AI, Informational Pain, and Nutritional Value
I hate a lot of things. Email, legal docs, dense reports I have to read for work. They bring me pain.
And I love other things: a great movie, a brilliant novel, a long, thoughtful podcast where two people explore big ideas. Cat videos too. These bring me joy.
I have a voracious, and sometimes chaotic, information diet. Like everyone I know, I am in a constant battle with myself: seeking insight, knowledge and wisdom, while often surrendering to the guilty pleasure of informational junk food.
Mapping My Information Diet
I’ve been thinking about how different types of content affect me: are they painful or joyful to consume? Are they high in intellectual nutrition or just empty calories?
Here’s how I’ve mapped it out (caveat: some of these move around):
The top right (high joy, high value) is where we’d like to spend all our time. But often we are stuck on the wrong side of the pain/joy divide.
Sometimes, joy and nutritional value align: a novel that reorients how you look at the world, an engaging long-form podcast, a nonfiction book that makes you reevaluate how you will live your professional life.
But often, there’s an inverse relationship. For me, academic papers are high-value, low-joy. Cat videos are maximum joy, zero nutrients.
Not all information is created equal. There’s what I should consume, what I want to consume, and what I can’t stop consuming.
AI: The Pain Reducer for Nutritional Content
AI, it turns out, is excellent at lowering the pain threshold for high-nutrition, high-effort content.
So, we built TLDRR, a little tool that converts long-form PDFs (for now) into structured summaries (or guides) and saves them in a dashboard. It pulls key takeaways, quotes, and questions, and builds a glossary to make dense material more digestible. You can ask deep questions, and share your summaries, making it easier to send high-pain-high-nutrition docs to others, with a chance they might read them.
Here’s an example: back in November 2024, economist Stephen Miran, now head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote a 40-page paper that plausibly outlines a U.S. tariff strategy. Trump’s tariffs are upending the global order, so there’s value in understanding what might be happening. Miran’s “A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System” is long, dense, but important.
Here’s what TLDRR did with it:
And here’s the full PDF if you want to dive into the original document:
Do you suffer from a high-pain information diet?
If this concept resonates with you — the ongoing challenge of consuming painful but important information — I would love to hear your thoughts. You can try TLDRR for free, and sign up to manage your own content library.
Say hi, or upload a doc and see what happens.
(NOTE: all em-dashes in this article were typed by a human).
It occurs to me that Trump's Council of Economic Advisers might deliberately write documents to cause maximum pain to readers, with the goal of obfuscating any information therein. If your career, interests, etc. involve knowing what's in those documents, of course you'll want some way to reduce the pain.
Relatedly and differently, as a writer myself, I take this as a call to take pains to make my own writing less painful to my readers, that they may feel no need nor desire to feed my writing into an automatic re-processor to extract information I ought to have made clear. If I can't nourish and spark joy, I'll make myself obsolete, replaceable by AI.