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Imagine the most mind-numbing choice youve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes peoples decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study combinatorial auctions, bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest pricea diabolical puzzle if youre considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.
This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. The bidders reach cognitive and information overload, says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brains emotion regionspreviously held in check by the dorsolateral PFCrun as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. With too much information, says Dimoka, peoples decisions make less and less sense.
So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops.
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The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the horrible mass of books which keeps on growing, and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land, as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of whats out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added information fatigue in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.
The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awarenesssomething that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.
I sometimes get fed up of wading through bullshit to find actual information. Does that count?
This last election had an overload of information, no one would be able to comprehend. What I did was look at the parties on the list and their views. When it came to electing judges I voted Libertarian, when it came to electing college regents I went with the anti tax party. When it came to our governor I voted Democrat, and Republican for our senators and representatives. Each party has its place, and its a matter of plugging them into the right places.
For news there really is no network on tv worth watching as they have all become opinion stations, conservative VS liberal. News papers seem to be the way to go but you have to be sure to read them from both sides i.e. liberal and conservative both because the truth lies in the middle somewhere. At least the papers will give you the events of the day, which tv doesn't. Radio talk shows are the same as their tv counterparts extreme on both sides. Internet news such as the AP wire may be good but getting the time to sit and read is almost impossible.
I find boards like this one is the best for information and developing opinions. You have an idea, so you throw it out there and get other peoples reactions and comments. Then you can modify your opinion accordingly. People will post what they feel is imoprtant and you have a wide variety of news and events to keep up on. It seems to work for now, for even the exteme views may have something valuable worth taking.
I sometimes get fed up of wading through bullshit to find actual information. Does that count?
I sometimes get fed up of wading through bullshit to find actual information. Does that count?
That is the point right there!!!
There are HUGE variations in the quality and importance of information. And that doesn't even take into account whether it is correct or not. Sometimes a lie about something important is more informative than tons of correct trivia. A lie at least indicates the subject is important enough to lie about.
Another issue is the really important stuff has been completely disappeared. Sometimes there is almost nothing out there but trivial crap on the subject you are researching. You have to look at 50 websites with shallow redundant drivel before you stumble across one with something important.
There is a kind of Gresham's Law of Information that has been amplified by the Internet.
psik
I know a lot of people don't trust Wikipedia, but it IS a good source to find the sources THEY use for their entries. Saves a lot of time, especially when researching historical data.
I know a lot of people don't trust Wikipedia, but it IS a good source to find the sources THEY use for their entries. Saves a lot of time, especially when researching historical data.
But if concepts are not presented in a certain way in Wikipedia or anywhere else will you know to think if it or look for it?
You can find "Planned Obsolescence" in Wikipedia.
You can find "Depreciation" in Wikipedia.
But neither is mentioned in the other. Depreciation is applied to capital goods not consumer goods and planned obsolescence is thought of as referring to consumer goods. But doesn't planned obsolescence cause the value of durable consumer goods to go down. So isn't the NET WORTH of the consumer reduced. So isn't that DEPRECIATION.
So the way information is organized and disorganized and left out affects what people find and how they think. So what ain't there keeps people from thinking along certain lines. Consumers are not supposed to think like capitalists so the information is organized to keep the pawns pawned.
So wading through information trying to make sense of things when you KNOW something is missing but you don't know what it is that is that ain't there EXTREMELY FATIGUING.
psik
Wikipedia is supposedly written by the users, and then fact checked? If that is the case then doesn't history then become what the general public agrees it is?
In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework) by using reviews.[49][50] In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the BBC, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication."
Come on, you can't take clinical tests where patients are under pressure and possibly aren't interested in the subjects the computer "scientists" throw at them and compare it to to real life situations where people have years to decide what to do with their 401K's, chosing health care or buying a car. Put a couple of years in the Military or the Police Dept. and make a couple of simulated or real life or death decisions and it will give you lazy whiny civilians some perspective on life.
The thing I miss most is that you could actually count on most Network News to deal with factual information. When Walter Cronkrite said something..that was golden. Now you have to wade through "opinion news" and down right fantasy to get to the truth..or some semblance of it.
