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When Critical Thinking Isn’t Enough: To Beat Information Overload, We Need to Learn “Critical Ignoring”
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When Critical Thinking Isn’t Enough: To Beat Information Overload, We Need to Learn “Critical Ignoring”

Beset by advertisements and noxious information, our attention is increasingly fractured.

Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky
The Conversation, 2023
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9

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Everyone knows search engine algorithms shunt you to incendiary or prurient sites to increase their ad revenue, yet that strategy remains remarkably effective. The tsunami of information, disinformation and misinformation online can overwhelm you. You may need new strategies to discern which sources are worth your time. Writing in The Conversation, a philosopher, two cognitive scientists and an educational scientist – Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky – propose that web users apply “critical ignoring” as much as critical thinking. If you actively choose what to ignore, they insist, you’ll retain more bandwidth to attend to and savor more meaningful material.

Summary

Search engines are designed to take you to obnoxious or lascivious sites.

Most of the platforms you use to search the internet are designed to seduce your attention away from your intended tasks. Their main goal is to keep you online in order to generate revenue. To achieve that goal, they engineer their algorithms to shunt you to any sites that will keep you online longer, including inflammatory, outrageous and offensive sites you most likely would not come across on your own. In effect, search engines were “conceived in sin.”

These tactics prove amazingly effective. In 2013, for example, hashtags on Twitter – now X – retained their popularity for 1.5 times longer than they retained popularity in 2016,indicating that society’s collective attention span diminished and is diminishing. With dis- and misinformation so rampant...

About the Authors

Ralph Hertwig is the Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where Anastasia Kozyreva is a cognitive scientist. Sam Wineburg is a Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History at Stanford University. Stephan Lewandowsky is the Chair of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol.

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