Coping with Information Overload
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Coping with Information Overload
And how to empathize with conspiracy theorists
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
I ran alongside my friend Mike for his first 50-mile trail race, back in 2015, and the most interesting thing I remember was that his GPS watch kept beeping.
It was the first year of my Ph.D. program, and Mike was my guinea pig for a pilot study I was doing for my research methods class. What that meant was not only did he have to run 50 miles, but he had to be interviewed along the way. For some reason he agreed. So there we were, running up and down the endless glacial rolling hills of southeastern Wisconsin on a humid Saturday in May, him answering all my questions.
In 2015, not everyone had a GPS watch—nowadays on the trail they chirp like tone-deaf birds—but Mike was an early adopter. His watch could be configured to vibrate in response to various stimuli, such as distance and elevation, and it would show you things like your pace and total distance. (And I don’t know what else, because even in 2023 I still don’t have one of these gizmos.)
Mike set his watch to go off both every mile and with every 250 feet of elevation change. He explained to me that he had considered only having it alert him every mile, but ultimately he added the elevation stimulus so that he would not “have to trust” the watch. He didn’t always want to know why it was beeping—he wanted to preserve some plausible deniability. Put differently, he sabotaged his own information source to make it less informative. But that brought some comfort.
They say ultrarunning is 50 percent physical and 90 percent mental. It’s painful and you have to deal with it. Much of the information you get is inconvenient (This is hurting too much for this early!). You need to play mind games with yourself to finish. Dissociation is a common tactic, often with music or mantras or math.
I could certainly relate to Mike with my own experiences in the sport. But what has interested me most about this was what it says about other situations in life.
Counter-Information
When I was an undergrad at Marquette, I once went to a talk by a visiting Jesuit from Seattle University. I don’t remember his name or even what he spoke about, but one of his observations has stuck with me. Sometimes, he said, people listen to music not to hear the music, but to block out the rest of the world—whether that’s sounds from outside or mental chatter from within.
I sat in the audience with my white earbuds dangling from my shirt collar like a pair of fuzzy dice, the cord running beneath my shirt to the iPod in my pocket. What he’d said—that was exactly why I listened to music most of the time. It wasn’t for the information, it was for the counter-information.
The word information usually has a positive connotation. Information is how we learn. It feels good to learn, and we want to do it. (I hasten to add that too often “learning” and “school” are disjunct.)
But upon reflection, it’s obvious that information is not always good per se. Certain information may be intellectually helpful but emotionally harmful, such as knowing exactly how many miles you still have to go in a race, or the “inconvenient truth” of climate change. Other information may seem helpful but isn’t, such as the genetic sequence for a virulent virus, the recipe for a bomb or knowing someone’s dark secret when you shouldn’t—things the philosopher Nick Bostrom calls information hazards. Still other information just isn’t helpful at all—for instance, something irrelevant or poorly modeled or outdated. And plenty of other information is just noise. (Hence the clarion call of silence.)
In ultrarunning as in life, much of the information you get is annoying or negative or otherwise unwanted. Pains from your body, the realities of the distance you’re facing. You can’t tune it all out, but you can’t take it all in, either. So you have to employ what I would call counter-information as a coping mechanism—sabotage your GPS watch or put on some music every now and then. Counter-information is information that is sought and used not for the informativeness of its content but rather for its capacity to counteract the informativeness of other, unwanted information.
Coping with Information Overload
Counter-information is just one way we deal with information overload. We also bury ourselves in rabbit holes, look for higher-order explanatory principles, and deny, deny, deny.
In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler writes that even things like drug addiction, terrorism and teen pregnancy can ultimately be chalked up as coping strategies for information overload. They’re ways of simplifying the world, though they may be destructive in other respects. Toffler writes:
All of them dangerously evade the rich complexity of reality. They generate distorted images of reality. The more the individual denies, the more he specializes at the expense of wider interests, the more mechanically he reverts to past habits and policies, the more desperately he super-simplifies, the more inept his responses to the novelty and choices flooding into his life. The more he relies on these strategies, the more his behavior exhibits wild and erratic swings and general instability.
Every information scientist recognizes that some of these strategies may, indeed, be necessary in overload situations. Yet, unless the individual begins with a clear grasp of relevant reality, and unless he begins with cleanly defined values and priorities, his reliance on such techniques will only deepen his adaptive difficulties.
In the constrained world of ultrarunning, successful runners use counter-information strategically but not indiscriminately. You have to track reality, and some information you must deal with (rationing your water, eating plenty, dealing with chafing or blisters early). In Toffler’s words, they have their values and priorities firmly in place from the outset.
But in the wild wider world, the rules for success are not so clear, and things are much more dynamic. It’s much easier to fail to adapt to a changing world and cope with its attendant information overload.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably less a victim than many. Yet I think we can all see something of ourselves in Toffler’s description above. We’re all inundated with endless information and new things around every corner. It’s easy to forget what we really want or who we really are. And so we can empathize even with the conspiracy theorists among us.
Empathy with Conspiracy Theorists
Research in cognitive science shows that there are a handful of different reasons we value explanations. We might value some explanations for how they help us predict future events (predictive power), or for how they account for as many data points as possible (co-explanation or comprehensiveness), or for how easy they are to learn and share (simplicity).
Perhaps all of these types should be given equal weight, or perhaps some are more relevant for certain kinds of explanations. But we don’t have strong norms for what makes a good explanation—perhaps we never will—and this may be precisely where conspiracy theories come from.
People who believe in conspiracy theories aren’t irrational or particularly gullible—rather, they simply value comprehensiveness over the other explanatory values. They just want a Theory of Everything, albeit at the expense of other values, such as simplicity and predictive power.
What sets a conspiracy theorist apart from a successful ultrarunner is that, in the relevant ways, the conspiracy theorist has lost contact with reality. In ultrarunning you get immediate feedback: you fail, the end. But in our wild world, you may not get any feedback—or worse, you may only get further affirming feedback, perhaps even unwittingly (e.g., you can’t control what Instagram Reels will show you next). That is, there’s no real test for many of our ideas.
Consider, for instance, the Pizzagate scandal from the 2016 U.S. election season. Rumors spread that Hilary Clinton inter alia was running a Satanic pedophilia and human trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. Unlikely enough, but highly explanatory if it were true, given that the theory was compatible with any number of other concerns. For any given person, it was impossible to say, really, whether it was true or not. (Because sometimes conspiracies, even unlikely ones, really are true.) A vigilante gunman stormed the pizza parlor and discovered that in fact it had no basement, finally making contact with reality. (Alas, such a “minor detail” did nothing to derail the conspiracy theory, which went on to morph into the broader QAnon narrative.)
So conspiracy theorists are, Toffler would say, victims of future shock. They’re attempting to cope with information overload—much of this information inconvenient—like the rest of us, but in doing so they have come to over-rely on co-explanation as an explanatory value.
Keeping Contact with Reality
There are surely ways beyond adopting conspiracy theories to cope with information overload and teach others to do the same. I’m thinking of things like no-screen Sundays, limiting email hours, and other approaches to informational balance. What all these have in common is they give us space to check in with ourselves, to keep in touch with our values and identity, which may help prevent the drift in explanatory values that can lead us astray.
Besides the few things we can do on our own, certainly the stewards of our informational infrastructure (i.e., Big Tech) also have a responsibility and role to play.
Looking further, the philosopher C. Thy Nguyen in Games: Agency as Art that games are useful because they offer a constrained, simplified world-in-miniature in which we can cultivate values and learn habits that we can eventually translate to other realms of life. Ultrarunning is a kind of game, and so it’s not surprising to me when ultrarunners say things like, “Running has made me a better person.” It’s true.
So games are another way—perhaps unexpectedly—for us to keep contact with reality in our increasingly disembodied digital age. So long as we know what game we’re playing and remember that it is a game.
Ports of Call
On the Benefits of Physical Media in the Streaming Era: A lovely short essay in The New Yorker.
Why Screenshot?: A research paper I came across from earlier this year explores the reasons people take and share screenshots on their smartphones. Read the paper here (academic subscription required) or watch the 10-minute conference talk here.
Accusations of ChatGPT Cheating: I did a study on college students’ experiences of being accused of cheating with ChatGPT, which was recently published. Drexel wrote a press release on the article, and I was happy to see it was picked up by Fast Company and a number of other outlets. It’s rare that academic research generates interest outside academia, but it’s nice when it does.
Have a good weekend! If you know someone who might find this post interesting, please share!