Tyranny of the Majority

Umair Haque is worried that a steady diet of tech.memeorandum is making him stupid:

[from The Problems with 2.0, pt 34514]

I luv Memeorandum and all it’s reconstructor cousins. It’s one of the first things of my reading list. It’s hugely slashed my search costs in finding new stuff. But there’s a problem. Ever since I’ve started using it to the point where it replaces many of my other sources, I have gotten stupider. I can feel it - I don’t think as fast, flexibly, or freely.

I persist in spending at least half of my reading time wandering around, for that very reason.

Aggregation a la tech.memeorandum is great for finding out what people are piling on, but bad for finding new, oddball, errant nonsense… and we need a reasonable admixture of that goo or we get stale, cobwebby, stupid.

The same reason that you have to get out of the RSS reader: too much same old, same old.