Total Noise (TMI)

“In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it.”  - David Foster Wallace, “Deciderization 2007—a Special Report”

In a world where information is being produced and stored in exponentially greater quantities every year, where stored human knowledge is estimated by some to double annually, where ideology slants and information bubbles are active and powerful, where every academic finding comes with a half-dozen counter-findings and a meta-analysis questioning the reliability of the entire field’s fundamental methodology, David Foster Wallace’s description in the above quote pretty accurately captures my experience of trying to be an informed modern person who also has a life.  The information-overload state, which DFW calls “total noise”, is a plight that I suspect most epistemically aware people wrestle with occasionally.

I’m less interested here in whether or not it’s theoretically possible, from a philosophical / epistemological standpoint, to untangle the modern rat’s nest on any given issue than I am in how we are supposed to deal with this situation, personally and practically, in the immediate present.  After all, theoretically, we could just be agnostic on every important fact or issue.  But the fact of the matter is that we have to live right now, and that means we have to make decisions like who to vote for and which brand to buy and which side to argue for on facebook right now, and right now doesn’t allow time for anything like epistemic due diligence.  As people who want to be right about stuff so they can make decisions that will positively impact the world, what’s the best approach we can take to overinformation?  Are there some kinds of authority we can identify and trust?  Are there tools or shortcuts or close approximations we can rely on?  Is the attempt even worth the effort?  Do we have to just give up on anything like certainty, and if so, is this freeing or crippling?  What’s your experience with this problem - how do you personally approach complex decisions or issues?  What do you see as the upsides and downsides of your approach?