Curate Your Consumption: The Most Important Skill of the AI Age

How and why to change how you consume mainstream media and social media

Written by me (Navin Kabra) with the help of Arsh Kabra

Being in the wrong WhatsApp groups and following the wrong people on social media is bad for you. It is bad for your career and will probably also make you an unnecessarily angry or depressed person.

More generally, the problem is that you are probably consuming information from the wrong sources—both on mainstream media as well as social media—and the solution is that you need to learn to curate your sources of information.

AI generated illustration because I didn’t want the Twitter screenshot later in this article to show up whenever I posted a link to this article anywhere.

This article is a bit of a khichadi of the two different ways in which the wrong information sources are bad for you: that they will affect your career, and that they affect your emotional well-being. And the reason for mixing them up into one article is that the solution to both problems is the same: fixing your information diet. We’ll talk about the good things that can happen if you do that, and how to actually do that. Along the way, we’ll also talk about why this has become so important only in recent times and why our parents didn’t have to deal with this problem.

Let’s start with how bad information sources will be bad for your career as AI starts taking over.

Why Aren’t You More Knowledgeable?

Countless online courses from the best universities, taught by the best professors—many of them completely free—are all available at the press of a button (or few). We carry the length and breadth of human knowledge at our fingertips. That which we don’t know ourselves, ChatGPT can teach us at exactly the pace that we can handle.

So, how come we aren’t all Harvard+Stanford+MIT+Oxford graduates combined in a single package? Of all the people who sign up for a Coursera course, approximately 5% actually complete it. And most of us aren’t even signing up. As for ChatGPT, all we use it for is to compose emails.

We have built access ramps to the shoulders of giants, and nobody wants to use them.

What’s going on?

As Naval Ravikant says, “the means of learning are abundant, but the desire to learn is scarce.”

Why is the desire to learn scarce?

Wrong friends and role models.

Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the 5 closest people to you.” Which means that if the 5 people you spend the most time with are the ones with a high level of curiosity, a high desire to learn, regularly doing interesting Coursera courses, and using ChatGPT heavily to learn new things, then you will also be one of the few (the 5%) who regularly learn new things. But if the people around you are spending time on the latest outrage in the news, interminable polarized political discussions, and the countless other ways in which social media sucks away your curiosity, then you will not have a desire to learn.

As ChatGPT starts disrupting jobs, it becomes increasingly important to be able to quickly learn new skills so that you can remain employed.

It is now clear that nobody knows which skills will be replaced by Gen AI and when. The best way to survive the tsunami is to constantly keep track of the capabilities of the latest AI tools, learn to use them well, and acquire new expertise in areas that AI is not yet good at. And the best way to do that is to have a desire to learn two types of things: a) using AI well, and b) learning to do things that AI can’t (and those might not be the same as the things you can currently do well).

So, if you don’t have the desire to learn, you are ngmi (“not gonna make it”). And you will almost certainly not have the desire to learn unless you’re spending time with people who have a desire to learn.

And for the purposes of this section, “the people around you” includes the people on WhatsApp or Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn that you most listen to.

Why is this so dependent on the people around you?

Because You Can’t Drink from a Firehose

The Information Age has quickly turned into the Information Overload Age. There’s a firehose of information pointed at us, and you can’t drink from a firehose. You can only pay attention to a small part of it. And who decides which small part of the firehose you drink from?

If you’re like most other people, you’re getting your information from—and hence you are being influenced by—your family, close friends, and increasingly your WhatsApp groups, your social media, and mainstream media.

Let’s look at what influence these are likely to have on you.

How Toxic are Your WhatsApp Groups?

WhatsApp is one of the best things that has happened to me. It has brought me closer to my family, extended family, friends, and classmates, and it has allowed me to find new friends and communities.

Some of the better WhatsApp groups I’m on are an incredible source of information and inspiration. People sharing cool things they learnt or did. People sharing new activities and initiatives they’re exploring. People being supportive of each other. Some groups are filled with runners and trekkers, which subtly encourages the other members to take up running or trekking. Other groups can inspire non-software people to start creating apps using AI. Or just travel more, or meet more people, or take up new hobbies.

But surely all of you also know about the groups that have political forwards, or misogynistic jokes, or random fear-mongering videos. You know those groups are bad for you, and yet you find yourself sucked into a pointless argument. Or watching another funny, but ultimately pointless video.

Being in groups of the first kind will increase your desire to learn. Being in groups of the second kind is a net negative in your life.

Twitter and Instagram are even worse.

Most people open Twitter and see a wasteland of toxicity. The Epstein scandal is trending. There are make-money-fast ads that are guaranteed to be scams. Questionable medical advice gets millions of views while doctors who fact-check it don’t get any views. Some guy in the US got caught on camera cheating on his wife. Bollywood celebrities are being bad to each other.

Most people who open Instagram see other problems. Women with Instagram faces, perfect bodies sculpted either in the gym or in Photoshop, are going on and on about how you can also look as good as they do. Evidence of the effect of social media on the mental health of teens, especially girls, keeps mounting.

Why does this tweet have 4.6 million views?

And don’t even get me started on TV news.

Media (social or otherwise) is rotting our brains and making us meaner, and giving us mental health problems.

Why is this happening?

All Hail the Algorithm

In the previous section, I was careful to say “most people on Twitter” and “most people on Instagram”. These Most People routinely say things like “Twitter is toxic” or “Instagram is bad for your mental health”. But in reality, Twitter isn’t one thing, and neither is Instagram. Each person sees a different world on their Twitter or their Instagram, depending on who they follow. They don’t realize that everyone else is seeing a very different version. More importantly, they don't realize that Twitter or Instagram is not showing them everything, even from the people they follow: there’s an algorithm that is actively selecting a subset of content to show them, and this is the nastiest part of the equation.

The Algorithm decides what kinds of posts you see more often and what you don’t. The Algorithm is not your friend. Some people who are aware of the algorithm’s hand think the algorithm is making decisions based on what you like and what you dislike—but that’s not really true. The algorithm’s primary job is to make money for its owners.

Remember, social media is free for users. And when something is being offered to you for free, it means that you are the product. Social media platforms offer companies advertising spaces where they can show ads to you, the user. And to make more money, the platforms need you to stay on there for long periods of time to increase the number of ads you see. To do that, they need to tap into something a lot deeper than your likes and your dislikes. They need to tap into your lizard brain. That’s why they have designed the Algorithm to find the things that make you angry, that make you want to yell at each other. The algorithm is designed to get you reading all the time and posting all the time. Venting your anger at someone is extremely cathartic and releases dopamine, and gives you a lot of enjoyment. Seeing other people similarly angry about the same thing is also enjoyable.

So, the algorithm shows you the most outlandish opinion that it knows will piss you off. Then, it shows you other people getting pissed off at the same thing. At some point, you get angry enough that you need to put your own two cents in. And the cycle repeats every second of every day. You stay on there because, despite it all, your brain is hardwired to enjoy these cathartic releases. Because we react to the most toxic stuff, social media is crafting us to be a lot more toxic.

There’s an even more sinister side effect of this that is far worse.

You may have heard how polarized the world is today. Hindus vs muslims, upper castes vs Marathas vs dalits, whites vs blacks, left vs right—along all of these axes, things are much worse than they were 20 years ago. This is not just my opinion—there’s data backing this claim. Take a look at this graph.

As you can see, just between 2000 and 2022, polarisation has risen from a 2, meaning somewhat polarized, to a 4, meaning toxic. But you don’t even need to see this graph. You can see people getting a lot meaner in front of your eyes on social media everywhere. This is not an accident. It’s not a chicken-and-egg thing either, where we don’t know whether social media made us meaner or if our inherent meanness has just been displayed for all to see on social media. We know what came first in this situation. It is all about the Algorithm.

Once the algorithm figures out what you emotionally react to, it shows you more of that and less of the other side. So, on emotionally charged issues, you start seeing reports of the same kinds of events happening in the world again and again, and the same idea being expressed repeatedly. And you start believing that the world is full of those events and those ideas.

To truly understand a complicated situation, you need to hear as many different opinions as you can. If you hear the same thing again and again, you will ignore certain key facts, no matter what side of the discourse you’re on. Social media will hide those facts from you, because they’re a lot more boring than someone bombastically stating their 100% Objectively Correct Opinion. Nuance is not responded to in the deep lizard brain. It does not give you dopamine.

“On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.” Linus Torvalds

Social media cordons you off into echo chambers where your beliefs get constantly reinforced, and you are never exposed to anything that challenges your worldview. If it shows you the opposing opinions, this is done specifically, intentionally to get you angry at it. Even that polar opposite opinion serves only to reinforce the opinion you already have. It intentionally shows you the stupidest form of the opposite argument.

As a result, we only get stupider. We only get meaner.

So, how can we fix this? How do we rise above the wall of information and actually make use of it?

The Engineers and the Chowkidar

This is the skill I was talking about earlier: curating your consumption.

Venkat Gururao calls it “Boundary Intelligence.” I prefer the term “Filter Intelligence.”

Venkat Gururao posits that in human brains, there are two kinds of intelligence that interact with one another. The first, he calls Interior Intelligence. This is the more traditional form of intelligence—what you normally think of when I say the word. It’s your IQ, your logic, your ability to reason. The other kind is Boundary Intelligence. This is your ability to control what kind of information you let in.

Think of it like an office building. Your traditional (interior) intelligence is all the software engineers working and Creating Value For The Shareholders. Your filter (boundary) intelligence, however, is the chowkidar, the security guard, standing in the lobby, deciding who gets into the building. If the chowkidar only lets in certain types of people into the building and refuses admission to others, slowly but surely, what the engineers work on and what they achieve will get controlled by this choice¹.

If your traditional intelligence is your ability to play Poker, then your filter intelligence is your ability to decide which table to sit at—something professional poker players say is a massive skill to learn if you want to make money playing the game. Traditional intelligence is your ability to read and analyze the information in a book. Filter intelligence is choosing the right book to read. Traditional intelligence is being a good listener. Filter intelligence is choosing whom to listen to.

In short, traditional intelligence now depends on filter intelligence. Without filter intelligence, your traditional intelligence might be focused on the wrong skills—skills that could become obsolete. With AI, the world is changing too fast, the problems are wicked, and there’s a thick fog of war. It is difficult to tell what is reality and what is marketing hype, and who is making sensible predictions and who is spouting nonsense. Filter intelligence helps you navigate that fog by helping you decide between irrelevant slop and the golden nuggets of truth.

Develop filter intelligence; otherwise, even ChatGPT is going to only tell you things that you like hearing.

And an additional problem is that, with Google and ChatGPT and YouTube, traditional intelligence can be outsourced. Learning to process information is easy, and actually doing it is even easier, actually. Complementarily, the importance of filter intelligence increases². Instead of passively consuming what the algorithm serves up for you, you need to become much more active and mindful about choosing what you want to see.

Why Now?

If this skill is so important, why isn’t it being taught in schools? Why has this suddenly become important now, in the “AI Age” as the title of this article claims?

Because the world today is so very different from the world of your parents and teachers.

My father became a civil engineer in the 50s. For the rest of his 40-year career, not much changed in the civil engineering world. Everyone went to school and learnt the more or less same stuff, and that gave them the necessary skills to last the rest of their career. Everyone knew where they needed to go to pick up a new skill—everything important could be found in well-known and revered textbooks, in schools and libraries.

I became a computer programmer in the 90s. I had to learn a new programming language every 10 years, and in recent times, new JavaScript frameworks every 3 years. But, even in those cases, what to learn and where to learn it from wasn’t too difficult to figure out.

But now, new AI tools and brand-new AI capabilities are released on a monthly basis. Tools that have the potential to disrupt entire industries and take away large chunks of jobs become available for free, and most people don’t even know about them. And the problem is that there are no experts—the people who invented this technology themselves don’t really know how best to use them. Muddying the waters is the fact that marketing and media hype around AI has gone up to insane levels.

It is clear to me that AI is the most important disruption of our lifetimes. And yet there is no textbook and no course you can take to quickly understand the full situation and get up to speed. Sure, there are a number of textbooks and courses that claim to do this, but currently, even the good ones are like the six blind men of Indostan who are trying to figure out what an elephant looks like—showing you just a small slice of the full picture.

So, knowing what skills to pick up to prepare for the AI age is a difficult problem.

But there’s an even bigger problem. A large number of people don’t even realize that they are supposed to be picking up new skills to prepare for the AI age. They don’t know how big a disruption AI will be and are just going about their lives as if nothing has changed.

In short, schools aren’t teaching the right things, mainstream experts’ predictions are not reliable, and most people aren’t even aware that there is a serious problem.

The solution to all this is to broaden your sources of input, to improve your filter intelligence. During the COVID pandemic, people OODA-looping through social media outperformed “experts” in predicting outcomes. Similarly, I can see that right now, following the right people on Twitter and Substack is necessary to a) realize that we need to pay attention to AI, and b) know how and where to pay attention.

Ruthlessness is Mercy Upon Ourselves

So, how do we train this skill? How do we make our filters stronger?

You have to curate what you see—through continued effort. On social media, ruthlessly unfollow accounts that resort to ragebaiting and engagement farming. Ruthlessly unfollow accounts that focus too much on current news. Ruthlessly unfollow people who engage in or fall for marketing hype. One strike and you’re out.

Find people who speak with intelligence and nuance. Find people who make meaningful contributions.

This isn’t just a one-time thing that you do and then forget about. It’s a continued process. Use an OODA Loop: Observe the things you’re reading, Orient your observations around a vision of what a particular social media site has to offer, Decide what you want out of a particular platform, and most crucially, Act upon those decisions. Create positive feedback loops where you search out new information and examine why someone is releasing that information in a particular way. When new information presents itself, process it and be careful of your trapped priors, the beliefs that are stuck in your brain so firmly that all contradicting evidence is disbelieved.

Most of all, find and follow people who appear to be fast OODA-looping their way around the unknown landscape.

A part of this process that gets left out in most discussions of it is your output—what you are writing and posting. You have to curate that also intelligently. Filter intelligence needs to filter on the way out, too. This is so because your output plays a big role in deciding what the Algorithm shows you. Write about black holes and you’ll start seeing more astrophysics content. Post angrily about the latest idiotic politician statement, and you’ll start seeing more idiotic political takes.

So become more mindful about what you post.

Your social media posts are you tapping a tuning fork out into the world and seeing who resonates. (Adapted from @kevinakwok)

Your social media posts are a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. (Adapted from Henrik Karlsson)

Keep in mind that you should also carefully choose which platforms you spend time on—Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, and WhatsApp are not the same—they have different strengths and weaknesses and are populated by different types of people. So choose wisely. But remember to base your decisions on the best of that platform, because that is what you will see after you start exercising your ruthless curation skills.

How About a Social Media Detox?

All of this curating of social media feeds sounds like a lot of work. Maybe you could just do a Social Media Detox instead?

Unfortunately, this is one of those ideas that sounds perfect in theory, but doesn’t work in reality. There’s research showing that social media detoxing does not improve either people’s well-being or life satisfaction. Why? I’m not sure. Probably the FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, that comes from not being on social media, is simply too high. Perhaps the social pressure of not being on social media overcomes any of its benefits. Or, you simply miss the funny reels and the dopamine hits from Twitter.

Alas. You’re just going to have to work hard on this one.

But trust me, the hard work of curation is worth it. You have to think of curation like exercise: you don't want to do it, but it is good for you in the long term. It is difficult to do, but it feels good after you've done it.

Once you start a process of curation, of blocking the grognards and liking the artists, of blocking the kneejerk reactions from the hellscape of anger and brutality and liking careful, sensible analyses, you start to actively make yourself smarter. If you challenge yourself to read things that you don’t think you’ll like, you’ll be surprised by the stunning amount of nuance that this world holds.

The world is simpler in Black and White, but it’s so much more beautiful when you can see all the colours.

1. Assume that the engineers don’t have access to the internet. Because in this stretched analogy, the chowkidar is the gateway and firewall controlling access to the internet

2. The economists among you will recognize this process from the idea of “commoditizing your complement”. The non-economists among you should use your favourite LLM to understand the idea of “commoditizing your complement”. You will also notice that earlier, learning about “commoditizing your complement” used to be the hard part. Now, thanks to ChatGPT, that part is easy: and knowing that you should learn about it was the hard part.