The Paradox of Choice

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

What book should I read today?

2967 choices 

Pick one at random, and if you don't like it three pages in, put it back. Rinse and repeat. This is the way normal people make choices.

If you have made the wrong choice... well, you can't unmake it. If it is a very important choice, you still have to make it, and at a certain point it might be easier to pick at random and live with what you get than to stress endlessly over it.

[Cain]

Oh, I more or less do anyway, don't worry (currently reading A Very Short Introduction to Marx).  I was just illustrating the point

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I was illustrating the counterpoint. I imagine that if you didn't choose books at random, you'd never get down to half the neat stuff you write about.

[Triple Zero]

While I think the information revolution is a good thing, an equally large filter revolution is needed too.  Screening noise from relevant data is something that is going to be increasingly important.

I was thinking of just that, today. I always keep musing about new ways to order and process data, but I realized that most of them were about creating novel data from existing stuff (currently twitter, bit.ly, etc). It may be good to code a filter for all the tidbits you get fired at you every day, automatically.

I wonder if there are any relevant materials that would aid in learning how to filter and screen noise. I know theres many things that cover it in part but I don't know if there is any literature that focuses particularly on that skill.

check out the late +Fravia's searchlores: http://www.searchlores.org/evaluate.htm

I remember last time from linking this site, Nigel got put off by the pomposity of the writing, please try to look past that, because it's an incredibly useful resource (/offtopic the community is dying after Fravia, in a few months I hope to have set up a new homeground, and I'll be calling on you guys to help populate it).

We are already terribly good at ignoring choice

We're not. You still live at your parents right? (which is ok) I know when I moved out, after a year or so, the amount of choices started to paralize me. This might not go for everybody, but it did for me.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I'd think that when choice is more important and timing more important, the emphasis on making the choice at all would take priority over which of a number of (ostensibly reasonable) choice(s) to choose. That said, yes, and yes.

Btw, I have gone the opposite direction in the data glut problem -- rather than filter out information, I just try to process (or at least absorb on some level) it faster. How well that works is arguable, but my eyes are exposed to a couple hundred wikipedia and tvtropes entries a day without my even opening a browser, and I'm pretty sure some of that is absorbed on some level eventually. That said, even I sometimes need to filter; now that I no longer use pidgin as my sole link to twitter, I lack logs, and so I had to go in and remove about 3/4ths of my follows because I can't absorb that much consciously that fast.

[Kai]

Thanks for the link Zero. I remember you linking before. Had not seen the Sielaff's Lessons page before, that was /excellent/.