You Are Not Your Own AI

NAB

The path to truth and clear thinking is being drowned by information overload. Arguably it has always been this way from the invention of the printing press to the internet and it is hampering our ability to act for the common good.

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“Humans are not information-processing machines, any more than we are hunting-and-gathering machines,” says author, blogger and ‘philosophical traveler’ Eric Weiner at Medium. “We need time to make sense of the information we’ve consumed.”

Weiner unearths a lesser known 19th-Century German philosopher who predicted data overload to show that what we experience today is not new.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”

With social media and email we’re like lab rats pulling a lever, hoping for a reward, says Weiner. What form this reward will take we don’t know but that is beside the point. Like Schopenhauer’s hungry readers, we confuse the new with the good, the novel with the valuable.

In Schopenhauer’s day, it was the encyclopedia rather than the internet which became a prop for actual individual investigation. Why puzzle over a problem when the solution is readily available in a book? Because, answers Schopenhauer, “it’s a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.” Too often, he said, people jump to the book rather than stay with their thoughts. “You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.”

Schopenhauer saw people scrambling for information, mistaking it for insight. “It does not occur to them,” he wrote, “that information is merely a means toward insight and possesses little or no value in itself.”

Weiner goes further. This excess of data — noise, really — has negative value and diminishes the possibility of insight, he writes.

“Inundated with the voices of others, we’re unable to hear our own.”