Perry Marshall starts off his article, “Old-Fashioned Discernment in the Age of the Internet,” with the following:

You know what’s wrong with the Internet? Smart people and stupid people get equal airtime. And since stupid people tend to shout longer and louder than people who have acquired wisdom and judgment, ignorance generally prevails.

He goes on to say that stupidity is cheap and plentiful:

. . . with stupidity, your options appear to be endlessly open, whereas wisdom is scarce and expensive and usually involves up-front commitments.

More surprisingly, he claims that you—and your customers—decide between the two every day. This seems to be contradicted by his later claim that “in the 21st century the #1 success skill—a skill that NOBODY ever seems to talk about—is discernment” (defined as keenness of insight and judgment).

I’m perhaps wrong to conflate “wisdom” and “discernment” here; perhaps he sees them as different. But assuming they are the same or at least related, do you decide to be wise/discerning, or is it a skill you learn? Maybe you must decide to learn discernment.

Regardless, I think he’s got a point about the importance of the skill. In a world where we have exponentially more information competing for our attention than a generation ago, discerning what is important enough to pay attention to will be ever more important. Advertisers become more adept at manipulating us, so if we don’t want to lose our shirts, we’d better become more discerning.

However, Marshall’s bread and butter is Internet marketing and publicity. He lists some observations of wise men vs. fools, including this one:

Wise people research online and offline. Wise people take a trip to the library and search collections of used books. Fools suppose that if it can’t be found on the first page of search engine results, it surely must not exist.

Sound observation, but if stupidity really is cheap and plentiful, we marketers are going to have to keep working on making that first page.