The Information Diet

The difference between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly is that Stewart is honest about his role as entertainer.

While these shows are funny, watching them isn’t the same as having a sense of humor. We shouldn’t conflate laughter with having a sense of humor. Laughing is important, sure, but being able to see the humor in all things—especially yourself—is even more important.

It turns out that a sense of humor might just be a vital part of our brain’s ability to rewire itself.

Much of what makes us laugh are things that are unexpected. The great jokes are about misdirection and surprise. As we anticipate the punchline of a joke, we’re trying to figure out where it’s going—the joke itself tends to be a buildup towards an expectation, and then comes the punchline: usually something unexpected. That’s what makes it funny.

Take Rove’s letter: he leads with something rather standard—a greeting and formality, but then closes with a killer punchline. It immediately changed my opinion of Rove, unwiring the heuristic in my brain that’s been trained by years of being a democratic political operative to believe that the man is pure, unbridled evil.

Instantly, upon reading that letter, Rove became to me somebody that’s human and very aware of himself. My presumptions about him changed and all of a sudden, I found myself saying in my social circles, “Oh, Karl Rove isn’t so bad. He just has different beliefs than we do.” I’d get jumped on, then pull out the letter and show it off. The power of Karl Rove’s humor softened the hearts of even the most liberal of activists.

It turns out that there may be some science behind this idea. In their book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press), scientists Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. provide a cognitive and evolutionary perspective for our sense of humor.

They argue that humor could be a cognitive cleanup mechanism of the mind, that nature needed a way for us to constantly check our judgmental heuristics, and reward ourselves for seeking the unexpected. They stipulate that laughter itself is a social signal that demonstrates cognitive prowess—something that’s useful in mate selection—and thus, our ability to laugh spread through generations.

Humor tends to be a useful mechanism for figuring out when you’re overly attached to information, too. If you can’t laugh at something, it likely means you’re not flexible with the information—that you take it so seriously that your mind cannot be changed. While it’s good to have these stances on some topics (say, the Holocaust or slavery), if you can’t laugh at Lebron James jokes, you might be taking your love of the Miami Heat a little too seriously.

Studying humor tends to make whatever might be funny no longer so, so I’ll leave it at this: lighten up.

Chapter 10. How to Consume

“While it is true that many people simply can’t afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we’ve somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the Internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority.”

—Michael Pollen

So now we’ve got our three skills: data literacy, a sense of humor, and a method for training and accounting for our executive function and attention span. The question now is: what is it that we should consume? What kinds of information go into a healthy information diet?

The world of food is littered with advice, and the one we probably know the best comes from the United States Department of Agriculture: the food pyramid. You’ve seen it—it looks like Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. The United States Food Pyramid: 1992–2011.

In 2011, the food pyramid was found to be too complicated, so it was distilled into something a bit more simple, ChooseMyPlate.gov, shown in Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2. The New ChooseMyPlate.gov: 2011–.

There is currently no government agency to monitor information consumption—though former President Bill Clinton suggested creating one in May 2011.[83] He suggested an agency that would regulate our information providers and suggest to us what information we should consume and which we should not—an independent agency run by the government that would determine what kinds of information ought to be released.

I suspect that if this idea gained any serious traction in government, the public would loudly destroy the thought. It’s just not viable: the first amendment prohibits any authority a federal agency could have over speech, and even if that were miraculously overlooked, it’d be a waste of money. The agency would have zero credibility with any consumer of information.

It’d be immediately labeled an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” We can regulate food because neither beef nor turnip greens typically inform our vote. Moreover, it’d be impossible to label and classify all the kinds of information we consume. A nutritional label (see Figure 10-3) would be equally impossible and ridiculous.

But just because there shouldn’t be a ministry of information, it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be “dietary guidelines” for information. They just shouldn’t come from government. Ideally, they ought to come from science, however you won’t find many neuroscientists clamoring to build the info-pyramid.

And of course, with food, we have the aforementioned 60,000 diet books available on Amazon.com if we want to get more advanced. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same kinds of resources to draw upon for creating a healthy information diet book, since it’s difficult to dissect individual information resources for their exact nutritional values. On top of that, proposing a list of information one should take in seems nearly reprehensible—who am I to tell you exactly what you should be reading?

Figure 10-3. A sample information nutrition label.

I don’t want to tell you what information to consume, or impose my own biases on you—that wouldn’t be responsible. Instead, I want to give you a framework for information consumption. Like nutrition, you won’t be nearly as successful at this if we focus too much on the food itself; instead, we have to focus on developing healthy habits for information consumption.

But, as I’ve noted before, the Internet moves faster than an author or a publisher, so if you want the latest and greatest resources, please visit InformationDiet.com and visit the wiki where I, along with the community of other readers, will keep an updated list of reliable sources at the bottom of the trophic pyramid.

Consume Consciously

Let’s first define the kind of information consumption that matters for our discussion. When I say consumption, I mean the kind of consumption that requires action on your part to initiate, with something whose purpose it is purely to provide you with information. Watching television, surfing the Web, listening to the radio, playing video games, and reading books, magazines, or newspapers—these are all forms of active information consumption. If it has a channel, a page, a frequency—if it involves you turning it on and off, or you picking it up— that’s the kind of information we’re talking about.

We’re not talking about the information consumption you don’t have explicit control over beginning and ending: advertisements on the side of the road during your commute to work, conversations with friends, families, and the waiter at your local restaurant, or the music in an elevator. While these things do contribute to your overall information intake, you don’t have a lot of control over them, so we can’t do much about them without turning you into a recluse.

We’re also not talking about the production of information for others to consume. While this is part of