Urgh… SO MANY CHOICES

In this age of information explosion, there is way too much information available in the Internet and some of them is actually repetitious because some people just like to copy other people’s work and put them as if their own. You can easily find many of such examples in Youtube. These people are wasting our time in searching for different kinds of information. So, in this case, there is always a convincing reason why we usually have to resort to books which have at least certain level of reputation guaranteed when doing research.

Today, I do not want to put the focus on books. Instead, I want to talk about ‘comments’. After reading a news passage in Yahoo, BBC or CNN or a video clipping on Youtube, would you bother reading comments written by others readers/viewers? In reality, I think commenters sometimes tell more truth than the main texts (article/video) themselves.

Below is an example of the above mentioned case from Yahoo:

http://hk.finance.yahoo.com/blogs/simon-lee/%E7%82%BA%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC%E8%88%AA%E7%A9%BA%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%9A%84%E5%95%86%E5%8B%99%E5%AE%A2%E4%BD%8D%E8%BC%83%E8%B2%B4-072408842.html;_ylt=AjoCedCnOc08f8mLXL2GnI1hgLVG;_ylu=X3oDMTFrcmdnOGdqBG1pdANCbG9nIEF1dGhvciBCbG9nIEluZGV4BHBvcwMxMQRzZWMDTWVkaWFCbG9nSW5kZXg-;_ylg=X3oDMTFwYTFmYzluBGludGwDaGsEbGFuZwN6aC1oYW50LWhrBHBzdGFpZAMEcHN0Y2F0A2F1dGhvcgRwdANzZWN0aW9ucw--;_ylv=3

Many people criticized the senior lecturer of providing wrong information to the readers… (skip, skip, lazy, lazy…) After doing some little research, it has proved the commenters to be right.

Here is another good example from Timeout:

http://www.timeout.com.hk/art/features/46434/daniel-libeskind.html

I myself also think that the design is really stupid and wastes space. The interiors are badly put together – the floors are dark; every floors have very limited space of about a maximum of 8 classrooms; there are unused space, particularly the angle part, is designed just to fit the design of the building…

So, would we spend some time to activate our critical mind in judging the validity of a piece of news? Or will you just click the ‘share’ button when you find it interesting? Have a thought for yourself.

Before ending, there is a piece of personal advice I would like to share with all of you – dig ONLY into the areas that what you really want/need to and leave the rest aside. Life is short and life is about making choices. One cannot get to know all the fields available in the world – we learn and we forget. And I think this is also the reason why we all have different careers and we contribute to society in different aspects, right?

Extended reading:

[Smarts: It's Not How Much You Learn That Matters. It's How Much You Remember]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/smarts/200904/smarts-its-not-how-much-you-learn-matters-its-how-much-you-remember