Learning Aloud

Essayist David Perrell has written a post arguing that the abundance of information offers a great opportunity for a few, but a significant problem for many. He calls this position the paradox of abundance and uses the metaphor of abundant food as a parallel providing possible insights.

As I understand the logic of this parallel (starting from the challenges of abundant food), human evolution has lagged significantly beyond the technology of modern agriculture and prepared foods. Biologically, we are not “programmed” to deal with an abundance of food especially the great variety of food not necessarily ideal for consumption. The more primitive drive encouraging consume when you can have not yet adapted to abundance. He also references a finance argument called Greshman’s Law familiar to many which suggests that bad money drives out good. I interpret this to mean, in this case, that cheap poor quality food that tastes good will be particularly attractive. For those who are discriminant consumers and Perrell suggests who prepare their own food from scratch, the abundance of quantity and quality is of great benefit. For the greater number who pay less attention to food quality and rely on purchased and at least partly prepared food, the abundance of low-quality food has led to many problems.

The essayist sees a similar situation with information. We clearly have an abundance of information varying greatly in quality including content purposefully generated to mislead and confuse. Free access allows discriminating consumers to benefit greatly, but those with less skill or those making less effort will likely encounter poor quality content. The poor quality drives out good is used to explain the penchant to consume simplistic explanations for complex things and to be drawn to emotion-inducing content. The author proposes the benefits of focusing efforts to assist through curation. He also argues the benefits of writing much in the same way to sees benefits in cooking from scratch.

I encourage reading of this essay as an interesting way to think about an obvious issue. In general, reasoning from metaphor is not a strong approach, but I can see the logic in the comparison. Describing a problem in an interesting and innovative way does not necessarily mean the core causes have now been identified and can be addressed. What about the recommendations – make use of the recommendations of trusted curators and write yourself are consistent with my own biases, but I would be challenged to offer data in support. At a more general level, writing forces extended processing and requires metacognition evaluation through translation that provides some advantages.

I don’t think it likely we will escape from the abundance of food or content. This is a consequence of the capitalism we endorse and once opportunities exist it becomes difficult to go back.