What is information noise?

Information noise is a concept in personal epistemology: The vast majority of information you encounter is irrelevant to your actual goals. Treating all inputs as equally worthy of attention is itself a decision — and it is almost always the wrong one.

Example: An engineering lead opens her laptop at 8:30 AM. Before she writes a single line of code or makes a single architectural decision, she has processed: 74 Slack messages across 12 channels, 23 emails (19 automated), a morning standup where 6 of 8 updates were irrelevant to her projects, 3 news articles a colleague shared, and a LinkedIn notification thread. By 9:15 AM she has consumed roughly 15,000 words. Fewer than 200 of them — a single Slack thread about a production latency spike — will influence any decision she makes that day. The other 14,800 words did not just waste time. They consumed the cognitive resources she needed to think clearly about the one thing that mattered.

This concept is part of Phase 7 (Signal vs Noise) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for signal vs noise.