CRITICAL IGNORING

Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, was no slacker. In addition to his Nobel Prize, he was a towering figure in computer science, winning that field’s highest honor, the A. M. Turing Award. He also recognized a problem that would become familiar to anyone trying to keep up with a constant stream of information: there is more to read than anyone has time to assess.

In a 1971 paper, Simon told the story of how one Easter his neighbors bought their children a pair of bunnies. “Whether by intent or accident, one was male and one female. And soon the neighborhood was overrun by bunnies.” Simon proposed the following law: overabundance of one thing leads to the scarcity of another. The neighborhood bunny explosion, he explained, led to a scarcity of lettuce.

You’ve heard our current era called the “information age,” but that merely names what is abundant. What does this overabundance lead to? Simon’s answer: it leads to a “scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.” And since information “consumes the attention of its recipients,” Simon believed “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”1

When we flash Simon’s quotation on the screen in our workshops, audience members nod in agreement. “Ah, yes,” they say, “we all need to pay more attention.”

No, we explain. Simon was saying just the opposite.

Here’s the thing. Attention is a zero-sum game. You can’t give something more attention without giving something less. Telling people struggling to keep their heads above water that they should think critically about every item that streams across their screens—reading closely, scrutinizing thoroughly, vetting conscientiously—actually makes things worse. Attention is frittered away, leaving us enervated. Spent. And, too often, confused.

Critical ignoring means deciding which sources deserve sustained attention. A brief check of an unfamiliar source can help you choose whether to read closely, seek better coverage, or move on.

Critical thinking and deep reading demand sustained attention. Spending that attention on a source that has little to offer leaves less for better treatments of the same question. Being selective helps you put the effort where it is useful.

Consider the problem of pacing effort. Consider a cyclist getting ready for a big race. What does that race consume? Energy, right? Does the coach tell the cyclist, “Listen up—the key to winning the race is to not run out of energy, so pedal as fast as you can”?

No! Just the opposite.

It is certainly good for a cyclist to be fit, to have the requisite muscle mass, and, sometimes, to pedal quite fast. But effective coaching is not about teaching cyclists to expend more energy. It’s about teaching them to expend less. Bow your head to reduce wind resistance. Sustain correct posture. Maximize both up and down strokes. Success is about pacing and breathing and maintaining clean aerodynamic lines. The principle governing all this? At every point, cyclists seek to minimize the energy they expend relative to the benefit they gain. Why? Because in the middle of the race, energy is going to get scarce—really fast. Racers need to conserve energy so that they have it when they really need it.

What energy is to a cyclist, attention is to an information seeker. A journal you’ve never heard of claims that smoking a hookah is no more dangerous than sipping an occasional beer, laying it on thick with strings of esoteric equations. (The source book discusses this example in chapter 7.) Before spending an hour spiraling down this rabbit hole, don’t you want to know the same journal published articles claiming that heeled shoes led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia and that masturbation is a cure for nasal congestion?2

It’s not just that giving your attention to dubious sources is a waste of time. It’s that attention, misapplied, can be dangerous. It would be comforting to think that when you engage deeply and earnestly with neo-Nazi literature or industry-backed climate change research that you come out more informed, provided you note all the logical traps and rhetorical fallacies along the way. In reality, whenever you give your attention to bad actors, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and freely offer them the opportunity to warp your perspective.

Critical ignoring also requires humility. Being skilled at spotting rhetorical tricks does not make you immune to them, and you do not have to master a dubious argument before seeking a more reliable account.

By dwelling on an unfamiliar site, thinking that we’re smart enough to outsmart it, we squander attention and hand over control to the site’s designers. SIFT offers a way to make that choice: stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims to their original context. Looking beyond a site before committing to it helps us decide where to spend our attention.

A quick check can sometimes take as little as thirty seconds. A difficult or consequential claim may require more work.

Further reading in the source book: Postscript.