When Information Becomes Noise

For most of history, the problem was finding information; today the problem is surviving it. The volume available to any ordinary person now exceeds what a scholar could once read in a lifetime.

在历史上大部分时间里，难题是「找到信息」；而今天的难题是「扛住信息」。一个普通人现在能接触到的信息量，已经超过了过去一位学者一辈子能读完的量。

Abundance sounds like an unqualified good, and in many ways it is. But attention is finite, so every additional item necessarily reduces the share available to everything else.

「多」听起来是无条件的好事，在很多方面的确如此。但注意力是有限的，所以每一条新增的信息，必然减少其他所有事情能分到的那一份。

The result is a strange mixture of confidence and confusion. People feel well informed because they have read a great deal, and are often less accurate because much of what they read was never checked.

结果是一种自信与困惑的奇怪混合。人们因为读了很多而觉得自己很了解，却常常因为读的东西大多没被核实过，而判断得更不准。

Filtering is therefore the real skill of the age, and it is not taught in most schools. Deciding what not to read has become as important as deciding what to read.

所以「筛选」才是这个时代真正的本领，而大多数学校并不教它。决定「不读什么」，已经和决定「读什么」一样重要了。

None of this argues for ignorance or for trusting a single source. It argues for treating information the way we treat food: the amount matters, and so does where it came from.

这并不主张无知，也不主张只信一个来源。它主张的是：把信息当成食物来看待 —— 数量很重要，它从哪儿来同样重要。