One question people often ask is where does someone gets inspiration / information / news. Maybe an equally important question is how to filter the overwhelming information and get most out of it, especially in a world where you can spend all day long just following the ins and outs chasing what’s happening realtime in the political area, sports space, and the business world.

When asked about the daily information diet, Mark Andreessen mentioned he himself is running an experiment of consuming information in a polarized way – completely stop reading newspapers, magazines, and basically anything with time horizon that’s, for example, between 5 mins an 5 years. So he reads social medias (a very short timespan info) and books (written 50 or 100 years ago).

The claim of “not reading newspapers and magazines” is funny though because they have a great potions overlapped – You will inevitably consume a lot of news when you are on social media from people you follow. So you are not actually missing out too much if not seeing the headlines of newspapers.

The real difference is the 2000 inbound startups Mark Andreessen reviewed each year from some of the by definition the smartest people from the domains they operate in. This is the most exclusive information that only he and his handful co-workers have access to. And it is hard to pick up a magazine to find similar interesting topics because things will only come out months or years after.

While the invention of internet breakthroughs the isolations and make information available and accessible to everyone, people’s ability of filtering those information isn’t equal. Those who come from upper classes or having different social capitals essentially still have a better filtration system that will keep them better off. The other side of the crowd might still be suffering by circling around low quality information and knowledge resulted from bad filtration capability.