The Information Diet
Numbers within brackets indicate footnotes which are located at the bottom.
If there is an omniscient God, then He can’t learn anything. He can’t because he already knows everything. All information is statically in his “mind”. Consuming or producing information of any form like text, speech, or video would be a useless endeavor for Him. That is of course unless He—for whatever reason—wants to communicate with humans.
When this happens, God speaks or has others do it for Him, usually in the form of language. But even when God speaks, He may be misinterpreted, not because He’s fallible but because the chosen medium is, for language is contextual and interpretive.
First, one of the most basic units of language that has meaning is a word. Sometimes, words by themselves have meaning. For example, when a caveman said “tree” (in his caveman language) to his kin, they likely knew what he meant. The word tree is empirically anchored; it references something that can be observed. However, many words are challenging to observe in the physical world; they may be abstract, existing in thought and without material form. It’s easy to see a tree but hard to see “education” for example. If I raised a child and just cooed the word education to him, the kid would never know what the word meant (let alone understand English or be educated!). He would, of course, need to understand words that help define education: a process of learning or teaching information. That’s a seven-word definition and each of those words in turn require additional words to define themselves, so on and so forth, perhaps ad infinitum.
Words, especially abstract ones, virtually always have meaning in relation to other words. And so, language, the medium of words, is a thick and interwoven network of ideas, experiences, physical artifacts, etc. Rarely, if ever, can words exist in isolation from one another. Therefore, in order to speak, comprehend, and write language, one must know—by knowledge or by inference—a lot of words and the relationships between them. Is it any surprise that fluency generally requires the speaker to know 10,000+ words?[1]
Meaning from language is not just derived from the face value definition of isolated words. Context—proximate preceding and succeeding words, tone, and emphasis—also determines language’s meaning. For example, “I am starving” can literally mean that I am dying from hunger. With context, it very well may mean that I didn’t eat breakfast. We could also say “We did it” and by stressing any one of the three words, we might understand the sentence three ways. Context does not just apply to abstract words and sentences but also to words that exist concretely. Warning my friend that I see a “cougar” yields a likely understanding that there’s a predatory cat nearby. However, I may mean, or he may interpret, that instead of a cat, a mature lady is stalking one of us. Thus, language’s meaning is circumstantial, depending on the conditions in which it is uttered—whether I said “cougar” in the wild foothills or a bar, or what my facial expression indicated.
Given that words are often defined by other words and are contextual, even simple language reveals complexity and uncertainty. In the face of this uncertainty, the meaning of language is inferred rather than fixed. As a form of communication then, language is more often than not probabilistic, not deterministic.
The Best We Got
For better or worse, we are not Gods. Even the power and implications of omniscience are so unfathomable to us that we reserve this quality for beings not of this earth. We also don’t live in a world as depicted in the film The Matrix. There is no program we can hack into and instantly command infinite information.
Omniscience has no equal. However, we do have something exquisitely human: language. It’s both the expression of our thought and reason.[2] Language allows us to give ideas form and for that form to be understood by others. At times, language may be constrictive, as thoughts can only be articulated via language and its available vocabulary. For example, describing how a C Major Chord—and music in general—sounds is a near, if not actually, impossible task. You could say the chord sounds “happy” or “positive”, but this language fails to explain the sensation and may even adulterate its essence, for the sound cannot be limited to a mere “happy” or “positive” adjective. Despite the boundaries language presents, it is equally, if not more, generative. While we may not be able to depict what a C Major Chord sounds like, we are able via music notation—a language in itself—to represent how to construct the chord and how long and loudly to play it. Humanity’s success owes great thanks to language, one of our best technologies. What would the world look like had it not been for Aramaic, Greek, Latin, English, Chinese, and math and its applications like code?
I am of the belief that information exists even without the human mind conceiving it. The proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it does in fact make a sound. However, without language to communicate thought and reason, the felled tree’s collapse is indeed quiet and muffled. With language, we can transmit, amplify, and tune information.
The Information Diet
It is often said that you are what you eat, that the foods you consume determine your physical and mental health. While it may not have a form as tangible as a banana or a steak, language is food too. But instead of “eating” language for energy, you “eat” language for information. With language, we can nourish our minds with knowledge. Without it, I suspect we’d be emptier-headed animals, perhaps extinct at that.
The past decade has been marked by a health and fitness craze, particularly surrounding our physical diets. Many people obsess about how many calories they eat or how much sugar, fat, or protein is in their food. Sadly, we seem to have neglected our information diet, the quantity and quality of information we consume.
For many who professionally sit today, it’s all too easy to binge on junk food too often or to excess. Similarly, in the current age of information, because of today’s modern media landscape and our access to the World Wide Web, it’s easy to surf mindlessly on the Internet and consume junk information. But if we care to keep our minds healthy, then we better start feeding them better. We better start thinking of our information diet.
Whole Information
If we think of our consumption of information like our consumption of food, then it will be helpful to categorize information as such.
In a physical diet, we generally classify food on a spectrum with junk food at one end and whole food at the other. If better bodily health is the goal, then a diet primarily composed of whole rather than junk food is an advisable strategy. However, it should not be confused that junk food means bad food; junk food is simply food you should not eat too often or to excess. For example, we could say eating cake in some quantity or some frequency would make it junk food. But cake is not bad. There is a time and occasion to gobble a sumptuous slice of this delicious and sugary bread. To borrow an adage from toxicology, the dose makes the poison. On the other end of the spectrum, whole foods are less susceptible to improper dosing. They can be defined as foodstuffs that you can eat habitually to live healthily. You can generally eat grains, fruits, and vegetables more frequently and in larger quantities than cake.
In the context of information, if intellectual health is the goal, then an information diet should be primarily composed of “whole information”, a type of mental food that you can consume regularly. For example, reading books, especially a well-written one, is likely to lead to better intellectual health than reading tabloids. Among many men and women in powerful positions like the C-suite and even the Oval Office, it is not surprising to find out that virtually all of them have one habit in common: reading books. Though not that everyone needs to aspire to be CEO or president (and not claiming these are virtuous positions or that you need to work long hours), I suspect everyone can benefit from customarily consuming whole information. Like food, whole and junk information are principally distinguished by their dosage. Hence, there may be a time and place to keep up with celebrity gossip. It may be quite healthy to unwind, decompress, and relax to your favorite sitcom. But like cake, these types of information should be celebrated, occasionally. Otherwise, you risk ailment.
I’ve answered some “what” questions, namely what whole and junk information are. However, why is whole information more “whole” and how does that happen?
Again, I will analogize information to food. Let’s compare almonds to soda, the former being whole food and the latter junk. Assume we have 100 calories worth of almonds and 100 calories worth of soda. Calorically, both are obviously equivalent. As far as your body is concerned, every calorie is equal just like how in terms of time, every second is the same. This is why a caloric surplus or deficit solely determines whether one loses or gains weight. However, the amount of energy derived from food is a first-order effect. Examining a second-order effect, while both almonds and soda store the same amount of energy, your blood sugar level will spike from the digestion of soda and gracefully climb with almonds. We could even evaluate a third-order effect; consuming acutely sugary foods makes you crave more food afterward (including more sugary food). So, while foods may have the same first-order effect, when factoring in the second to nth effect, the overall health benefit can vary tremendously.
This food analogy is similar to how reading Plato’s Republic for an hour of leisure is the “same” as spending sixty minutes watching TikTok shorts. In terms of time, you've recreationally spent an hour on each activity, the first-order effect. You may even have “learned”—absorbed knowledge and can recall it—the same amount of information too. However, when considering the subsequent effects, the intellectual reward may diverge drastically. By watching TikTok shorts, you might have induced a temporarily shorter attention span, perhaps even contributing to a permanently shorter one. You might begin to prefer hyper-attention-grabbing (via violence, sexuality, and appeals to pathos) more. You might even watch TikTok for longer than an hour because the product is just that fun. To be fair, in the right amounts, TikTok shorts can be utterly entertaining and hilarious; the laughter and cheer they bring about could contribute to better mental health. However, it is terribly concerning when you are so captivated by something that you can barely, or can’t, cease its activity even when some part of you wants to. Reading Plato’s Republic on the other hand probably does not have these types of secondary and tertiary order effects.
By summing information’s intellectual and physical effects, from the first to the nth order, we can conceptually quantify wholeness. Hence, more whole information has a greater net benefit than that of less whole (junkier) information. How information becomes more or less whole depends on each of its orders’ effects, their charges—positive or negative— and their magnitudes.
Given that most information passes through language to be communicated, we may extend the term “whole information” to “whole language” at times. While you may not be able to visualize information which is somewhat intangible, you can visualize language as clearly as actual food. Text exists; you can see it on a page or a screen. Even when your eyes are closed, you can conjure up an image of words and sentences. This is centrally important because it is much easier to identify whole information and junk information when you can see it.
Nutrition
Whole information, like whole food, is nutritious and conducive to digestion. Let’s first examine how information is nutritious. Whole foods are densely packed with nutrients. Flesh has essential amino acids, oranges have vitamin C, and kale has calcium. Nutrition as applied to language references the language’s content: the thoughts, ideas, and insights therein. An algebra textbook, for example, would be highly nutritious for its many useful ideas like variable and linear equations.[3] That said, great content does not guarantee its own comprehension.
What makes whole foods particularly nutritious is not only their constituents but also the synergy between those many parts. In nutritional science, there is a mounting body of evidence for “nutrient synergy”, how a concert of nutrients yields greater health benefits than the isolated consumption of each nutrient. Eating broccoli, for example, is likely better for you than taking a vitamin K tablet, for broccoli contains many additional antioxidants and anti-cancerous compounds that work in harmony. In the context of language, many ideas presented in isolation are easily overlooked or forgotten. Returning to our algebra textbook, suppose the book lists only equations and expressions without explanatory details. I think we all know from personal experience that the rote memorization of formulas results in poor recall. While rich in content, the formula-only textbook is like a sequence of multi-vitamin tablets; there is little to no teamwork among ideas.
Sometimes, for information to be synergistic, it needs various modes (concrete example, analogy, narrative, etc.) to collaborate. I suspect this is why whole information, like a well-written math textbook, is peppered with elaboration, insofar as it is appropriate for the audience. To ensure the comprehension of proportions and scaling, an effective author provides a textual definition, math notation, and a real-world example: If a recipe that serves 4 people requires 2 cups of sugar, how many cups of sugar do you need to serve 24 people?
Learning information across various disciplines is another form of informational synergy. For a student to fully appreciate the math described in his textbook, it’s advisable that he reads and learns science and rhetoric as well as plays outside the classroom. Throughout history, innovation often has been the result of the learnings of one field applied to a different domain, producing profound insights. The catholic priest, Greg Mendel, did not conceive of the idea of traits and genetics with a microscope but rather a spade, dabbling in the botany of pea plants.
Digestion (Part 1)
Digestion is the process by which nutrients from food are extracted. In many cases, digestion is assisted by the presence of fibrous material, known as roughage, in the stomach. Roughage assists with the absorption of nutrients and slows down the rate at which this happens.
In the context of information, digestion is like—but not identical to—comprehension. Whereas the digestion of any nutrient has binary outcomes (i.e. the nutrient is absorbed or not), the comprehension of information has multiple. You cannot digest cellulose, but you may weakly or strongly understand the principles of capitalism. That said, the digestion of food via the gastrointestinal tract has salient similarities to the comprehension of information via language.
Roughage in language is the content that implicitly states, or provides evidence for, the content’s main idea. Its purpose is to lend a hand to the grasping of essential nutrients of information, at least the ones the author of that information wants to get across. For example, the main idea of this essay is that one’s information diet is similar to one’s physical nutrition; therefore, one should treat the former as seriously as the latter. Yet, throughout this essay, I expand upon this idea implicitly or by analogy. I literally say “for example” twenty-four times in this essay. That’s roughage.
Many renowned nonfiction books will likely have an online digest, a summary of the book written by someone other than the author. When you read a digest, even if it is exceptionally written, you rarely can remember or learn from the book’s ideas better than if you had read the whole book. The digest has been stripped of roughage. While the repetition of an idea may help a reader remember and learn from it, I suspect great books are long not because they are redundant, but because their claims require a tonnage of roughage to be adequately understood.[4]
As is often the case, we do not command total recall of all language that we have consumed. Our brains are limited in space and particular about real estate. We retain what is deemed important and therefore, it’s likely that the vast majority of the language that we consume is considered functional but not focal. To absorb some types of essential nutrients in information, we must ingest a lot of language that we may not remember. Yet, ingest such vast quantities we must, especially for highly nutritious information. Otherwise, we would probably struggle to identify what was worth remembering, learning, and applying.
Tangent
It should not be confused that by roughage, I mean to imply that verboseness is appropriate. Brevity, without sacrificing meaning, is best. Borrowing from finance, we can think of brevity as a type of return: a return-on-language (ROL). We can express ROL by assigning the number of informational units as its numerator, and the number of words used to convey this information as its denominator. Many units of information described in a few words would have a high return. In contrast, as the number of words increases and by holding information constant, the return decreases.
We can visualize ROL by graphing it. First, let’s assume the number of informational units is 1, the number of words is x, and ROL is notated by R(x). Thus, R(x) = 1/x. For the sake of graphing, we’ll assume the number of words can be continuous rather than discrete (we’ll allow for the existence of fractional words). When we graph this function, we can see that as the number of words increases, the ROL approaches 0. On the other hand, as the number of words approaches 0, the ROL approaches infinity. An omniscient God, who’ve we established does not need language to understand, has an undefined ROL, for Her denominator is always 0 (as a bonus, Her numerator is infinity).
Graph of R(x)
Unlike omniscient beings, we need language. Human information needs some number of words to communicate itself. In the real world, information is often not constant when language increases or decreases; the function oversimplifies.
Nevertheless, we could also visualize pithiness another way; we’ll call the new function ROL_t. The numerator is still the number of informational units, but the denominator is the number of seconds needed to understand information (now the variable is actually continuous). Generally, the more words you must read, the longer you take to comprehend the string of information. Perhaps you lose focus, a word sidetracks you, or simply the sentence requires more time to read. To yield a high ROL_t, we ideally want to spend little time comprehending lots of information.
The graph of ROL_t still looks the same as that above. Our omniscient God still has an undefined return-on-language, but this time it’s because She requires zero seconds to understand anything. For humans, we need a non-zero amount of time to digest information.
ROL and ROL_t demonstrate why redundancy is value-reductive to language. If a reader must read the same thing twice, especially if it does not repeat for emphasis or style, then both the number of words and the amount of reading time increase as the informational units remain constant. ROL_t helps reveal why appropriate word choice matters. If a reader comes across a word he does not understand, then he often needs to infer its meaning. As the reader infers a word that he does not know, he may misinterpret or attribute a weaker weight to the word, thereby detracting from or diluting the word’s meaning. Thus, the number of informational units—the numerator of ROL_t— may decrease. Additionally, given time does not stop as the reader infers, the unknown word delays comprehension. So, inappropriate word choice may prove to be a two-sided assault; ROL_t’s numerator simultaneously shrinks as its denominator grows. The potency of language correspondingly descends to zero.
When crafting language, we should generally use words commensurate with the level of our readers and listeners. Parents often talk to their toddlers in basic English (usually in a slower cadence and higher pitch) not only because it’s cute. To a toddler, the string “go to the potty” has more meaning and takes less time to understand than “defecate”, even if the former string is longer.
We can now think of brevity as the ability to capture complex ideas in fewer words or less time. Brevity gives language power, even approaching that of God.
Digestion (Part 2)
Returning to our food analogy, what happens when information is too easily digested?
Our bodies can quickly digest glucose, the near-universal sugar for life, and can efficiently convert it into a usable energy currency[5]. If there is food that can be digested with little to no effort, is there information that can be understood with little to no language? I suspect the most understandable information is that which you already know (or think you know). Learning what you already know requires zero words; the information is a current tenant in your mind. While coming across information you already know can be quite healthy or totally harmless, exposure to this type of information won’t lead to learning or an expanding worldview. Rather, just the reinforcing or crystallization of existing beliefs.
Reinforcing a belief because you’ve heard it again in slightly different words is bad; beliefs should be reinforced when they’re actually true. Information that has become crystallized and therefore fundamental to your identity is like fat that has hardened and become a permanent obstacle to your arteries. As we learned with ROL, language that can communicate many units of information in few to no words is powerful. I think it’s fair to say that information that is fundamentally true to us feels like an infinite number of informational units. Infinity is a problem. When informational units approach infinity, it doesn’t matter the choice or number of words used to describe information; the resulting return on language will be astronomically huge. When language feels that powerful, we often conflate that power with truth.
For example, it seems like American society is at peak political polarity. That’s quite bad because at this level, having dispassionate debates is nearly impossible. From where did this peak polarity arise? I would assume for many reasons but one that is relevant here is that the American people ingest too much ultra-digestible information. The first issue is that the public has demanded or is only capable of consuming information expressed in a few seconds or characters. Therefore, if media providers wanted to stay in business, their content had to evolve to be shorter. However, delivering new and accurate information in short form is very difficult (recall why nonfiction books are long); many ideas barely can be adequately stated in 10 seconds or 140 characters, let alone argued for. Content creators were rather cut for options. But there was and is a reliable method to give their audiences desired content that can fit their attention spans: what they already know or want to hear. Media makers don’t have to be particularly careful or measured with their words when the purpose of their content is to echo and amplify what the intended audience already knows. Any language will resonate all the same.
The food-to-information analogy is not perfect. Whereas the goal of our stomach and intestines is to yield the most calories—irrespective of the content digested—the goal of our minds should often be to grapple with digestion. It’s likely a good sign to have frequent exposure to information that challenges an existing belief or requires significant brain power to understand. Comprehension should not come too easily. And if it does, you may be doing to your mind what shoveling raw sugar into your mouth does for your body. In small doses, it’s fun and trivial. Not in large doses.
Storage and Solubility
Can our brains store information like how our bodies store fat and other nutrients?
It’s been seven years since I formally studied psychology. Yet, I find that when prompted, I can recognize some concepts or notable experiments with surprising clarity. The key words in the sentence above are “when prompted”. In most scenarios, there is little need to recall or apply the lessons from psychology class. However, I recently found myself in a conversation that referenced a certain social experiment and even after many years, I remembered information that I thought was discarded long ago.[6]
While I undoubtedly forgot some parts of my high school psychology textbook, not every page was lost and wasted. I had retained some information; it was mainly waiting to be called upon. In the same way the body stores fat due to excess energy consumption, the mind stores information due to supplemental language consumption. And just like how fat is converted when the body requires energy, latent information is recollected when the mind deems it relevant.
While remembering a psychology experiment at a cocktail party to seem clever may be pointless, the ability to recollect and apply dormant information is not. If a person’s mind is ladened with useful “fat”, then when a problem he encounters triggers the fat’s conversion, he has better information to find a solution.[7] Perhaps the most important reason you should avoid consuming too much junk information is not because it wastes your time in the present, but because you deprive yourself of storing fat which you can burn in the future. Consuming junk information is like keeping yourself mentally emaciated; starving yourself of useful knowledge to aid your decision-making later on. It is therefore quite healthy to have a “fatty” mind, granted that the stored information is useful. Unlike the body of a typical Balenciaga supermodel, the ideal mental physique is plus-sized.
The storage of information is similar to another concept within nutrition: how the body absorbs vitamins. Vitamins are either considered water- or fat-soluble. Water-soluble means that when the body has enough of the vitamin, any incremental amount is urinated out. Fat-soluble vitamins on the other hand can be absorbed and stored in the body’s fatty tissues. Liberal ideals (equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) are like fat-soluble vitamins; these ideas are stored and recalled well. Proverbs are like water-soluble vitamins. How many times do you need to be reminded to treat others how you’d like to be treated?
To be clear, the solubility of information refers to its storability, not superiority. There is plenty of useless information that stores well. There is plenty of wisdom that we need to hear again and again. As Sherlock Holmes once professed, “It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones”.
Lastly, what is particularly interesting about fat-soluble vitamins is that in large doses, they can be toxic. Ingesting too much Vitamin A, for example, can kill you.[8] English has a word for a kind of information that often comes in large doses, poisons the mind, and can kill its carrier: dogma. Indeed, if you come across a prolific body of information that asserts its permanence and predominance, then you are likely learning either elementary physics or religion.
Tips For What (Not) To Eat
The obvious implications of the information diet relate to media consumption: which types of media we consume, which people or companies we let feed us, and how much media we eat overall. Our goal is to find more whole information—for completely whole information does not exist— from the people and places that can provide it best.
I have long been a lover of books which I believe offer more whole information given their thoughtfulness and reviewal process; however, books can equally guide readers astray from truth as much as books can direct toward it. Like a food diet, an information diet should be diverse, for too much of any whole food is detrimental. What’s important is that we habitually consume an array of whole information so that we can reap the benefits of nutrient synergy, roughage, and storage. I hope the below tips help you optimize your information diet. However, you know yourself more than I do so trust your gut. That said, if a certain kind of information leads to illness or fleeting ecstasy, you’re either eating the wrong thing too much or very much the wrong thing.
There is more information in this world for any one lifetime to consume. You may have heard the term “information overload”, the challenge in critical thinking when one is overwhelmed with data. The term is often used to describe our current age of information, of how exogenous forces like media and technology conglomerates constantly inundate us with information. This connotation is actually quite deceptive for two reasons. First, outside entities—especially in freer countries—principally inundate us with methods to access information, not information itself. Meta’s Instagram primarily functions not to generate pictures, but to provide the platform for this media to proliferate. The same goes for X (Twitter); it is not a contributor but the supervisor of a forum of short form and text-based content. Second, it’s not the companies that are overwhelming us with information; we seem to be incapable of not overwhelming ourselves. We could very well delete these apps.
Via negativa, also called the “way of subtraction” is the idea that sometimes a problem’s most effective resolution is not an additive, but a subtractive one. In other words, it’s the study of what not to do. For example, if you want to sleep better, consider drinking less coffee rather than ingesting sleeping pills. If you want to make money, don’t lose it (investing particularly adheres to via negativa). Crucially, subtractive solutions are often less prone to compounding side effects. For example, when you drink more coffee to stay awake, especially later in the day, you experience trouble falling asleep. If you wake up tired, you may have a headache, so you take a painkiller, thereby inducing nausea. In the context of the information diet, via negativa indicates subtracting, not adding or reallocating, media consumption. If you are feeling unwell, consider reading less. Stop talking. Skip that podcast. Put down the phone. I suspect you already have a good idea of what information you need to cut out of your life than what to fill it with.
There is more wisdom in this world than just what is in between a book’s bindings. Learning does not mean reading, listening, watching, or writing; there is knowledge to be gained outside of media consumption. French existentialist and soccer enthusiast Albert Camus once declared, “What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man, I owe to sport”. We all harbor life experiences—many of them ineffable—that have taught us more than any language could. I remember the first time I saw a slum. Witnessing open sewage, smelling its odor, or seeing shoddy shacks that a small gust could topple over taught me more about the bubble I grew up in than any book ever did. And I did so while facing people, not pages. Life is rich with lessons, many of which can only be appreciated when you leave space for yourself to contemplate them. Remember via negativa. Surrounding yourself with good information is only part of an optimal information diet.
Indeed, junk information and junk food are often cheaper and more convenient to access than their whole counterparts. Garden greens usually cost and require more effort to procure than a bag of potato chips. A book (or e-book) often comes with a price tag and a commitment: dedicated reading. Social media is quite the opposite: “free” to use, mindlessly easy to consume (think scrolling and refreshing content), and instantly accessible anywhere, contingent on an internet connection. In the modern world, doing wrong—consuming poor food and information—does come easy. What are a few tips to avoid doing wrong and what shouldn’t we eat?
First, question how you pay for information, or more specifically, how you don’t. Due to the internet’s expansion and influence, we’ve grown accustomed to the norm that information is free or very cheap. However, if you’re not paying for information, then someone else likely is. And whoever pays probably has more power in choosing what is said. While paying more for media is no guarantee that the content will be unbiased, it is more clear what type of partisanship you are paying for. Free or virtually free media, on the other hand, frequently succumbs to the bias not of its creators but of its advertisers. If you are not wary of this dynamic, then you may conflate your innate preferences with those that have developed because you have been indoctrinated by ads, especially if you freely surf the internet or refresh your application’s feed.[9] Be intentional and don’t mindlessly consume information. Consider paying more for it.
Second, if you can’t or don’t want to pay for information in terms of dollars, then perhaps pay in terms of time. Particularly beware of shortform content. Sounding smart, stating coherent arguments, and stirring emotions with sensational claims in a few minutes or paragraphs is easy. This is less likely to occur when language is communicated over hours or tens of thousands of words. You may have objections to some points raised in this very essay, for example, given it’s more than 7,000 words. If I wrote 500 words, it might have been neater, but perhaps not more whole. Prefer lengthy and live interviews and podcasts rather than soundbites, or read a long thread of Tweets rather than one. Don’t forget that information needs roughage; it needs to be contextualized. Don’t eat your information too fast.
Third, understanding information should often require effort. Information should periodically challenge us and be tough to learn or accept. A key benefit of challenging information comes from grappling with it, by exerting great energy to understand it, we are more able to absorb its knowledge. Learning physics for many is difficult, but I suspect that after understanding some elementary kinetics and thermodynamics, one has a deeper idea and appreciation of how the world works, literally. Additionally, other difficult topics or subjects may become easier to comprehend, particularly those in related realms. As previously established, when information is perfectly comprehensible, it’s likely information you already know. Chew on tough information.
It is probably prudent to assume your information diet is equally important to your health just as sleep, diet, and exercise are. When you’re not feeling well, it’s easy to recall that you have been sleeping less or poorly, eating junk food, or slacking off at the gym. However, we rarely question the impact of the types of information we ingest. If you have noticed an uptick in crankiness, cynicism, or misanthropy, it may very well be because you’re sleeping 4 hours a day, working too much, and/or eating poorly. However, can we entertain that some portion of this unhappiness might be due to your habitual listening to diatribes instead of debates?[10]
Refined taste
The raison d’être of media is to be shared: writers have readers, orators have listeners, videographers have viewers, etc. Therefore, media is incentivized to attract an audience and often does this by being sensational, by being interesting. In our modern age, the competition between media enterprises is enormous, thereby adding even more pressure for content to intrigue. As media vies for the attention of online users, it must avoid one cardinal sin. The worst thing media can do is be boring.
Yet sometimes, the truth is boring. Most of the time, an answer that lacks certainty is boring too. Given media must be interesting, it often initially “tastes” good; we like consuming it at first. However, if we habitually consume interesting media, then it’s likely some amount of the information has been bent or some truths have been omitted. Moreover, in the same way chronically eating sugary foods desensitizes you to sweetness, so too does consuming interesting media desensitizes you to interest. In large doses, interesting information could be extremely harmful. In America’s current political landscape, there are many politicians and pundits who, if anything, are not boring. Sometimes their sensationalist tirades are hilarious and sometimes they even reveal the truth. Their content has its time and place. That said, it should not occupy all of yours. If language tastes too good—too interesting or impelling—you should at least consider its dose. Refine your informational palate.
How To Feed Yourself…You Have No Choice
Fitness professionals have a great saying: you can’t outrun your fork. Do not forget that there is information that you cannot run away from: the internal commentary within yourself. Unless induced in intense meditation, our minds are never-ending media players, constantly rewinding, resuming, or simulating language. Until death, you continuously feed yourself information. You are your own largest food supply. And there is no escaping tasting your own cooking.
Therefore, we must consider our language carefully. For example, the real reason you shouldn’t lie—either in your mind or out of your mouth—is because lying crowds out the truth. The lies we tell others and ourselves often come with great and believable justifications, ones that display coherence and conceivability. But just because something is coherent and conceivable—that it makes sense—does not make it true. And so, by lying we often expend our energy to generate false causes rather than spending our efforts to identify the true ones. In other words, we cook up a lot of junk information and keep the whole information in the freezer. The failure to examine true causes also occurs when we can’t admit ignorance when we should. In this case, we harm ourselves not by producing junk information but by omitting whole information. If we cannot acknowledge that we do not know, then how can we expect to learn or be taught? As an old Chinese saying quips, “You can’t fill a cup that is already full”. Our minds, like our stomachs, have a finite capacity.
Like our bodies, we fortunately have agency over our minds. I’ve never met anyone who controlled CNN, Fox, TikTok, Meta, and X and whatever these platforms are supposedly posting or pushing. Everyone I meet, however, does control their thoughts and speech. The best thing you can do for yourself is unsurprisingly to focus on yourself. While today’s media arguably has become a nightmarish machine compelled or programmed to perpetuate interesting but junk information, we must take responsibility for our diets. If we can do that, then we might recognize the below:
1) we eat too much junk information;
2) we need to eat more whole information; sometimes,
3) we don’t need to eat at all.
In modernity, we have at our fingertips a cornucopia of hyper-stimulating information. While this type of information can give us “happiness” in some fleeting manner, it is probably without much substance and crucially almost impossible to dose properly. We scroll on social media too long because it’s so funny. We watch porn too often because it’s so erotic. We read one-liners written by first-rate provocateurs but second-rate thinkers. We do all these things whilst convincing ourselves that this is what we want. Indeed, we chose this path consensually.
Only in hindsight can we count and measure our information diet’s effects (from the first to the nth order). Only then can we see our mental bodies in the mirror.
But surely you must have some hindsight. And now you read this essay. Maybe you can change.
Many thanks to Andrew Wang, James Marsh, Taylor Lowery, and Parham Rouzbahani for reading drafts of this essay and for contributing key insights.
[1] 10,000 words is generally the amount required to be considered a native speaker of Latin and Germanic languages. One may be conversationally fluent with 5,000 words and can get by well enough knowing 2,000 words.
Separately, it’s also possible that many words don’t have to be known if you know their constituents. For example, if you do know these words: “a” “process” “to” “learn” “or” “teach” and “information”, then you can save yourself from knowing “education”. However, whenever you want to express education, you’ll say more words than necessary.
[2] This idea comes from George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture. The full quote is “That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
[3] Information and food are not perfectly analogous and at times, discrepancies arise. For example, nutrients from food are universally needed whereas information is not. For example, I need to eat food so that I will live. I will not die if I don’t know how electromagnetism works.
[4] In the subfields of computer science and mathematics, there is a concept called Kolmogorov complexity which is a measure of the computational resources required to produce an output. In other words, it’s how “compressible” something is, like a string of text. For example, a string of text can be a singular character repeated 10 times like “aaaaaaaaaa” or a string of equal length that can be utterly random like “8P9TikoPXu”. Randomness can't be compressed; it cannot be fully expressed in any simpler form. For example, by rounding pi (π) to any decimal place, you in fact lose meaning, however slight. Many ideas, often expressed in books, have high Kolmogorov complexity—not because the ideas are convoluted and redundant—but because any detraction of detail would strip the underlying message of its essence.
[5] About 5 - 10% of calories contained within carbohydrates are required simply to digest, absorb, and dispose of it, sort of like a nutrient tax.
[6] The experiment in question is the Stanford Prison Experiment which demonstrated the potential malleability of a person’s behavior given his assigned level of authority.
[7] For example, whoever controls the nuclear warheads in the United States, I think, should know quite a lot about the Cold War. While today’s nuclear threat and proliferation are subject to different conditions, it’s likely there are many lessons to be learned from the American and Soviet standoff—that never erupted into Armageddon.
[8] Do not be afraid of vitamin A. Most people’s intake of the vitamin often comes from precursors. For example, carrots are rich in beta-carotene which upon digestion converts into vitamin A. Upon converting enough beta-carotene, your body starts to flush it out.
[9] It is an eerie coincidence that social media platforms refer to a user’s stream of content as “feed”. If a user does not selectively and intentionally curate his content on his own, then he will be fed the “recommended” or “you also may like” content from an algorithm.
[10] I’m hinting at priming, a term from psychology, in which one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus. One of the most cited cases—which has in fact been difficult to replicate—is the Bargh-Doyen study conducted in 1996 in which a group primed with stereotypes of elderly people started to walk slower compared to the control group. It seems that the validity of priming is undecided; so, we cannot rule out the possibility that media influences mood.
