Preserving SANITY in world of over-information

I have been trying to be man of action but lately, I am facing brain fog. Now let me try to solve this:

Osho said one brilliant quote something like,

“People go on watching all kinds of non-sense, listen all kinds of non-sense, think all kinds of non-sense. Do you think that if you watch half an hour of violent MMA fights to get the kick out of it, you will simply leave all its sensation there at the audience seat, it will recoil within your sub-conscious somewhere.

Imagine a house where you have trash accumulated on your home- You simply put trash at one corner and then go on living. You simply go on repeating this process instead of recycling waste to proper place or managing waste. One day, it will come when trash will accumulate so much in your house that you will no longer have space to sit in your own house.

Exactly like that, we have been doing with our mann. So much has been accumulated that we no longer are mindful but just mind-full of bits and pieces of non-sensical opinions, inferences, recoils, memories. We can not see clearly what is there. We do not listen to what is said. We can not think coherently and rationally to what is facing towards us. Our system is simply over- burdened. We are victims of analysis-paralysis or fear-laddened”

Osho said it in 90s when there was no internet. Now after internet with every unwashed masses of the world throwing their vomits and shits in front of our face, with every fart that John does on other side of the world echoed world-wide, our senses are fulled to the brim. In-fact, scientists have said that short attention span and lack of patience and stillness is the biggest crisis of GEN-Z generation but it holds true for other age people as well who spend considerable amount of time on internet.

Here’s how I have been trying to deal with over-information surrounding us:

i) I do not listen to new songs but just those songs which I have been listening again and again.

ii) I do not have to engage in viral trends.

iii) I do not watch new cat videos.

iv) I listen to and watch only people after deciding that person is smarter knowledgable than me and he/she talks something of value w honesty.

But most importantly:

I noticed some of what you noticed as well, I think what’s happening is the world’s information sources are both incentivised and progressively getting better at capturing people’s attention on various topics.

And many people are engaging in this kind of “edutainment” interaction with various information that is actually meant to bend them to a certain agenda in a very non-obvious way.

I don’t have a huge problem with that, that’s their decision, that’s how they want to consume information. Me personally, I’ve always found it extremely important the way I consume information and the way I reason about information and the way I apply an analytical framework to categorize information. One of the things that I do is I actually remove specific terms and just have variables instead of the terms.

I say: The situation is that thing A did something to thing B and then thing C had a reaction of x. And I just evaluate the situation without the details of the situation. And that is just the device you get from studying philosophy and doing analytical philosophy and looking at the fundamental variables of what’s going on in an argument.

I think at the end of the day there is a lot of bias where a lot of confirmation bias takes a hold of a lot of times. If I had to guess, a lot of these algorithms are getting better and better at giving people the information that they wanna see in order to get them to consume more information . And that’s creating a confirmation bias. So that no matter what you believe, you will be fed more of that and you will suddenly be confirmed and find confirmation about any topic as long as you stay in the system. As long as you stay in front of the screen, the algorithm will continue to give it to you. That’s what the algorithm cares about. It doesn’t care about position a or position b or viewpoint a or viewpoint b. It just cares that you will come back the next day and hear about what happened.

I have no control over will Putin and Donald Trump will go to fight? But I certainly have control over how I choose to spend my hour I have. I have a stack of books to read and a system to build and all these things to do. It’s kind of what do you want your life to be about.

I think there’s this scary thing where there’s a lot of information.

Before the problem was you couldn’t get information, before it was a luxury to have a book. And then, people could get books, and then it was still kind of a luxury to get certain books, you could go to libraries. And then it was a luxury to get videos, educational videos were a luxury. Now you can get those all over the place wherever you want. Now there is an abundance of information, the question now is not how to get information, how to get a book or a teaching company lecture.

The question now is how do I selectively do research and evaluate information to avoid confirmation bias and avoid various other bias. To have an accurate picture of reality rather than a biased picture of reality that benefits someone else, not me. That’s the game that everyone is involved in now. For some reason that game is not clear to people. I think people are in this game, and that’s the worst game to be in. The worst game to be in is in a game where you don’t know the rules, that’s where people start to take you around the block a bit.

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and then I try to stick to this framework: