2025 Resolution: Stop being distracted by noise
In 2025, corrupt power brokers are going to work hard to distract you. Don't let them.
In an era where information is abundant but clarity is scarce, understanding "noise"—the distractions and distortions that obscure truth—is more important than ever. While intelligence analysts coined the term to describe challenges in their work, the concept resonates far beyond government or military contexts. Noise is everywhere, from the relentless churn of news cycles to the echo chambers of social media.
There are plenty, millions of facts about the news every day. Sticking to the facts is just step one. “True but irrelevant” is more common than many realize. There is a lot of noise out there. Unassembled and unfiltered facts are not helpful.
Noise refers to anything that clouds our understanding of events, making it harder to discern meaningful insights. In our daily lives, it might be the overwhelming flood of headlines or competing narratives. Historically, it includes the biases, myths, and misinterpretations that shape how we see the past—and, by extension, the present. Like the vast historical archives, today’s deluge of news can bury key insights under trivial distractions. History is full of contested truths—think of debates over the causes of wars or interpretations of revolutions. Similarly, modern events are often framed in conflicting ways, depending on the storyteller. Just as past societies clung to comforting myths, we frequently fall prey to our biases, distorting our understanding of what’s happening around us.
History teaches us to zoom out, far out, and then come in close and focus. Instead of focusing on isolated events, we gotta look for trends and patterns. Or connections to interests that are at first unclear. For instance, the rapid spread of misinformation during today’s crises mirrors how rumors and propaganda shaped public opinion in past conflicts. Recognizing these parallels helps us understand how information flows—and how it can trick. Consider current debates about technology’s role in society. Discussions about artificial intelligence and social media echo earlier anxieties about technological revolutions, from the printing press to the Industrial Revolution. Each of these shifts brought fears about societal collapse and promises of unprecedented progress. History shows us that while technology can disrupt, societies adapt—and the lessons from those adaptations can guide us today.
Or take the polarization dominating modern politics. The fierce ideological divides of the 21st century have parallels in eras like Reconstruction after the Civil War or the contentious 1960s. By studying how societies managed (or failed to manage) such divides, we gain tools to understand the challenges we face now—and potential paths forward.
Back to Artificial Intelligence. In whose interests is it to make A.I. sound apocalyptically powerful? I asked a Canadian futurist and techie about it and came away with the impression that the A.I. companies want to sell you on the power of their technology to do more than generate basic text copy or automate jobs and ruin entire fields for human thinkers. They exaggerate the danger because it gets engagement and because scary A.I. equals powerful A.I. that can attract billions in investment. But how much of that fear is cooked up in marketing? The real danger is not that AI will end the world but that it will be used to suppress workers’ wages and steal content from writers and creators that is harder to prove.
The stakes of noise distraction are especially crucial for Americans because the American people are the most powerful persons on the planet. Therefore, foreign and domestic interests expend resources to distract and deceive Americans from using their power for the common good, to keep the American people from looking out for themselves. Perhaps the most insidious form of noise is deliberately created disinformation. Adversaries often plant false information to mislead analysts and decision-makers, mostly to trick and distract the people. This can include fabricated documents, staged events, or carefully crafted narratives designed to deceive, James Bond-type stuff. But the most common is simple misdirection and exploitation of old anxieties and rivalries. Imagined and perceived historical animosity and resentment are perfect fodder for this, and some groups are known to be exploitable because of their bias against other groups. The challenge lies not only in identifying such deception but also in understanding its purpose and the actual truth it might be hiding.
The human mind itself can generate noise through various cognitive biases and mental shortcuts. Confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and availability bias are just a few examples of how an analyst's thinking patterns can introduce noise into the analytical process. These cognitive distortions can lead to misinterpretation of data or overlooking crucial information that doesn't fit preexisting beliefs. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or expectations while ignoring or discounting contradictory evidence. Anchoring bias, however, is relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the "anchor") when making decisions, even if it's irrelevant or incomplete. Even the Bible warns against anchoring bias in Proverbs 18:17: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”
The final example - there are more biases - is availability bias, when we overestimate the importance or likelihood of events based on how easily they come to mind, often due to recent exposure or emotional impact; so you let the first example you can think of - it is most available in your mind - and then you let that have too much influence about how you think about an event. The point is that with so much information coming at you like a firehose in your face, you are more prone to following and being exploited by the manipulation of bias because it is easier to process things in a way that fits how you already sort of think about the world.
History teaches us that noise isn’t new, but it also shows us how to hit mute on nonsense.