When the “river” is so polluted that it catches on fire, it’s time for your personal EPA (Estimation of Probable Accuracy) filter to kick in. Practice, practice, practice.
• WSJ > “Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring” by Christopher Mims (1-2-2026) – In an age of endless low-quality information, it’s time to fight our instinct to seek out and absorb all we can.
… critical ignoring. “It’s not total ignoring,” says Sam Wineburg [emeritus professor of education at Stanford University], who coined the term in 2021. “It’s ignoring after you’ve checked out some initial signals. We think of it as constant vigilance over our own vulnerability.”
… it’s up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit. In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information [especially our brain’s bias for negative information], and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data.
Key points (quoted)
- Realize that critical thinking has become a liability
- Remember that your attention is a scarce resource
- Recognize that ‘true enough‘ is dangerous
- Use the internet against itself