Three Degrees of Information

We live in a time of information overload. Never before has so much been available to us — news alerts, feeds, podcasts, commentary, opinions. But while the volume has exploded, our ability to make sense of it has not. The amount of first-hand experience in our lives hasn’t grown; it remains constant. What has grown, massively, is the third-hand information we absorb each day: distant, abstract, recycled through layers of interpretation.

This imbalance matters. Without a way to distinguish and balance these degrees, we mistake sheer volume for clarity, and we end up confused, paralyzed, or anxious.

Over time, I’ve come to think of information in three degrees, arranged by distance from direct experience. This lens has helped me evaluate not just what I believe, but how I believe it, and whether my “information diet” is balanced or toxic.

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🎯 1. The Target Model: First, Second, and Third Degrees of Information

The first step is to distinguish between the three degrees of information arranged by distance from direct experience:

• First-hand information (center, bullseye): What you directly see, hear, touch, feel, and live. If you stood in the rain, it was raining for you. First-hand information is always subjectively true, even if incomplete. It’s resistant to misinformation because nothing can override your lived experience.

• Second-hand information (middle ring): What trusted people — friends, family, colleagues, mentors — tell you. It’s usually reliable, but it’s filtered through someone else’s perception and bias. It’s partial truth, valuable but not immune to distortion.

• Third-hand information (outer ring): What you read, hear, or watch from institutions, media outlets, books, influencers, or algorithmic feeds. This is where the flood happens. Third-hand information can be powerful in scale but is also the noisiest, most distorted, and most vulnerable to misinformation.

The Misinformation Gradient

Misinformation can’t penetrate first-hand experience — you can’t be convinced you didn’t just touch a hot stove. It creeps into the second-hand layer when others misremember or misinterpret, and it floods the third-hand layer, where repetition, framing, and hidden agendas thrive. The outer ring is the danger zone: the further you move from the center, the more likely you’re navigating distortion instead of reality.

The Information Diet Metaphor

Think of these rings as food groups. A healthy diet is anchored in fresh, whole, first-hand experiences, supported by trusted second-hand sources, and sparingly supplemented with third-hand abstractions. When the outer rings dominate, drowning out the center, the result is imbalance, confusion, and anxiety.

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🧭 2. The Context Questions: Where, What, Who, Why, and How

The Target Model describes degrees of trust in information: first-hand is most trustworthy, second-hand requires some filtering, and third-hand is the most vulnerable to distortion. But trust alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Every piece of information also arrives with a context: where it was encountered, what kind of content it is, who is sharing it, why they’re sharing it, and how it reached you. These questions can help you refine your trust in the information. They can help you spot hidden weaknesses, subtle distortions and manipulations, and overlooked strengths.

When you pause to ask Where? What? Who? Why? How? you give yourself a chance to see beyond the surface of a claim, and to judge whether it deserves weight in your worldview.

Where: The Setting Shapes the Signal

Information doesn’t come to us in a vacuum. The setting where you encounter it strongly influences its degree and its reliability.

• At home: Most of what you take in here is first or second-hand — what you see in your family, the weather outside your window, how your body feels. But home is also where many people consume third-hand information (TV news, social media). It’s a place where the inner circle and the outer ring collide.
• At school or work: Here you get a mix of first-hand (your own projects, tasks, observations) and second-hand (teachers, colleagues, bosses). But textbooks, reports, or corporate communications often land in the third-hand layer.
• While traveling: Travel immerses you in first-hand encounters — seeing a city, tasting food, meeting locals. Yet many people experience travel filtered through guidebooks or travel blogs before they’ve even arrived.
• Online: The internet is overwhelmingly third-hand. Even when you think you’re hearing “authentic” voices, you’re often several degrees removed from the source.

The setting dictates the default degree. If most of your information intake comes from online spaces, you’re biased toward third-hand — and you need to actively rebalance with lived experience.

What: The Nature of the Content

Not all information is created equal; its type often reveals which degree it belongs to.

• Sensory observation (e.g. “it’s raining,” “this food is salty”) → always first-hand.
• Personal stories → usually second-hand when relayed to you, first-hand when lived.
• Opinions → second- or third-hand, depending on how close the source is.
• Statistics/data → third-hand by nature, since they’re aggregates of many experiences.
• Rumors → third-hand at best, often misinformation territory.

Mismatches are dangerous. Treating a broad statistic as if it must apply to your personal life leads to overgeneralization. On the other hand, taking a single anecdote and assuming it represents a universal truth leads to distortion. Part of a healthy information diet is matching the what to its proper ring.

Who: The Source of Authority

Information is shaped by who is sharing it.

• Yourself: The only true first-hand source. What you directly experience is unshakable.
• People you know personally: Friends, family, colleagues. They form your second-hand circle — usually more trustworthy, but still filtered.
• Strangers and institutions: Journalists, influencers, politicians, academics. They can be credible, but they’re firmly in third-hand territory.

The further away the “who,” the more skepticism you should apply. But distance isn’t everything: some distant institutions (e.g. medical journals) can be highly reliable, while some close peers can be unreliable. The key is being conscious of how proximity affects trust.

Why: The Motivation Behind the Message

Every piece of information delivered carries an intention behind it. Understanding the why reveals hidden pressures on reliability.

• To help or share: Friends giving advice, neighbors warning about local hazards — usually well-intentioned, but still colored by bias.
• To persuade: Activists, politicians, even peers trying to win you to their viewpoint.
• To sell: Marketers, advertisers, influencers with affiliate links.
• To educate: Teachers, mentors, books — still filtered, but with a clearer purpose.
• To control: Institutions, regimes, or algorithms that benefit when you believe certain things.

First-hand experiences rarely come with a “why” beyond your own curiosity or survival. Second- and third-hand almost always carry agendas, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. Recognizing motivation helps you weigh credibility.

How: The Channel of Transmission

The medium shapes the message. The how influences both clarity and distortion.

• Direct observation → pure first-hand.
• Face-to-face conversation → carries tone, body language, immediacy; higher trust.
• Phone call or text → second-hand, but details can be lost or misinterpreted.
• Email, reports, newspapers → polished, filtered, often third-hand.
• Social media feeds → third-hand plus algorithmic distortion; repetition creates the illusion of truth.
• Books and archives → stable, but still third-hand — edited, curated, interpreted.

The same information can feel more or less reliable depending on the channel. A friend’s words carry weight in person but feel less grounded when forwarded as a screenshot. A statistic in a peer-reviewed paper feels firmer than the same number in a meme. The channel doesn’t just deliver information; it frames how much you trust it.

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⏳ 3. The Time Dimension: The Half-Life of Information

Even the most reliable information isn’t timeless. Information decays. It has a half-life that differs depending on its degree.

• First-hand information: True in the moment, but memory drifts and perception fades. Ten years later, your recollection of an event may be colored by bias or storytelling.
• Second-hand information: Decays faster. Each retelling adds distortion, like a game of telephone.
• Third-hand information: Most perishable of all. News becomes outdated, studies get overturned, “facts” expire. Algorithms often recycle stale or debunked content as if it’s fresh.

The Need for Reevaluation

Left unchecked, decayed information hardens into dogma — outdated ideas held long after their shelf life. The antidote is reevaluation: refreshing your first-hand experiences, cross-checking second-hand claims, and updating third-hand knowledge with new evidence.

Visualize this as half-life curves: first-hand decays slowly, second-hand faster, third-hand fastest. A healthy diet means revisiting and refreshing your anchors regularly.

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🧠 4. The Psychology of Information: Traps and Pitfalls

Beyond structure and time, there’s a psychological layer. This is where imbalance in the information diet manifests in our minds and behaviors.

Anxiety and Overload

Third-hand information is often abstract, sensational, and uncontrollable. Flooded with it, people grow anxious about dangers far removed from their daily lives. First-hand experience reduces ambiguity — it grounds you. If you’ve been outside and it feels safe, that anchors your nervous system against the drumbeat of fear.

The Kolb Trap: Stuck in Abstraction

David Allen Kolb, an American educational theorist, developed Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) to describe how people learn through a continuous cycle of doing, reflecting, thinking, and testing. He identified four phases in this cycle:

1. Concrete Experience (CE): You engage directly — you do something, encounter it, live it.
2. Reflective Observation (RO): You step back and think about what happened. What worked? What didn’t? How did it feel?
3. Abstract Conceptualization (AC): You form theories or general principles from those reflections. You connect experience to broader ideas.
4. Active Experimentation (AE): You test those ideas in practice, trying something new. This creates fresh experience — and the cycle repeats.

In healthy learning, you move through all four stages. But modern information environments warp the cycle. They flood us with concepts, models, and theories (the AC phase), while starving us of new Concrete Experiences to ground them in.

The result is the Kolb Trap:

• Endless theorizing without action.
• Anxiety, because abstractions multiply risks you’ve never tested or experienced personally.
• False certainty, because you mistake familiarity with ideas for true first-hand understanding.

The way out is simple but challenging: re-anchor in first-hand experience. Doing something directly — even small experiments — restarts the learning loop and restores balance.

Paralysis and Avoidance: Second-Hand as a Bridge

When people are stuck in abstraction, saturated with third-hand input but paralyzed from acting, second-hand information becomes the bridge back to experience. Trusted peers and communities can guide you out of paralysis by modeling lived examples.

A friend saying, “Come try this with me,” is far more effective than a statistic or article insisting you should. Their second-hand testimony reduces the perceived risk and offers social proof that the step is survivable, even beneficial.

This bridging role is vital: second-hand examples don’t replace first-hand experience, but they lower the barrier to entry. They give you the confidence to re-engage the learning cycle — to move from theory back into action, and from anxiety back into grounding reality.

Illusions of Truth: The Danger of the Outer Ring

The danger of staying stuck in abstraction, and never making it back across that bridge, is that you become increasingly vulnerable to the illusory truth effect — the psychological tendency to believe something is true simply because you’ve heard it often enough.

The outer rings thrive on this. Algorithms, news cycles, and social feeds recycle the same claims until they feel self-evident. Without strong first-hand anchors to test them against, repetition substitutes for reality.

• A repeated rumor starts to “feel right.”
• A statistic you’ve seen a dozen times feels unassailable, even if it’s outdated.
• A narrative echoed by multiple outlets feels like fact, even if none of them are drawing from direct evidence.

This is the final pitfall: mistaking familiarity for truth. Once caught here, people drift further into anxiety, false certainty, or manipulation.

🍎 Building a Healthy Information Diet

Information is food. Some is nourishing, some is junk, some is poison. Just as you wouldn’t subsist on candy alone, you can’t live on third-hand abstractions without consequences.

The principles are simple but profound:

• Anchor yourself in first-hand experience.
• Lean on trusted second-hand bridges.
• Treat third-hand as context, not foundation.
• Refresh regularly, because all information decays.
• Be aware of psychological traps — anxiety, abstraction, paralysis, illusion.

A balanced diet of information won’t just make you better informed — it will make you more grounded, less anxious, and harder to manipulate.

So ask yourself: Where is most of my information coming from? How fresh is it? Who’s giving it to me, and why? And when was the last time I grounded it in something I’ve lived myself?

I hope this framework helps you build a healthier information diet. If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know.