“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Critical thinking is great, but in a world full of information we need to learn 'critical ignoring', as the above quote from philosopher and psychologist William James (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) attests.

The Internet offers an informational paradise and a nightmare-riddled underworld at the same time. A boundless wealth of high-quality information is available at our fingertips, right next to a ceaseless torrent of low-quality, distracting, false and manipulative information, much of it designed to arouse curiosity, outrage, or anger. Competition for our attention has accelerated over the past decade, which is why we need we (pupils, parents and staff) need strategies to help us reclaim some cognitive space.

The textbook cognitive strategy is critical thinking, an intellectually disciplined, self-guided and effortful process to help identify valid information. In School, we teach pupils to closely and carefully read and evaluate information. Thus equipped, they can assess the claims and arguments they see, hear, or read. The ability to think critically is immensely important in all academic subjects and while accessing information of all kinds online.

But is it enough in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation? The answer is “No” for at least two reasons.

First, the digital world contains more information than the world’s libraries combined. Much of it comes from unvetted sources and lacks reliable indicators of trustworthiness. Critically thinking through all information and sources we come across would utterly paralyse us, because we would never have time to actually read the valuable information we painstakingly identify.

Second, investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place means that attention merchants and malicious actors have been gifted what they wanted, our attention.

Critical ignoring to make information management feasible

So, what tools do we have at our disposal beyond critical thinking? Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance. Without it, we will drown in a sea of information that is, at best, distracting and, at worst, misleading and harmful.

Three main strategies exist for critical ignoring. Each one responds to a different type of noxious information.

1. Self-nudging. In the digital world, self-nudging aims to empower people to be “choice architects” by designing their informational environments in ways that work best for them and that constrain their activities in beneficial ways, such as:

- Removing distracting and irresistible notifications.

- Setting specific times in which messages can be received, thereby creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising.

- Restricting the use of our personal data for purposes of targeted advertisement.

2. Lateral reading is a strategy that enables people to emulate how professional fact checkers establish the credibility of online information. It involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information about the organisation or individual behind a site, before diving into its contents. Only after consulting the open web do skilled searchers gauge whether expending attention is worth it. Before critical thinking can begin, the first step is to ignore the lure of the site and check out what others say about its alleged factual reports. Lateral reading thus uses the power of the web to check the web.

Online, looks can be deceiving. Unless one has extensive background knowledge, it is often very difficult to figure out that a site, filled with the trappings of serious research, peddles falsehoods about climate change or vaccinations or any variety of historical topics, such as the Holocaust. Instead of getting entangled in the site’s reports and professional design, fact checkers exercise critical ignoring. They evaluate the site by leaving it and engage in lateral reading instead.

3. The do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic targets malicious users who harass, cyberbully, spread disinformation or use other antisocial tactics. For instance, one of the main strategies that science denialists use is to hijack people’s attention by creating the appearance of a debate where none exists. The heuristic advises against directly responding - resist debating or retaliating.

The philosopher Michael Lynch has noted that the Internet “is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer – often at the same time.” Navigating it successfully requires new competencies. Without the skill to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attention, we allow others to seize control of that precious commodity, our time.

Inservi Deo et laetare