Mind pollution

Thursday, August 19, 2021

Today I heard an interesting new word from Tanel: inforeostaja (information polluter). I think that he rather wanted to say vaimureostaja because he was referring to an Estonian news agency known for writing stories that look useful and clear at first glance but ignore some important facets of reality and lead to wrong conclusions. But inforeostaja is something else, information pollution is when somebody says excessive useless details. So I suggest to introduce the new word mind pollution to express what Tanel was talking about.

information pollution

When you pollute other people with excessive and worthless details that make it harder to extract useful information. (Source: Jakob Nielsen, Information Pollution, 2003-08-10)

mind pollution

When you pollute the minds of other people by producing content that looks like a clear and easy explanation but leads to a wrong conclusion.

Maybe related: A killing of the mind