Signal and Noise
filtering what matters in a noisy world
We were promised clarity.
With better tools, faster information, and smarter systems, life was supposed to get easier to navigate. But instead, most of us feel more scattered than ever. More data, more content, more access—and somehow, less understanding.
We don't suffer from a lack of information. We suffer from a lack of signal—and from a fading ability to find it in the noise.
What follows is both a personal reflection and a practical framework on how I think about signal versus noise. Across personal habits, relationships, startups, and the growing role of AI, this is how I’m learning to stay grounded, protect my attention, and preserve what makes us human.
The Personal Noise: You’re Not Busy—You’re Untethered
The most common complaint in modern life is lack of time. But when you look closer, time isn’t the real issue—anchoring is. People aren’t overwhelmed because they have too much to do. They’re overwhelmed because they lack a stable internal compass. Without anchors—clear values, priorities, or beliefs—you lose the ability to separate signal from noise. Everything starts to feel equally urgent, equally valid, equally distracting.
Anchors are what hold your attention steady in a storm of inputs. They give shape to your choices and clarity to your thinking. In my Substack Black and White, I wrote about how anchoring is not just a productivity tool—it’s a moral stance. In a society obsessed with ambiguity and centrism, many people have become afraid to stand for anything. They float in the gray, mistaking indecision for thoughtfulness. But when you no longer know what you believe—or refuse to believe in anything at all—everything becomes noise. Anchoring is how you reclaim direction.
This isn’t just a philosophical idea. It plays out every day in how we work, consume, and communicate. When people say they’re “too busy,” what they often mean is that they’ve been consumed by distractions. You’re not busy. You’re just distracted. And that distraction exists because there's nothing keeping your attention grounded. You’re pulled into notifications, opinions, and trends—not because they're meaningful, but because they’re loud. And loud fills the vacuum.
Nowhere is this more visible than in how we process information. Not all information is knowledge. But when you’re unanchored, you treat everything as equal—every headline, tweet, podcast, or thread gets a vote. You confuse content with comprehension, quantity with insight. Knowledge only forms when new information connects to something pre-existing: a belief system, a body of work, a direction you're already pointed in. Without that structure, you’re just piling on noise—unprocessed, unfiltered, and ultimately unhelpful.
Even productivity becomes distorted. People try to outwork the chaos by doing more, responding faster, scheduling tighter. But productivity without anchoring just makes you efficient at reacting. You become good at executing on things that may have nothing to do with your deeper goals. True productivity is subtractive: it’s about filtering the noise so that signal can get through. It’s not about how much you do—it’s about whether what you’re doing aligns with what matters.
And now, the rise of AI makes this challenge even harder. In my essay AI Abundancy and the Scarcity of Souls, I warned that as machines flood the world with infinite content, commentary, and code, we risk losing the thread of our own identity. AI can generate more signal-like noise than ever—polished, plausible, well-structured—but none of it has soul unless we bring it. Anchoring becomes not just helpful, but necessary for survival. Without a clear sense of self, you will outsource your judgment to algorithms. You’ll lose your own frequency in a world flooded with artificial ones.
This is the real danger of being untethered. It’s not just about stress or distraction—it’s about disintegration. When you no longer know what you believe, or why you’re doing what you’re doing, you lose your ability to tell what matters.
At that point, you’re not just surrounded by noise. You become part of it.
The Interpersonal Noise: Optionality, Sampling, Presence, Intentionality, Judgment, and the Illusion of Closeness
Noise isn’t limited to screens or media—it exists in how we relate to people. In modern life, we’re surrounded by more people than ever, yet real connection feels increasingly rare. The issue isn’t the quantity of interaction. It’s the lack of signal—clarity, depth, and intention—in those interactions.
Optionality is a mind virus.
Yoni Levy’s phrase, optionality is a mind virus, captures what’s broken in many relationships today. People hesitate to commit—to a person, a friend group, a project—because they want to keep their options open. But without commitment, relationships don’t deepen. Optionality sounds like a form of freedom, but in practice, it creates surface-level ties that generate noise: casual, replaceable interactions that take up emotional bandwidth but don’t offer meaning in return.
Sampling more doesn’t increase your chance of finding signal. It decreases it.
There’s a well-known story from Socrates about a young man walking through a wheat field, searching for the most magnificent stalk. He can only walk through once and pick one. So he keeps passing stalks, hoping for a better one ahead. By the time he reaches the end of the field, he’s picked nothing. This is what endless sampling looks like—more choices, more information, more noise, but less clarity, less commitment, and ultimately no reward, no signal. The more we bounce between people, ideas, or communities, the harder it becomes to recognize anything truly valuable when we see it.
Presence is signal.
In a world of distraction, real presence—undivided attention in a conversation or moment—is rare. Most people are physically in the room but mentally somewhere else. They’re half-listening while checking their phone, or thinking about their next meeting. Presence cuts through that noise. It creates clarity. It tells the other person: I’m here, and I’m listening. I wrote about this in my Substack on self-awareness—how rare it is to feel truly seen or heard. That kind of moment only happens when someone is fully present, and it stands out precisely because everything else feels scattered and passive.
Intentionality reduces noise.
Being intentional about who you spend time with and why is essential. It’s easy to let your calendar fill up with recurring calls, group chats, or shallow social obligations. But if you don’t choose deliberately, you end up with relational clutter—lots of contact, little connection. Intentionality is about tuning your social environment. Who do you want to go deeper with? What relationships are just friction without meaning? It’s not about cutting people off out of cold efficiency—it’s about creating the space where meaningful signal can exist. Clean the noise so the signal can finally show up
Judgment is noise; feelings and needs are signal.
Another common form of interpersonal noise is judgment-based communication. Most people don’t say what they truly feel or need—instead, they express frustration through vague complaints, blame, or assumptions. That kind of language clouds the signal and creates misunderstanding. Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a framework developed by Marshall Rosenberg, has helped me see this clearly. It teaches that judgment is noise, while clear observations, feelings, and needs are signal.
For example,
“You never listen to me.” → Noise. It triggers defensiveness and obscures the real issue.
“I feel discouraged because I need to feel heard.” → Signal. It creates clarity and invites understanding.
It’s a shift from accusation to clarity. When conversations are built around identifying needs rather than assigning fault, they become less reactive and more productive. That’s what signal looks like in relationships—clear, intentional, and grounded in mutual understanding.
Not all closeness is signal.
C.S. Lewis drew a useful distinction between companionship and friendship and it maps well to this theme. Companionship is what happens when people spend time together due to circumstance—colleagues, classmates, casual social groups. It creates familiarity and routine, but not necessarily depth. Friendship, in contrast, forms when people discover shared convictions or a mutual pursuit of meaning—what Lewis described as the moment someone says,
“What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
In today’s world, much of what passes for connection is actually just proximity. We mistake repeated exposure or ongoing contact for true understanding. But in terms of signal vs. noise, most companionship is ambient social noise—comfortable, but not transformative. Friendship is signal—it aligns values, reveals truth, and strengthens identity. Recognizing that difference has helped me be more intentional about where I invest time and energy. Not all social closeness is signal. And that distinction matters.
The Startup Society: Discernment as a Survival Skill
The startup world is overflowing with noise. Everyone’s building, pivoting, launching, tweeting. New categories emerge every week. New frameworks, new hype cycles, new “must-read” threads. The pace is thrilling—but also disorienting. Signal gets buried fast.
In this environment, discernment isn’t just helpful—it’s a survival skill. It’s not enough to focus. You have to filter. Discernment means applying subtractive focus—not just saying yes to what matters, but having the courage to say no to everything that doesn’t. It’s the ability to recognize noise disguised as opportunity, and to avoid mistaking visibility for value.
That’s where intentional ignorance becomes essential. In a culture obsessed with knowing everything, tracking everything, and being early to every trend, the instinct to ignore can feel wrong—even risky. But what you choose to ignore says more about your clarity than what you consume. FOMO is the enemy of discernment. It pressures founders to chase signals that aren’t theirs, to react instead of build, to spread themselves thin in the name of being plugged in. But intentional ignorance isn’t laziness—it’s ruthless alignment. It means tuning out what’s loud so you can stay true to your internal compass.
This ties directly back to something I’ve written about before: the AND mindset. In startups, people often feel forced to choose—between ambition and discipline, speed and durability, vision and execution. But in reality, great founders learn to hold that tension. They don’t collapse under it—they’re shaped by it. Intentional ignorance is part of that same discipline. It doesn’t mean shutting yourself off from complexity—it means being clear on which complexity you’re willing to carry, and why.
There’s also a deep connection between constraints and clarity. Constraints are often treated like a limitation, but they’re actually a forcing function for focus. The best founders I’ve seen don’t innovate because they had infinite options—they innovate because they had to make tradeoffs. Scarcity—of time, resources, even attention—is what sharpens discernment. Constraint forces signal by design. When you can’t chase everything, you’re forced to ask: what actually matters?
And then there’s AI—the new noise amplifier.
We’re entering a world where AI can produce endless outputs: copy, images, pitches, strategies, even voices. The threat isn’t that AI replaces humans overnight. The threat is more subtle—and more dangerous: AI may flood the world with plausible, polished, soul-less signals that dilute what it means to be human. When everything looks “good enough,” how do we know what’s real?
This question is more than philosophical—it’s strategic. If AI can mimic surface-level signal, then human creativity, discernment, and depth become even more valuable. Not less. The founders who succeed in this world won’t just build faster or cheaper—they’ll build with taste, judgment, and emotional depth. They’ll preserve what’s authentically human—the one signal AI still can’t fake.
Humanity vs. AI: The Fight for Authentic Signal
This isn’t just about deepfakes, misinformation, or spammy AI-generated noise. The deeper risk is identity erosion. As AI floods every channel with perfectly plausible content, the line between the synthetic and the human starts to blur. And when everything could be AI, we start to second-guess our own voice. If your writing, your thoughts, even your personality could be mimicked, what does it mean to be you?
AI is the ultimate noise generator. It can produce infinite outputs—content that sounds informed, polished, and smart. But what it gains in form, it often loses in soul. Signal isn’t just structure—it’s depth. It’s intention. It’s vulnerability. If AI is optimized to sound “right,” then the human edge is not in sounding better, but in being real.
This is where we risk forgetting who we are. In my Substack on self-awareness, I wrote about how rare it is to encounter someone fully present—someone grounded in what they feel, what they believe, and why they show up the way they do. But that kind of groundedness is exactly what’s under threat when people begin outsourcing not just execution, but expression.
In a world where AI can mimic competence, the only thing it can’t replicate is contradiction. Humans are inconsistent. We change our minds. We feel one thing and do another. But these imperfections—far from being flaws—are what give our signal weight. They show we’re alive, growing, unfinished. That’s something AI can simulate, but not own.
And importantly, our imperfection is not a flaw—it’s part of how we were designed. The Bible makes this clear. We weren’t created to be machines. We were created to be human: limited, emotional, unfinished, and capable of growth.
“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
—Genesis 2:7
This duality—dust and breath, fragility and meaning—is the foundation of our nature. And rather than asking us to erase that weakness, Scripture reminds us that God works through it.
“But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’”
—2 Corinthians 12:9
That’s what AI can’t replicate. It can mimic confidence, but not grace. That imperfection is not a bug in the design—it’s the very condition that makes growth, humility, and love possible. What separates us from machines isn’t just intelligence—it’s the ability to wrestle with ourselves, to break, to repent, to heal. We aren’t meant to sound perfect. We’re meant to be authentic. The danger of AI-generated perfection is that it tempts us to forget that messy signal is more human than flawless noise.
The other risk is that people start using AI not just to generate content, but to think for them—to collapse nuance into slick coherence. I’ve written before about second-order thinking: the ability to hold complexity, anticipate consequences, and challenge first impressions. But if AI flattens complexity into something neat and frictionless, we may lose our tolerance for depth altogether.
In that world, discernment won’t just be useful—it will be existential. The question will no longer be “Can this be generated?” but “Does this have soul?” The signals worth following won’t be the ones that look smart. They’ll be the ones that feel real—messy, human, unfinished, but grounded.
So as the signal-to-noise ratio collapses under the weight of synthetic content, our job isn’t to shout louder. It’s to stand clearer. To own our contradictions. To speak from anchoring values. To create in ways that aren’t just impressive, but irreplaceable.
Because if we don’t, AI won’t have to replace us.
We’ll already have faded into the noise.
Practices: How I Tune for Signal
We can’t kill the noise. But we can tune our receivers.
In a world of infinite input and artificial outputs, staying grounded isn’t about knowing everything—it’s about knowing what matters. Over time, I’ve developed a few personal practices that help me filter for signal, protect my attention, and stay aligned with the values that actually guide my life.
1. Dive deep to find truth.
Skimming creates illusions of knowledge. So I make a habit of going deeper: reading the full piece, tracing ideas back to the source, and following the thread—especially when something challenges me. That means reading books, long-form Substack essays, listening to full-length podcast conversations, and—most importantly—writing to think. Writing forces me to confront the gaps in my understanding and refine what I actually believe. It’s not just a way to express ideas—it’s a way to discover them. Anchors don’t come pre-installed. You earn them by doing the work—slowly, repeatedly, and mostly alone.
If something feels complex, I resist the urge to summarize it too early. Depth requires patience, and patience is how I separate insight from noise.
2. Borrow signal from trustworthy minds.
No one filters alone. In each domain that matters to me—investing, theology, technology, health—I keep a shortlist of people whose judgment I trust more than the general noise. These aren’t necessarily the loudest voices, but they’re consistent. Grounded. Thoughtful over time.
If I find myself lost in the noise of a topic, I ask: What would this person think? What have they said when no one was watching? Curation is underrated. These signal carriers become part of your extended cognitive filter.
I treat this list as a living system—something I check in on, prune, and refresh periodically. Trust is earned, but relevance shifts. The people I listened to five years ago aren’t always the ones I look to today. Updating this network is part of staying grounded in a fast-changing world.
3. Delete noise fast.
Some things aren’t worth wrestling with. I’ve learned to discard obvious noise without hesitation:
– Clickbait headlines designed to provoke rather than inform.
– AI-generated content optimized for virality but empty of substance.
– Fake gurus selling generalizations in the form of frameworks.
– Outdated science presented with misplaced confidence—rigid formulas, shallow interpretations, or advice that hasn’t evolved with the evidence.
– Opinions that sound bold but aren’t anchored to any foundational thinking—no history, no lived experience, no skin in the game.
– Opinions clearly limited by knowledge, experience, or wisdom—not because the person is malicious or unthoughtful, but because their range of reference is narrow. When someone argues loudly from a shallow base, it often creates misleading clarity that masks a deeper confusion. Signal requires range.
– Clear judgmental statements—not rooted in curiosity, not based on shared definitions, just flat assertions of right and wrong. These tend to shut down thought, not open it up. They generate more emotional heat than signal.
– People speaking confidently from their unknown unknowns—when someone is unaware of what they don’t know but speaks with authority anyway. This kind of noise is especially dangerous because it’s cloaked in false conviction. I explored this in my Substack piece The Wilderness of Thought—how unknown unknowns are what blind us most, and how they can distort conversations, decisions, and even worldviews if left unexamined.
– Opinions expressed without open-mindedness—especially those that resist updating in light of better evidence or new perspectives. As Adam Grant explores in Think Again, the ability to rethink and revise one’s views is not weakness—it’s wisdom. Without that mindset, conversation becomes static and signal can’t break through.
If it’s garbage, I treat it like garbage. No guilt. No saving for later.
Noise feeds on hesitation. Speed matters here.
4. Check your signal loss ratio.
I’ve made mistakes—missed signals I should’ve caught. Dismissed people too quickly. Let cynicism block something genuine. That’s part of the process.
But when I look back, the solution was never to abandon the system—it was to improve it. I refine my filters, not my values. I adjust the dials, not the destination.
This reminds me of how Elon Musk describes Tesla’s engineering process: take components out of the system until it breaks—then only add back the absolute minimum required. It’s a mindset that applies just as well to life and information. If you’re not sometimes losing signal, you’re probably keeping too much noise. And if you never break anything, you’re not experimenting hard enough.
The point isn’t perfection. The point is pressure-testing your filters, regularly and deliberately. That’s how discernment stays sharp.
Conclusion: Holding the Signal
Across personal life, relationships, work, and technology, the same pattern shows up: too much noise, too little discernment.
At the personal level, most people aren’t overwhelmed because life is objectively harder—they’re overwhelmed because they’ve lost their anchor. Without clear beliefs or systems to filter what matters, everything starts to feel equally urgent, equally interesting, equally valid. That’s when distraction masquerades as busyness, and motion replaces direction.
In relationships, the problem is similar. Optionality and passive engagement create the illusion of connection, but not the substance of it. Without intentionality, presence, or emotional clarity, we end up maintaining a network instead of building a community. Many of our conversations today are noise by default—not because they’re insincere, but because they lack grounding.
In the startup world, the challenge gets amplified. The pace is fast, the signals are mixed, and the pressure to respond to everything is high. But the best founders aren’t the ones who react to the most—they’re the ones who filter the best. Discernment, not speed, is the differentiator. The ability to ignore what doesn’t matter is just as important as the ability to spot what does.
And now, with AI generating infinite outputs, we face a different kind of noise altogether: content that looks like signal but isn’t. The risk isn’t just fake images or misinformation. It’s deeper—the gradual erosion of authenticity, the normalization of surface-level coherence without depth. When machines can mimic human output, the human edge has to come from something machines can’t replicate: contradiction, vulnerability, and the willingness to wrestle with uncertainty.
This is why filtering for signal matters more than ever. It’s not just about efficiency or focus—it’s about protecting your ability to think clearly, relate deeply, and create meaningfully. Whether it’s through anchors, discernment, or intentional ignorance, the work of holding the signal is ongoing. It takes practice, and it requires saying no to a lot of things that appear valuable on the surface.
There’s no perfect system. You’ll miss some signals, and let some noise through. But the goal isn’t perfection. The goal is to keep the distinction alive—between what’s loud and what’s true, what’s easy and what’s real, what’s content and what actually carries meaning.
That distinction is everything.