I don’t think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload. We believe that every person, or organization, can only make so many competent decisions in a given amount of time. Up until the point that we change our biology, there are some fixed limits on the speed by which we individually process information. However, there are enormously powerful tools by which we can extend the amount and extend the capacity of, for example, how information is organized. The simplest example is our telephone numbers. Why do they come in a grouping of three and four instead of just throwing all seven at you. It’s because you can’t remember seven very easily, but you can remember three and four. That’s a primitive example of what might be called chunking information. We can handle more information if we can chunk it, and we can chunk it at higher and higher levels of complexity, and we can employ better models of organizing information. If you have powerful models, you can just handle a lot more.
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