Information Is Power
Who to Listen To, and How to Choose What You Feed Your Mind

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar line. Where it comes from turns out to be a good place to start. It says something useful about how information turns into power, and how often it does not.

This page rests on one idea, and it is our own way of putting it: your mind works a little like your stomach. What you take in, again and again, shapes how you think. That is a comparison, not a scientific finding, and the page says where research bears on it and where it does not.

From there, the page looks at:

• Who is worth listening to.
• A short filter to run before believing something.
• How to find the strongest version of a view you disagree with.
• Why a few deep sources can beat endless scrolling.

It ends with books and a film on the same theme, and practices drawn from the sources.

Some of this is covered in more depth on other pages. For checking a claim step by step, see the SIFT method. For quotes and invented sources, see how to spot a fake quote. For the mental shortcuts that mislead us, see cognitive biases, checked.

Where “knowledge is power” comes from

Bacon’s line was about God

The Latin words begin with Francis Bacon, in a passage about God. In February 1597 Bacon published the first edition of his Essayes. The same volume held his Religious Meditations and Places of Perswasion and Disswasion.

The meditations, the Meditationes Sacrae, are in Latin. One of them is titled De Haeresibus, “Of Heresies”.

In it, Bacon criticises people who give God’s knowledge a wider range than God’s power. He then puts it more exactly: a wider range to the part of God’s power by which God knows than to the part by which he works and acts.

In brackets he adds the famous phrase: “for knowledge itself is power”. That is the English of James Spedding’s 1859 edition. The Latin of the aside reads nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

In context, the knowledge is God’s, and Bacon’s point is that God’s knowing is part of God’s power. It is not advice about getting ahead.

Bacon’s human version came later

Bacon did write about human knowledge and power, more than twenty years later. In the Novum Organum, published in October 1620, the third aphorism reads Scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt. In our translation: human knowledge and human power come to the same thing.

Joseph Devey’s translation begins “Knowledge and human power are synonymous”. The reason it gives: if you do not know the cause, you cannot bring about the effect, and nature is mastered only by submitting to it. The power Bacon means is the power of knowing causes, so that you can act on them.

The exact Latin is Hobbes’s, and he added a catch

The tidy Latin form, scientia potentia est, is Thomas Hobbes’s. Around 1620 Hobbes worked for a time as a secretary to Bacon.

In the Latin edition of Leviathan, published in 1668, Hobbes writes Scientia potentia est; sed parva. In our translation: knowledge is power, but a small one. It is small, he says, because outstanding knowledge is rare and is seen by very few (our translation of quia scientia egregia rara est).

His English Leviathan of 1651 makes the same point: “The Sciences, are small Power; because not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man”.

The idea itself is older than either man. The King James Version of Proverbs 24:5 reads: “A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increaseth strength”.

Our reading: the line is less a promise than a pair of conditions. Bacon’s version needs knowledge of causes that you can act on. Hobbes’s caveat is that knowledge only counts as power when other people can see it.

Your mind is like your stomach (our framing)

This section offers a comparison, not a claim that the brain digests information the way the body digests food. What you read, watch and scroll through, again and again, becomes the material you think with. Choosing it with care is a bit like choosing what you eat.

The comparison is old. Seneca makes it in his second letter to Lucilius. Food does no good, he writes, and is not taken into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten. Toying with many dishes, he adds, is the sign of an over-fussy appetite (Letter 2.3–2.4, in Richard M. Gummere’s translation).

The Latin of that line is more direct: fastidientis stomachi est multa degustare, it is the mark of a fussy stomach to taste many things (our translation).

Francis Bacon used the same image in his essay “Of Studies”: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”. The line was already in the first edition of 1597. The text quoted here is a modern-spelling version of the final edition of 1625, The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral.

Modern writers have kept the comparison going. Clay Johnson’s book The Information Diet is summed up in its catalogue record the same way. Too much junk information can lead to cluelessness, just as too much junk food can lead to obesity.

Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 essay in The Guardian argued that “news is to the mind what sugar is to the body”. Both are arguments by their authors, not research findings.

Where research bears on it: repetition

One finding fits the comparison closely. The illusory truth effect is the finding that people rate statements as truer when they have seen them before.

The first paper on it was published in 1977, by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino. A 2010 meta-analysis pooled 51 studies of it.

Two later results matter for everyday reading.

• In a 2015 set of experiments, repetition made false statements seem truer even when people knew the correct answer.

• In a 2018 study, people saw real false headlines as they had appeared on Facebook. Even a single exposure made a headline seem more accurate later, both in the same session and a week later. Prior exposure had no effect on entirely implausible statements, such as that the earth is a perfect square.

The effect holds up, with limits.

• A 2021 registered study of 567 people found it immediately, after a day, a week and a month. It got smaller as the delay grew.

• A 2022 systematic map of 181 studies found that all were run at Western universities, and most used trivia statements in a single session. It also noted a lack of replications by outside teams.

The 2021 study’s authors point out a conflict. Their finding that the effect fades does not fit an earlier meta-analysis, which found no link across studies between the size of the effect and the delay between sessions.

In short: repetition makes claims feel truer, reliably in the lab. How long the effect lasts is not settled.

Where research bears on it: attention

The economist and computer scientist Herbert Simon put the other half of the problem in a 1971 essay, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”. In an information-rich world, he wrote, the wealth of information means a shortage of something else: the attention of those who receive it. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.

If attention is the scarce thing, then choosing what to feed your mind is also choosing where your attention goes. How much of what competes for it is written by people at all? That is the subject of our page on the dead internet theory, which looks at what the bot numbers measure.

Who to listen to

Two signals help here, in our reading: what a source loses when it is wrong, and what it gains from your attention.

People who pay a price when they are wrong

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game, published by Random House in 2018, is built on one idea. Its publisher presents the idea as a whole worldview, and a rich one.

The publisher’s description quotes him: “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game”. Without it, he says, fools and crooks benefit, and their mistakes never catch up with them.

The book calls asymmetry the core idea behind skin in the game. The publisher’s description puts the rule in plain words: you cannot make profits and pass the risks on to others.

The phrase is older than the book. The Oxford English Dictionary dates skin in the game from 1976. It labels the phrase colloquial, first used in North American business.

Our reading: someone who loses something when they are wrong has a reason to be careful. That loss might be money, reputation or their own health.

Someone with a track record you can check has given you something to check. Neither is proof that they are right, but both are better signals than confidence.

People who are paid by your attention

Simon’s point has a practical side. If a source earns from your attention, its first job is to hold that attention. Being right does not always do that.

Charlie Munger, in his talk on human misjudgment, put incentives first on his list. He thought he had been in the top 5 percent of his age group in understanding the power of incentives for almost all his adult life. Yet he had always underestimated that power, he said.

This is not a reason to dismiss anyone. In “How to Disagree”, Paul Graham gives the example of a senator arguing that senators’ pay should rise: “Of course he would say that. He’s a senator.”

That reply, he writes, would not refute the argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. Our logical fallacies cheat sheet draws the same line: facts about a person matter when you are relying on their word, not when you are judging their reasoning.

A quick filter before you believe something

Here are four questions. None of them takes long, and the last two link to pages that go deeper.

1. Who is saying it, and what do they gain? Gain is not only money: attention, followers and status count too. As above, a motive tells you how much to lean on someone’s word. It does not settle whether their argument holds.

2. Is it a fact, an opinion or a feeling? A Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 US adults in 2018 defined a factual statement as one that objective evidence can prove or disprove. An opinion, it said, reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.

   A majority correctly sorted at least three of five statements of each kind. Pew called that result only a little better than random guesses.

   The third category, a feeling, is our addition. A statement can describe how someone feels about a thing and still be presented as a fact about it.

3. Where is the original source? A quote, a statistic or a study is only as good as the place it first appeared. Our guides on finding where a quote first appeared, on numbers that mislead and on reading a study cover the three cases.

4. Do other trustworthy sources agree? One quick way to find out is to leave the page and see what others say about the source and the claim. That is lateral reading, the core of the SIFT method.

   The same questions apply when the answer comes from an AI chatbot. Our page on critical thinking in the age of AI looks at what studies have found.

Watch your own bias, and find the strongest version of the other side

The filter above points outwards. The harder part points inwards, because the same shortcuts work on whoever is doing the checking. Our cognitive biases page checks fourteen of the famous findings and which held up.

Munger made a practical point about one of these shortcuts. People hold on to the first conclusion they reach. So, he noted, judges and juries must sit through long, skilful presentations of the side they would not naturally favour. He said this helps prevent a good deal of bad thinking caused by first-conclusion bias.

John Stuart Mill made the same argument in On Liberty, published in 1859: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”. It is not enough, he wrote, to hear the other side from your own teachers. You need to meet its arguments at their most plausible and persuasive.

Today this is sometimes called steelmanning, the opposite of a straw man. In the OpenStax textbook Introduction to Philosophy, to steelman an argument is to make the strongest possible case in favour of it.

Paul Graham’s essay “How to Disagree”, from March 2008, gives a ladder for judging the replies themselves. It runs from DH0 to DH6: name-calling, ad hominem, responding to tone, contradiction, counterargument, refutation, and refuting the central point.

The levels, he notes, describe the form of a reply, not whether it is correct. A DH6 reply might still be unconvincing, but one at DH2 or lower is always unconvincing.

Graham’s essay does not use the word steelman. In our reading, the two ideas fit together: you cannot refute someone’s central point until you have stated it in a form they would accept.

Fewer, deeper sources

Seneca’s second letter is the classic case for depth. “Everywhere means nowhere,” in Gummere’s translation (2.2).

A person who spends all their time travelling, he says, ends up with many acquaintances but no friends. The same holds for readers who visit every author in a hasty, hurried way.

His advice in Latin is short: probatos itaque semper lege. In our translation: so always read the tried and tested ones. Our summary of Letters from a Stoic covers the rest of the letters.

Bacon’s essay adds a rule for how to read, not just how much. Read, he says, not to argue against, not to believe and take for granted, and not to find things to talk about, “but to weigh and consider”.

His sorting into tasted, swallowed, and chewed and digested is a way to spend attention unevenly on purpose. A few books, he says, are to be read wholly, with diligence and attention.

Depth does not mean narrowness. Our page on the Renaissance man looks at what research says about range and depth together.

Munger’s talk on human misjudgment

The published version of “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” is not a single talk. Munger’s book Poor Charlie’s Almanack describes it as selections from three of his talks, combined into one talk never given. Munger revised it in 2005.

The first talk was at the Caltech Faculty Club on 2 February 1992. The second was at the Harvard Faculty Club on 6 October 1994. The third was at the Boston Harbor Hotel on 24 April 1995.

The talk works through a numbered list. The book’s note on the talk calls it a checklist of 25 standard causes of human misjudgment. Munger describes them as psychology-based tendencies that are generally useful but often mislead.

Several bear directly on what we take in.

• Doubt-avoidance. The brain is programmed with a tendency to remove doubt quickly by reaching some decision.
• Inconsistency-avoidance. The brain is reluctant to change.
• Availability-misweighing. The mind overweighs what is easily available.

There are also social-proof, authority-misinfluence and what he called the twaddle tendency. Munger said plainly that he had “stolen” the material from its various discoverers, often giving it new descriptions and titles. So many of his tendencies are findings from psychology under his own names.

Popular claims, checked

“Knowledge is power” is Francis Bacon’s line

Partly The words are Bacon’s, but they did not begin as a slogan. The Latin ipsa scientia potestas est is from 1597, and in context it is about God’s knowledge being part of God’s power.

His statement about human knowledge and power came in 1620. The exact form scientia potentia est is Hobbes’s, from 1668, with “but a small one” attached.

Our attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s

Doesn't hold up The comparison is vivid and the numbers sound precise, but no research has been found behind them. The claim says the average attention span fell from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8, less than a goldfish’s 9.

The BBC statistics programme More or Less traced it in 2017. The figure led back to a 2015 industry report, which credited it to another website. The sources that website listed could find no research behind it.

One attention researcher told the BBC that attention depends very much on the task. The programme concluded there was no evidence that human attention spans are shrinking.

A different, narrower measure has changed. Gloria Mark studies how long office workers stay on one screen before switching. She told the American Psychological Association in 2023 that the average fell from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds in recent years.

That is time on one screen at work, not a general attention span, and it is not the 8-second figure. Goldfish do not have short memories either, as our real or myth page explains.

False news spreads faster than true news

Partly A widely cited study is behind this one, though a later reanalysis explains its result differently. Published in Science in 2018, it looked at about 126,000 stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Six fact-checking organisations had judged each one true or false. Falsehood, it found, spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth”.

The study also found that bots spread true and false stories at the same rate. The authors took this to mean that people, not bots, did the extra spreading.

A 2021 reanalysis in PNAS compared stories that spread to the same size. It found that the reported differences in how they spread can almost entirely be explained by the false-news cascades being larger.

So false stories reached more people in that data. Whether they travel by a different mechanism is less clear. Both studies are about Twitter, and about stories fact-checkers had checked.

Echo chambers and filter bubbles trap most people

Still argued Researchers disagree here, and the studies point in different directions.

A 2022 literature review by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found echo chambers much less widespread than is commonly assumed. It found no support for the filter bubble hypothesis. Studies in the UK put the share of people in politically partisan online news echo chambers at between six and eight percent.

On the other side, a 2023 study in Nature used data from 2020 for all active adult Facebook users in the US. Content from like-minded sources made up the majority of what people saw, although political information and news were only a small fraction of it.

In the same study, cutting that content by about one-third for 23,377 users had no measurable effect on eight measures of attitudes.

A companion 2023 study in Science used aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. It found that ideological segregation in political news is high. It also grows as you move from what people could see, to what they did see, to what they engaged with.

Our reading: one-sided feeds are common on some platforms, but being fully sealed off is rare. The effect of one-sided exposure on beliefs is small or unproven in the studies so far. Both Facebook studies covered US users during the 2020 election.

Following the news makes people anxious

Partly The short-term part has support, which makes the larger claim easy to believe. Small experiments show that watching negative news can raise anxiety in the short term.

• In a 1997 study, people shown a 14-minute bulletin edited to negative material felt more anxious and sadder afterwards.

• In a 2007 study of 179 students, state anxiety rose after a 15-minute newscast.

Longer-term effects rest on surveys. After the Boston Marathon bombings, a 2014 study in PNAS looked at people’s media exposure in the week after. Six or more hours a day of bombing-related media exposure was associated with more acute stress than direct exposure to the bombings.

A 2023 study of US adults described what it called “problematic news consumption”. It found greater mental and physical ill-being among the 16.5% with the most severe pattern. A 2025 replication over two waves found 7.5% in that group, and the link with physical ill-being did not hold over time.

Surveys like these show links. They cannot settle whether news causes lasting distress, or distressed people follow more news.

Taleb coined “skin in the game”

Doesn't hold up The phrase is the title of his book, which explains the link, but it is older than the book. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase from 1976, decades before Taleb’s 2018 book. What Taleb did was turn a business phrase into a broad rule about risk and fairness.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is Herbert Simon’s

Holds up The line is in Simon’s 1971 essay quoted above, as given in Oxford Essential Quotations.

Hearing something again makes it seem truer

Holds up, within the limits above. The illusory truth effect has been found since 1977, across many studies, and even when people knew the correct answer. Most studies, though, use trivia, convenience samples and short delays.

Munger’s misjudgment talk was a single 1995 talk

Partly He gave a talk on the subject on 24 April 1995. But the published text combines three talks, from 1992, 1994 and 1995, revised by Munger in 2005.

Reading and watching

These are short descriptions of books and a film on the same theme, taken from their publishers’ and makers’ own pages. They are in no particular order, and listing one is not an endorsement of everything in it.

• Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. Originally published in 1985. Its publisher describes it as a book about the corrosive effects of television on politics and public discourse. It asks what happens when public life becomes subject to the demands of entertainment.

• The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan (1995). A defence of scientific thinking. It has a chapter called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” (chapter 12). Its publisher says it offers a baloney detection kit for thinking through political, social, religious and other issues.

• The Information Diet, Clay Johnson (O’Reilly, 2012; some catalogue records say 2011). Argues that information can be consumed as carelessly as junk food; its catalogue description is summed up above.

• Stop Reading the News, Rolf Dobelli (2020). Its publisher calls it a manifesto about the dangers of news, which it calls the most toxic form of information. He made a shorter version of the argument in his 2013 essay in The Guardian, quoted above.

• Verified, Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (2023). A guide to checking what you find online that builds on techniques such as SIFT and lateral reading. Our SIFT page covers the method.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011). Our summary covers the key ideas and which have held up.

• Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2018). Discussed above, under who to listen to.

• Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport (2019). Its publisher describes minimalism as the art of knowing how much is just enough, and digital minimalism as applying that idea to personal technology. Our Deep Work summary covers his earlier book.

• Factfulness, Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018). Describes ten instincts that distort our view of the state of the world.

• The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser (2011), and his TED talk “Beware online ‘filter bubbles’” from the same year. The book describes what Pariser calls the filter bubble: a personal universe of information shaped by personalisation. The research on how common it is appears above.

• The Shallows, Nicholas Carr (2010). Its publisher frames the question as whether we are sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

• Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday (2012). An account of how rumours travel online and get “traded up” the media ecosystem until they become real headlines.

• Farnam Street (fs.blog), a website and newsletter run by Shane Parrish. It describes itself as devoted to helping readers understand how the world really works, make better decisions and live a better life. Our mental models page checks where many of the ideas it discusses come from.

• The Social Dilemma (2020), a documentary-drama directed by Jeff Orlowski. Netflix describes it as exploring the dangers of social networking for people, with tech experts warning about their own creations.

  The Center for Humane Technology worked on it. It says that never before have a handful of tech designers had so much control over how billions of us think, act and live.

  The film has been criticised from more than one direction. In a review published in 2021, the media scholar Robin Mansell said the film makes a strong causal claim about harm to young people’s mental health. The evidence on that causal link, she wrote, is equivocal.

  She also quoted another scholar’s charge of a selective presentation of evidence and an exaggerated sense of the platforms’ clout. Facebook, one of the companies the film is about, published a response in October 2020 saying the film “buries the substance in sensationalism”.

  The makers and these critics describe the same platforms from different positions. The research summaries above are where the evidence is.

How to use this

These practices come from the sources above. Each is something people do, not a rule.

• Noticing familiarity. Repetition makes claims feel truer, so a claim that feels familiar has not thereby earned trust. Some readers treat “I’ve heard this before” as a cue to check, not a reason to believe.

• Sorting the plate. Bacon’s three kinds of book work for feeds and newsletters too: most things get a taste, and a few get read properly.

• Keeping a short list. Seneca’s version is to stay with a few tested writers and come back to them. A short list of sources with track records that can be checked is one way to do it.

• Asking what the source gains, then weighing their word accordingly, while judging their argument on its merits.

• Naming the category. Before reacting to a claim, labelling it fact, opinion or feeling. Pew’s survey suggests this is harder than it sounds.

• Stating the other side first. Following Mill, writing out the strongest version of the opposing view, in a form its holders would accept, then answering its central point. Graham’s ladder is a way to check the reply.

• Leaving the page. Before sharing something, running the four SIFT moves.

Sources

Knowledge is power

• Francis Bacon, Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion (London, 1597), Meditationes Sacrae, “De Haeresibus” and “Of Studies” (Internet Archive scan); Latin text and English translation in James Spedding (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. VII (London, 1859), pp. 241 and 253 (archive.org scan).
• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Book I, aphorism 3: Latin text, The Latin Library; translated by Joseph Devey, Project Gutenberg.
• Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, “Of Studies” (Project Gutenberg).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Francis Bacon” and “Thomas Hobbes”.
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. X (Project Gutenberg); Latin Leviathan, Part I, cap. X, in Opera Philosophica, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. 3 (London: Bohn; dated 1839 in the Internet Archive record) (Internet Archive).
• Proverbs 24:5, King James Version (Wikisource).

Food for the mind

• Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 2, translated by Richard M. Gummere (Wikisource); Latin text (The Latin Library).
• Clay Johnson, The Information Diet, Open Library record.
• Rolf Dobelli, “News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier”, The Guardian, 12 April 2013.
• Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino, “Frequency and the conference of referential validity”, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16 (1977), doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(77)80012-1.
• Dechêne, Stahl, Hansen & Wänke, “The truth about the truth: a meta-analytic review of the truth effect”, Personality and Social Psychology Review 14 (2010), doi:10.1177/1088868309352251.
• Fazio, Brashier, Payne & Marsh, “Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144 (2015), doi:10.1037/xge0000098.
• Pennycook, Cannon & Rand, “Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147 (2018), doi:10.1037/xge0000465.
• Henderson, Simons & Barr, “The Trajectory of Truth”, Journal of Cognition 4 (2021), doi:10.5334/joc.161.
• Henderson, Westwood & Simons, “A reproducible systematic map of research on the illusory truth effect”, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 29 (2022), doi:10.3758/s13423-021-01995-w.
• Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971), pp. 40–41, as quoted in Oxford Essential Quotations.

Who to listen to, and how to disagree

• Penguin Random House, Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• Oxford English Dictionary, “skin in the game”, in skin, n.
• Charles T. Munger, “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Talk Eleven (Stripe Press).
• Paul Graham, “How to Disagree”, March 2008.
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapter II (Project Gutenberg).
• OpenStax, Introduction to Philosophy, “2.3 Developing Good Habits of Mind”.
• Pew Research Center, “Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News”, 18 June 2018.

Popular claims

• American Psychological Association, Speaking of Psychology, “Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD”, February 2023.
• Simon Maybin, “Busting the attention span myth”, BBC News, 10 March 2017.
• Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, “The spread of true and false news online”, Science 359 (2018), doi:10.1126/science.aap9559.
• Juul & Ugander, “Comparing information diffusion mechanisms by matching on cascade size”, PNAS 118 (2021), doi:10.1073/pnas.2100786118.
• Arguedas, Robertson, Fletcher & Nielsen, “Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review”, Reuters Institute, 19 January 2022.
• González-Bailón et al., “Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook”, Science 381 (2023), doi:10.1126/science.ade7138.
• Nyhan et al., “Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing”, Nature 620 (2023), doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06297-w.
• Johnston & Davey, “The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins”, British Journal of Psychology 88 (1997), doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1997.tb02622.x; Szabo & Hopkinson, “Negative psychological effects of watching the news in the television”, International Journal of Behavioral Medicine 14 (2007), doi:10.1007/bf03004169.
• Holman, Garfin & Silver, “Media’s role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings”, PNAS 111 (2014), doi:10.1073/pnas.1316265110.
• McLaughlin, Gotlieb & Mills, “Caught in a Dangerous World”, Health Communication (2023), doi:10.1080/10410236.2022.2106086; “Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Health: A Replication Study”, Health Communication (2025), doi:10.1080/10410236.2024.2434955.

Reading and watching

• Penguin Random House pages for Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Demon-Haunted World, Digital Minimalism, The Filter Bubble and Trust Me, I’m Lying; Open Library records for first publication years.
• Hodder & Stoughton, Stop Reading the News; University of Chicago Press, Verified; Macmillan, Factfulness; W. W. Norton, The Shallows.
• TED, Eli Pariser, “Beware online ‘filter bubbles’”; Farnam Street, About.
• Netflix, The Social Dilemma; Center for Humane Technology, The Social Dilemma; Robin Mansell, “The Social Dilemma: A Contradictory Narrative About Platform Power”, The Political Economy of Communication 8(2) (2021) (journal page); Facebook, “What ‘The Social Dilemma’ Gets Wrong” (October 2020, PDF).

We read Bacon, Hobbes, Seneca and Mill in the editions and translations linked above; where the English is ours, the page says “our translation”. For the studies we read each abstract and, where it was open, the full text. We did not read the books in the reading list; their descriptions come from their publishers’ and makers’ pages, and Simon’s 1971 essay is quoted through Oxford Essential Quotations.

Checked October 2026.