The Overwhelm Issue: Did You Even Remember Baltimore Was This Year?

We process too much for our brains nowadays.

I just looked over the most-clicked and shared stories of the year for The New York Times, detailed here, and predictably most of the stories are about Trump, the election, and (because of recency bias and salacious nature) Luigi Mangione shooting the UnitedHealth CEO. (Is he a patsy?)

What did surprise me was that clicked-on Story №3 of the year was the Baltimore bridge collapse, which happened back in March, but it made me think for five minutes: was that even this year? I guess it indeed was.

This led me an older thing I wrote and think about sometimes: we talk often of misinformation and disinformation (are those the same thing?), but one thing we don’t discuss a lot is information overload.