The Information Tipping Point

May 15, 2026

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age.
– Aldous Huxley

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

AI, the most joyless revolution ever
Who can be happy about this future?

A bet over the future of work
How will AI play out?

The first cognitively less capable generation
Created by the transition from textbooks to tech.

THINKING OUT LOUD

The Information Tipping Point
Access to information is eroding our ability to think

For most of human history, information was scarce. Humans knew little. We were surrounded by nature we didn’t understand. A failed harvest, an eclipse, a plague, a violent storm—these things arrived without explanation. In the absence of understanding, humans created stories to fill the void. Gods explained the weather. Spirits explained disease. Myths explained the movement of the stars. Meanwhile, we learned as we went. If someone ate a poisonous mushroom and died, everyone around this person learned.

Slowly, something remarkable happened. Information expanded.

Language evolved. Writing emerged. Knowledge was passed down generationally. Agriculture created settlements. Settlements created civilizations. Civilizations created libraries, trade routes, schools, philosophies, and systems of inquiry. The printing press exploded access to ideas. The scientific method transformed the way humans pursued the unknown. Medicine advanced. Technology advanced. Prosperity grew. Population exploded.

For centuries, there appeared to be a virtuous cycle between information availability and critical thought. More information meant more curiosity, which produced more knowledge. The more we learned, the better we became at understanding the world around us. The growth of knowledge expanded our reasoning, inspired more critical thinking, and accelerated progress.

And then something changed.

Over roughly the past 25 years, humanity crossed a threshold no civilization had ever crossed before. Information stopped being scarce. It stopped even being abundant. It became infinite and instantaneous.

The internet placed the world’s information inside our homes. Smartphones placed it in our pockets. Legacy news media and social media ensures it never stops arriving. Today, the average person encounters more information in a single day than people centuries ago may have encountered in years, perhaps even lifetimes.

At first glance, this should have ushered in a golden age of knowledge and human flourishing. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening.

Now we appear more distracted than reflective. More reactive than thoughtful. More tribal than open-minded. We have unprecedented access to information, yet trust in institutions, expertise, and even objective reality itself has eroded. Anxiety and loneliness have surged. Public discourse has become emotionally combustible. Many people no longer appear interested in understanding opposing viewpoints, only in defeating them. Even science has been captured, now dominated by politics rather than the scientific method.

It raises an uncomfortable question: Is it possible that humanity reached a tipping point where access to information stopped strengthening our capacity for critical thinking and instead began eroding it?

The answer may lie partly in the limitations of the human brain itself.

The human mind evolved to survive in relatively stable social groups and comparatively simple informational environments. It did not evolve to process thousands of headlines, opinions, videos, alerts, advertisements, ideological battles, conspiracy theories, tragedies, and algorithmically optimized emotional triggers every day.

Critical thinking requires mental space, not constant bombardment of information during every conscious moment. It requires our attention but also reflection, conversation, debate, experimentation, and the willingness to wrestle with ambiguity. But information overload creates the opposite conditions. Faced with an endless stream of information from uniformed sources, profit-motivated sources, and politically motivated sources we have reached cognitive overload.

And when people become cognitively overwhelmed, tribalism offers relief.

If the modern information environment feels impossible to navigate, it becomes comforting to outsource thinking to a group. Political tribes, online communities, influencers, ideological movements, conspiracy theories, even lifestyle brands begin functioning as cognitive shelters. They simplify complexity. They tell us who is good, who is bad, what to believe, and whom to distrust. Outsourcing our thinking is ultimately easier than parsing through overwhelming amounts of information and thinking for ourselves. Who has the time? Who has the desire?

In some ways, modern society resembles a strange return to pre-rational thinking. The current informational environment encourages us to grasp emotional security over disciplined reasoning. Instead of carefully weighing evidence, we increasingly respond to narratives that affirm our fears and support our opinions.

And while traditional religion has declined sharply across much of the modern world, it is hard not to notice that new forms of worship have emerged. All-knowing technology now occupies a quasi-spiritual role. So does the self. We curate our identities online. We obsess over our visibility and personal branding. We place enormous faith in algorithms, platforms, and digital systems we barely understand.

At the very moment humanity appears cognitively overloaded, artificial intelligence enters the picture promising to remove even more friction from thinking itself.

AI may become an extraordinary tool. More positive than not? Only time will tell. But tools reshape the people who use them. GPS weakened many people’s sense of direction. Social media shortened attention spans and rewired social behavior. If AI becomes a substitute for reflection, analysis, discussion, debate, writing, and problem-solving—that is, the whole process of critical thinking—we risk outsourcing the very mental processes that unleashed our progress to date.

So what do we do?

Perhaps the answer resembles the way we’ve learned to think about food. When processed food became ubiquitous, abundance did not make us healthier. It often made us sicker. Look at the obesity rate. Look at how addicted we are to Big Pharma. The solution is of course not abandoning food but becoming more intentional about what we consume. The same may now be true of information.

We need to favor informational “whole foods” over informational “junk food.” Longer-form think pieces over endless scrolling. Books over twenty-second addiction bait. Nuanced thinkers over emotional provocateurs. Trusted sources, if we can identify them, over algorithmic noise.

We need to relearn how to protect attention itself. Read more, not because it is virtuous but because it strengthens concentration and reflection. Seek out writers and thinkers willing to grapple with complexity rather than reduce every issue to dogmatic certainty. Spend more time in physical reality. Spend more time with nature. Meet friends face-to-face. Enjoy getting to know new people who think differently from us. Have stretches of the day where no screen mediates our experience of the world.

Human progress has always depended not merely on access to information but also on the capacity to use it productively and wisely. The great challenge of the current age is obviously not obtaining information but learning how to maintain independent, critical thought in the presence of too much of it.

THE RANDOMS

The huge success of the Cerebras IPO tells us investors are hungry for more AI-related IPOs. Will investor enthusiasm for IPOs further reduce capital available for private equity and private credit? It certainly won’t help, now that PE investors are selling portfolio companies at a loss.

When will the Russians realize Putin has destroyed their population, economy, global influence, and quite likely their culture? Maybe destroying their culture is what Russia needs to get itself back into being a productive country.

Big tech’s massive AI spend could very well transform the industry from asset light and high margin to asset heavy and low margin.

The interest cost on our federal debt is now about $3B a day. But guess what, China has an even bigger debt problem.

The combination of Eastern and Western medicine may prove one of the greatest outcomes of our recent globalization cycle.

The transition from textbooks to laptops and tablets has created the first ever cognitively weaker generation.

Wouldn’t it be great if more people were honest? And wouldn’t it be great if everyone who’s truly honest would understand they are not always right?

Is a higher energy density technology right around the corner?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

Inflation is back big
Consumer sentiment remains gloomy
Streaming has overtaken TV advertising

Labor

Firms embracing AI are lowering employment
The current job market favors women
Per-capita income of the bottom 95%

The Lone Star