Your information diet. Social media. Gossipy and negative people. Mulling over old failures/regrets/slights etc. The mind is easily pulled along by negativity and outrage... as can be observed in our current global psychological state.

The classic thing that pollutes your brain are punk (music and Mad Magazine) and smut.

I’d add “dangerous memes” such as injecting bleach to cure covid.

https://www.susanblackmore.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/201...

Not who you asked, but Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is an excellent book about polluting your brain.

As for my personal experience, internet comment sections will pollute one's brain.

Filling your brain with reasonably reliable information is good, but filling it with people online just saying things isn't.

For example, when 30 reddit comments all repeat the same "fact" (for which their source is other reddit comments), it can subtly work its way into your subconscious as something you know is true but can't remember where you first heard it, which is only one step away from seeming like "common knowledge."

Now imagine a similar effect with a politically charged news story instead some random fun fact. Now imagine all the comments are actually just AI run by propagandists with the specific intention of making you believe things that aren't true.

One way I've tried to avoid the worst effects is by being very careful to remember my source for anything I know. I never say "It turns out xyz," I only say "according to abc, xyz." It's probably not enough, I think it might be time to just get off internet forums entirely.

Yes, I'm a hypocrite and yes, it's very funny.

Mixing metaphors, there is signal and noise. You can keep asking for noise, but the suggestion is to not train your neural networks with it as it will impair your inferencing. That said, we all have our own cost and reward functions...

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