Signal and Noise

Every day, you process more information than a person living in the 1500s encountered in an entire lifetime. That's not a metaphor. It's a rough calculation based on the volume of text, images, audio, notifications, headlines, emails, texts, ads, signs, screens, and ambient data that passes through a modern human's awareness in twenty-four hours.

And almost none of it matters.

That's not cynicism. That's signal theory — a branch of engineering that's been around since the 1940s, when a mathematician named Claude Shannon figured out the fundamental problem of communication: how do you separate the message from the static?

Shannon was working on telephone lines and radio transmissions. But his insight applies to everything. Your inbox. The news cycle. Social media. The advice your brother-in-law gives you about investments. The podcasts you half-listen to while driving. All of it is a mix of signal — information that actually matters to your decisions and your life — and noise — everything else.

The problem isn't that you can't find information. The problem is that you're drowning in it, and nobody taught you how to swim.

The Attention Economy

Here's the systems-level view. In earlier articles, we talked about networks and how they shape what you see and believe. Now let's talk about why those networks are shaped the way they are.

The answer is economics. Specifically, the economics of attention.

In a world where information is infinite and free, the scarce resource isn't content. It's your attention. Every app, every platform, every news outlet, every content creator is competing for the same finite pool of hours in your day. And the ones that win are the ones that are best at capturing and holding that attention.

Not informing you. Not helping you. Capturing you.

This isn't new. Newspapers figured out a century ago that "if it bleeds, it leads." But the scale is new. The sophistication is new. A newspaper could put a scary headline above the fold. A modern platform can track your eye movements, measure your scroll speed, A/B test which thumbnail makes you click, and adjust in real time — thousands of times a day, for billions of users, simultaneously.

The result is an information environment that's been optimized, with extraordinary precision, to produce engagement. Not understanding. Not truth. Engagement. And engagement, it turns out, correlates strongly with emotional arousal — particularly anger, fear, and outrage.

So the information that reaches you most easily isn't the information that's most true or most useful. It's the information that's most emotionally activating. The signal-to-noise ratio of your information diet has been deliberately degraded because noise is more profitable than signal.

What Signal Actually Looks Like

Signal is information that changes what you do.

That's it. That's the test. If a piece of information doesn't alter a decision you're going to make, an action you're going to take, or a belief you hold about something that affects your life — it's noise. It might be interesting noise. Entertaining noise. Emotionally satisfying noise. But it's noise.

Try applying this filter to your last hour of information consumption:

• That article about a political scandal in a state you don't live in — did it change anything you'll do this week? Noise.
• That tweet thread about why a celebrity is problematic — did it affect any decision in your life? Noise.
• That news alert about markets dropping 2% — are you going to change your investment strategy because of it? If not, noise.
• That friend's text asking if you're free Saturday to help him move — that changes your schedule. Signal.
• That email from your doctor's office about test results — that changes how you think about your health. Signal.

Most men, when they honestly audit their information intake, find that signal accounts for maybe 5-10% of what they consume. The rest is noise they've been trained to treat as important.

The Three Channels of Noise

Noise doesn't arrive randomly. It comes through predictable channels, and recognizing them is half the battle.

Channel 1: Algorithmic noise. This is the stuff platforms feed you because their models predict you'll engage with it. It's personalized, which makes it feel relevant even when it isn't. "Recommended for you" is a polite way of saying "engineered to keep you scrolling." The algorithm doesn't know what's good for you. It knows what keeps your thumb moving.

Channel 2: Social noise. This is the information you consume because people in your network are consuming it. Your buddy shares an article about seed oils. Your coworker won't shut up about a podcast. Your group chat is dissecting last night's game. Social noise feels like connection — and sometimes it is — but it also creates information conformity. You end up knowing what your cluster knows and caring about what your cluster cares about, regardless of whether any of it is signal for your life.

Channel 3: Status noise. This is information you consume to maintain a class identity (remember our OOP discussion). You read the business press because you're a Professional. You follow certain accounts because you're a Informed Citizen. You have opinions about geopolitics because the class definition for Educated Man includes that method. None of this is necessarily signal. It's interface maintenance — keeping up the public-facing behaviors your labels require.

Once you can name the channel, you can start deciding whether to listen to it.

Noise Feels Productive

Here's the trap. And it's a particularly effective trap for men in their 40s and 50s, because it exploits something we were raised to value: being informed.

Reading the news feels productive. Scanning industry headlines feels productive. Staying on top of "what's happening" feels like a responsibility. And there was a time — pre-internet, pre-smartphone, pre-algorithmic feeds — when it mostly was. When information was scarce, consuming more of it was almost always useful.

That world is gone. We haven't updated the habit.

The feeling of being informed and the state of being informed are now almost completely decoupled. You can spend two hours reading news and emerge less clear about the world than when you started, because what you consumed was optimized for engagement, not understanding. You feel like you did something. You didn't. You were the product, not the customer.

Real signal — the stuff that actually makes you smarter, better positioned, more effective — is almost never served to you. You have to go find it. And finding it requires a fundamentally different posture toward information than the one most of us default to.

The Posture Shift: Pull, Don't Be Pushed

Most information consumption is push-based. The platform pushes content to your feed. The news app pushes alerts to your phone. The email pushes itself into your inbox. The group chat pushes messages to your lock screen. You're on the receiving end of a firehose, and your only choices are to swallow it or look away.

Signal-seeking is pull-based. You decide what you need to know, and you go get it.

The difference sounds small. It's enormous.

Push-based consumption puts you in a reactive posture. Something arrives, you respond. Your attention is a flag in a windstorm, pointing wherever the strongest gust blows it. Every notification is a small interruption that costs you more than the seconds it takes to read — research suggests it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. If you're getting pinged 30 times a day, you're not focusing on anything. You're skimming the surface of everything.

Pull-based consumption puts you in a deliberate posture. You start with a question: what do I need to know to make the decisions in front of me? Then you go find answers. When you have them, you stop. You don't keep browsing. You don't follow the algorithmic breadcrumbs into the forest. You got what you came for. You leave.

This feels unnatural at first. It feels like you're missing things. You are. That's the point. You can't process everything. Choosing what to miss is the skill.

Building a Signal Filter

Engineers build filters to separate signal from noise in communications systems. You can build one for your information diet. Here's a practical framework:

1. Define your decisions. At any given time, you have a handful of actual decisions in front of you. Career move. Health choice. Financial plan. Relationship question. Parenting situation. Write them down. These are your signal domains — the areas where information might actually change what you do.

2. Identify your sources. For each decision domain, find 2-3 sources you trust — not because they agree with you, but because they have relevant expertise and a track record of being right more often than wrong. Bookmark them. Go to them directly when you need them. These are your pull sources.

3. Throttle the push. Turn off notifications for everything that isn't a direct message from a person you care about or a calendar event. Everything. The news will still be there when you choose to check it. The market will still move whether you watch it or not. The group chat will survive without your immediate reaction.

4. Set information windows. Check the push channels — email, news, social media — at set times. Twice a day is plenty for most people. Once in the morning, once in the evening. Outside those windows, the channels are closed. This isn't discipline. It's engineering. You're designing a system that serves you instead of one that extracts from you.

5. Apply the action test. For every piece of information that catches your attention, ask: does this change something I'm going to do? If yes, it's signal — save it, think about it, act on it. If no, let it go. Don't bookmark it "for later." Don't share it to seem informed. Let it pass through you like the noise it is.

What You Gain

Men who make this shift report something unexpected. They don't feel less informed. They feel less anxious.

Because a huge amount of what passes for "staying informed" is actually just ambient stress. A low-grade, constant awareness of problems you can't solve, events you can't influence, and outrages you can't fix — all delivered at a volume and velocity that keeps your nervous system in a permanent state of low-level alarm.

Cut the noise, and the alarm subsides. Not because the problems went away. Because you stopped letting them occupy space in your brain rent-free.

What takes their place is something most men haven't felt since before smartphones: boredom. Real, honest, uncomfortable boredom. The kind where you're sitting somewhere with nothing to look at and nothing to react to and your brain starts doing something it's forgotten how to do — thinking.

Not consuming. Not reacting. Not scrolling. Thinking. Making connections between ideas. Having original thoughts about your own life. Noticing things in your immediate environment that you've been too distracted to see.

That's where signal lives. Not in the feed. In the quiet space you create when you turn the feed off.

The Network Effect

One last piece, connecting this back to the system.

When you change your information diet, you change what you bring to your network. The conversations you have shift. The things you notice shift. You become a different kind of node — one that passes signal instead of amplifying noise.

And because networks are systems, that change ripples. The friend who used to send you rage-bait articles notices you don't engage with them anymore. Maybe he keeps sending them. Maybe, eventually, he sends fewer. The coworker who monologues about podcasts notices you're not mirroring the same content back. Maybe the conversation deepens into something original.

You can't control the network. But you can change your own signal-to-noise ratio. And in a system where most nodes are broadcasting noise, a node that consistently provides signal becomes something rare and valuable.

It becomes worth listening to.