and brain, get excited/sad etc etc.

> but can you really pretend it doesn't exist?

Why would I want to do that? It exists and that’s okay. In fact it’s helpful for many and often for me as well.

> And how long can you stick to it?

For 7 months last time. Then I got infected by COVID and had to lie on the bed for quite sometime and phone slipped back in the bedroom (use case was rain sounds - helps/helped me sleep; and funny videos just to keep the mood afloat). Gotta get rid of it again.

Imho I don’t think there’s too much of Internet out there. It’s about how frequently and what all you try to keep accessing.

This is a very simple observation I’ve had - anybody who has got to do things is successfully able to use the Internet to get those things done by using it bare minimally or give up and get it done elsewhere - ie in the physical space, whatever that’s called - real world(?). In fact those people don’t even need books and travel to distract them away from this distraction.

=== How To Think With Information Overload ===

Here's my five-to-thrive idea for learning about something without information overload. You can also do this with vetted internet articles too, but be picky!

1. Start with the most popular & best selling book on the topic.

2. Next, a popular, but slightly more technical book on the topic.

3. Third, a semi-technical book that builds on the ideas of the first two books.

4. Follow it up with a hard book that brings in problems & opinions from experts.

5. Last, a book that talks about the future of the topic.

...

While there are many different mediums in which you can get your information, I personally prefer books due to the amount of time that goes into them. The idea that you can absorb years of somebody’s life work in a few hours might just be the greatest gift we’ve been given.

=== Low Information Diet ===

As Michael Pollan says about plant-based foods: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” I needed to supplement my content consumption with information straight from the source, not manufactured in a plant by online personalities or agencies.

...

I had to train myself to stop clicking on clickbait by asking a question first. “Will I change anything about my life if I knew the answer to this question?”. The answer surely was no every single time, and I started to click less.

...

Your actions are a consequence of your thoughts. Your thoughts are a consequence of what you consume. And what you consume is largely a consequence of how you filter and refine your information diet. If you choose better inputs, you’ll get better outputs.

===

Some other things to be careful of is "pluralistic ignorance" and "sensory deprivation" when it comes to only getting your information from a screen. The internet, TV, and computers are beautiful, but also can cause these feelings faster than traditional ways of getting information. I personally opt for less screen time and more ways to learn from others and nature. That keeps the baddies like analysis paralysis, FOMO, and anxiety at bay. It also makes life much more serendipitous and organic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation