The Internet Is Making You Stupid - Echo Chambers & Content Curation - Future IQ

5,361 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jun 06, 2025

Slog Reference: Curate Your Consumption

Description

You think your career is stuck because of a lack of skills — but the real reason might be your WhatsApp groups. Or your news feed. Or your content choices. In this episode of Future IQ, we expose how the algorithm is rewiring your brain, killing your curiosity, and turning smart people into angry, distracted versions of themselves.
From the toxic power of outrage-driven platforms to the silent danger of echo chambers, we break down why what you consume is more important than what you know — and introduce a concept even more vital than IQ: Filter Intelligence. The good news? We also show you how to escape the loop. How to curate your inputs, fix your feed, and rebuild your attention in an age designed to destroy it.
This is not just about digital detox. It’s about rewiring how you think — before the world does it for you.

Book Recommendations:
https://tapthe.link/HowToGetRich
https://tapthe.link/IfITBleedsItLeads

More Videos:
You Can Only Have 150 Friends - Dunbar's Numbers Explained: https://youtu.be/ekAtODyfkyw
How to Learn Anything Fast? Learning by Osmosis: https://youtu.be/YlRmFeOODoY
STOP Watching NEWS Right Now! Why NEWS is Bad for You: https://youtu.be/YYr7qNnOPDg
Finishing Every Book Is A Waste Of Time: https://youtu.be/yViCi9qhzC4
Follow Your Passion Is A Terrible Advice: https://youtu.be/NG6tm5FlONk
How The World Chooses To Be Incompetent: https://youtu.be/tvDs-rEF37s

Sources:
James Clear thread: https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1674055226259644420
Nir Eyal book Hooked: https://www.amazon.in/HOOKED-Nir-Eyal/dp/0241184835
Nir Eyal book Indistractible: https://www.amazon.in/Indistractable-Control-Your-Attention-Choose/dp/1526625334
Social media detox has no effect: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-90984-3
@vgr thread on boundary intelligence: https://twitter.com/vgr/status/915303346570911744
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/echo-chambers-filter-bubbles-and-polarisation-literature-review
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/1122786134/does-social-media-leave-you-feeling-angry-that-might-be-intentional
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604707/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/05/13/is-social-media-curating-hate-and-scouring-the-web-for-our-greatest-fears/
https://thedailytexan.com/2025/04/01/the-outrage-algorithm-social-media-benefits-from-division/

00:00 – Warning: WhatsApp Can Ruin Your Life
00:46 – Drowning in Info, Starving for Wisdom
01:20 – Everyone Can Learn, But Few Actually Do
02:45 – You Are Becoming A Bad Person
03:27 – Blame the Algorithm, Not Aunt Karen
06:50 – Meet Your New Superpower: Filter Intelligence
09:51 – Curate Like Your Sanity Depends on It
11:52 – You’re Training the Algorithm (Whether You Know It or Not)
13:38 – Smart Inputs, Smart People
15:21 – The Grand Finale: Curate, Then Create

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

#futureiq #instagram #facebook #twitter #socialmedia

Related Slog Matches

Curate Your Consumption

Date Proximity

54.00

Transcript

- Being in the wrong WhatsApp groups will destroy your career and make you a bad person. Okay, I understand the making me a bad person part but destroy my career and these are two different problems but because the solution is the same we are going to talk about both of them in this episode. We will describe the two problems one after the other and then get on to our proposed solution. Okay. So what is the first problem we are taking up? Let's start with your career being in danger. That your knowledge and skills are no longer the most important drivers of your career. Wait, my knowledge is not important. My skills are not important. But WhatsApp groups

0m 35s are important. Yes, WhatsApp is just an example. But your information sources, those are very important, right? But first, let's take a step back and see how the world is changing. We are living in the golden age of information. The best courses in the world from the best universities taught by the best profs are easily available mostly for free. True. Anything you want to learn can be easily learned from YouTube. And then to that add chat GPT. It can pretty much answer any question you want. It can give you PhD level answers. It can be a tutor for you no matter what you want to learn. True. Absolutely true. And yet people are not learning. True. Also

1m 17s true. Yeah. The reason for that is to quote the means of learning are abundant but the desire to learn is scarce. Okay, that's a very very smart way to put it. So now I'm wondering if I can buy the desire to learn. Right. Where do you get this desire to learn? The secret like Soilent green is just people. It is said that you are the average of the five people closest to you. Oh, like the first Dunbar number. Correct. Now if the five people closest to you are all enthusiastic about learning, you will be the kind of person who wants to learn.

1m 49s On the other hand, if the five people near you want to spend all their time watching dumb YouTube videos, guess what you will be doing, right? Watching dumb YouTube videos, which is not this one. Yeah. The other point is learning by osmosis. You will end up wanting to learn whatever is floating around in the environment around you. Right. M so for example if the bunch of people around you all are like talking about machine learning or Java you will end up learning that and it is possible that that's a big waste of time because there is no future in that true right now Java doesn't have much of a future if I understand correctly but I do have a

2m 29s self-motivated desire to learn so learning by osmosis and the first dunar number in this case doesn't apply to me you are a weirdo shriant most people do not have a self-motivated desire to Okay. So then what happens to these most people? We'll come to that. But let's talk about the second problem which is that you are becoming a bad person because of my WhatsApp usage. WhatsApp, social media and the other aspects of the internet. Okay. You will notice that in the last 25 years the world has just gotten more polarized. Everyone is more angry at each other. Don't take my word for it. Look at this chart of polarization in the world. In 2000 it

3m 09s was at level two somewhat toxic. Now it has reached level four maximum toxicity. Wow. And that's mostly Brazil, India, Turkey. Yeah. Well, pretty much everywhere in the world the same problem exists, right? US, UK are no exceptions to this. True. And the root of the problem is the algorithm. Yeah, I can see how that is the case. But for those who don't know what you mean by the algorithm, let me explain using social media, then I'll extend it to WhatsApp and other information sources. Sure. Okay. When you are on Instagram or Twitter or any social medium, right?

3m 46s What you are seeing is completely controlled by the algorithm of the platform which has been written by them and that algorithm is not your friend. Okay. The reason for this is simple. All of these platforms are free which means they make money from ads which means they want you to spend more and more time on the platform so that they can show you more and more ads so that they can make more money and do you know what is the best way to make you spend more and more time on the platform by giving me content that I will engage with. Yes, except that you are seeing it very positively and it is not a positive

4m 19s thing. You engage with content when you are angry, when you are outraged, when you are afraid or when you get into fights. And that is what the algorithm is trying to maximize. Okay? For example, the algorithm loves to find that one guy in some little village somewhere who did something nasty and then put it up all over the world, right? Yeah. The real reason why that person did that nasty thing is because he is a terrible person. But the algorithm wants you to think that it's because of his religion. So that you get into fights over that religion for the rest of the week. And the reason for that is because bad is stronger than

5m 00s good. And we have an episode pending on this. Right? It is important because unfortunately the same logic applies to the news you see to the mainstream media, the newspapers, the TV and then ultimately to also what goes viral on WhatsApp. True. If it bleeds, it leads has been a long-standing maxim of all news media outlets since time immemorial. So, I get it. But what I'm getting from this is that it is not my fault. It is social media that is making me toxic. Well, social media is toxic is just shorthand for saying I let the algorithm choose for me. But I am training the algorithm to show me what I like. What's the harm in that? Little

5m 42s children would love to eat ice creams and chocolate all day. But that doesn't mean that we give them ice creams and chocolates all day and all night and the next morning too. No, you are training the algorithm to create little eco chambers for you where you get just the news you want which makes you angry and which you shout at people and then you get worked up and you don't get worked up. We need to explain things. Okay. Right. The problems with this which I have listed down here are that it causes a filter bubble. True. It magnifies your pre-existing biases and blind spots. It causes confirmation bias. It causes preference falsification which is what

6m 19s leads to increased polarization and it causes trapped prior. So you are not looking at data and you are not learning what is really happening. True. True. problem in life is that reality does not care about your trapped prior and now you are getting a very false picture of what is really happening in the world because of the filter bubble and the fact that I've created this eco chamber around myself. How do I escape these echo chambers or am I just doomed? This requires a new skill which I'm going to call filter intelligence. The idea that you spoke about at the beginning of the episode.

6m 56s Yes, this idea comes from author Wenut Gurrao. He distinguishes between interior intelligence and boundary intelligence. Interior intelligence is what we think of traditionally as intelligence, IQ, logic, reasoning. Okay. He has created this new concept called boundary intelligence. I am calling it filter intelligence which is the intelligence to choose the correct sources from which you get your information. Like setting up a check at the boundary to see what is coming in. Yes. So traditional intelligence is all the smart people inside your building. Right? Filter intelligence is the chokidar who decides which people to let in. All right. I will give you a few more examples. Traditional intelligence is your poker playing skills. Okay.

7m 44s Boundary intelligence is knowing which table to play at which the professionals will tell you is far more important if you want to make a lot of money. Right. Traditional intelligence is watching a video and understanding what is said, connecting it to other things. Boundary intelligence is choosing the right channels to watch. Right? And in that sense, you already have shown an example of boundary intelligence, filter intelligence because you're watching the right channel. Subscribe and also comment. We love comments. But does this mean that traditional intelligence is no longer important? It is important but the importance is reducing. Earlier we used to think that's the only important thing but now because of Gen AI because of the internet people can pick up

8m 30s things very quickly right true but knowing what to pick up the importance of that has just gone up by an order of magnitude ahu now I'm wondering why didn't we have this filter intelligence this chidar that you spoke about until now the world was not changing so fast in the past right so the default ways of getting information you go to school you have textbooks the college and when you go to job they have a standard set of things to follow all of those had been decided by smart people 60 years ago and they were applicable they were valid right my dad became a civil engineer in the 60s and for the next 40 years it

9m 09s didn't really change true I became a programmer in the '90s and every 10 years the field of programming changed entirely and I had to go and look up things later with Gen AI things are changing every 6 months. So whatever is the sources that are wellnown and standard and popular are out of date. So you do need filter intelligence to know whom to follow now, what to study now because everything is changing so rapidly so quickly within a span of 6 months. We need to have a filter to get the right kind of information. Exactly.

9m 44s Filter intelligence is curating your feed. Right. But how do I curate my feed? The most important part of curating your feed is to ruthlessly unfollow people who are either posting dumb stuff or toxic stuff. And it has to be one strike and you are out, right? One dumb tweet, unfollow. One outrage politics tweet and you're out, right? Okay. Second thing is curate your platforms, right? Not just the content platforms. Yeah. A certain kind of person hangs out on Instagram. A different kind of person hangs out on Pinterest. A third kind of person hangs out on Twitter and a fourth kind of person hangs out on LinkedIn. Right? So choose your platform properly. But an important thing to keep in mind is that

10m 32s choice of platform should be based on the best that the platform has to offer. Right? A lot of people will tell you that Twitter is just too toxic. Yeah. But you now have the power of curation. You get rid of all the toxic people on Twitter and Twitter is one of the best platforms to follow if you follow the right people. Right. Okay. Very interesting. One more thing is don't follow the news. We've done an episode on this on why you should not follow the news, why you should stop watching the news. Check it out. We'll put a link in the description. Another thing is that curation is not a one-time thing that you do your curation after watching this

11m 10s episode and you are done. You have to continuously curate. You have to continuously update because the world is also changing. So this is more of an UDA loop thing. Yeah. Observe, orient, decide and act. Correct. One more problem is that when you start out with curation, you're not very good at it, right? But have a feedback loop. See what works, see what doesn't work, have basian updating of your sources. And that way you will end up with a good curation over time, not immediately. Right? Slowly you're getting better and better at it. True. Very true. And finally, there is one thing you can do which most other people are not going to do which is curate your output. Output.

11m 54s Yes. Keep in mind that if you tweet about politics, Twitter is going to show you about politics. If you post on Instagram about your clothes, Instagram is showing you more stuff about clothes, right? So what you post is what gets reflected back to you. So be careful what you post, right? Post about science, post about art, post about sophisticated things and that's what will come back to you, right? Being on social media is like hitting a tuning fork out into the world and seeing who resonates with you, right? And that by the way is also in his bio on his Twitter handle which we'll put on the screen. Go follow Naveen. He tweets out some really interesting stuff. Similarly

12m 37s and surprisingly, this applies to Chad GPT also. If you ask dumb questions, it will give you dumb answers. If you ask questions that are more intelligent or deeper, it will give you deeper answers. So, just get better at asking questions also. That's a very interesting observation and yes, the quality of your questions a lot of times determines the quality of your answers. So, do try that out and let us know what the results are in the comments. But, Naven, you have put a lot of to-dos on my plate. What happens if I don't do any of them? What if I don't put a chalk dar on this consumption? The basic thing you have already seen, right? The ecochamber

13m 15s happens and then you have a very bad view of the world. But there are a few more things that I want to point out, right? First one is that your filter intelligence, what you curate also dictates your traditional intelligence, right? Because that is what is going to decide what your brain spends time on, right? Second is that great inputs plus decent IQ will beat bad inputs and very high IQ any day. Right? That's why you have to be focusing on filter intelligence instead of just your raw intelligence. That's a very brilliant point. And the third thing is that the more complex area that you are getting into the more wicked problems that you are trying to solve where the fog of war

14m 03s kind of a situation is higher much higher need for curation because there are too many people with too many different viewpoints and everybody is arguing that's where this really begins to matter. Yeah. Because the sources become important and that's where your filter intelligence will become incredibly important. And this is too much work. Naven, can I just do a simple social media detox or something, please? You can do a social media detox. It will not work. No. No. There is research showing that social media detox doesn't really help. Right? One week, two week, one month doesn't really work. And the reason is because you get FOMO, there is social pressure and it is so enjoyable, right? Social media, right? It is that

14m 50s dopamine hit is very enjoyable. I'm not going to deny that. So you have to do curation but think of curation as exercise, right? It is something that you don't want to do when you begin but you feel great after you have done it. I can attest to that. I recently started a kind of exercise and it's been working great for me. And although every morning I'm like I don't want to do this. 1 hour later I'm like I'm so glad I did this. Yes. Right. Okay. This has been a long episode, so I'm going to summarize the important points. The world is changing very fast and a fire hose of conflicting information is pointed towards you. So

15m 29s you have to curate your feed. Ruthlessly unfollow the idiots and the toxic people. Curate your platforms also. Certain platforms are better, other platforms are not. Okay? Also, you're the average of five people closest to you. So choose those five people carefully. This might involve cutting off some people and adding some new friends. One more thing, output stuff. Okay, post to the social media that you have chosen. That shapes your inputs, shapes your intelligence and hence it is going to shape your future also. Keep in mind that you should maximize curation and satisfies traditional intelligence.

16m 11s That's a very good way to put it. And if you're wondering what maximizing and satisficing means, no those are not wrong words. They are actual words. We have done an episode on it which we will line up for you next. Go check that out. Shriant Naven Future IQ curate. Curate.