Signal-to-noise health names the correction to a disastrous equation: more information = better informed. They are not the same. A person receiving five thousand headlines, alerts, clips, and algorithmically selected outrage fragments is receiving more noise, not more signal — and noise can suppress signal just as effectively as censorship. There are two ways to hide something: prevent people from seeing it, or bury it beneath ten thousand irrelevant things; modern information systems excel at the second.
Why it reframes the design goal
So the goal of an information system is not maximum throughput but sufficient access to relevant, current, trustworthy signal without unnecessary destruction of attention. This is why virality is a signal pathology — a share count rewards speed, outrage, and tribal confirmation rather than importance — and why the model separates importance from attention capture. Its blunt warning: a society can drown in information while starving for signal. See How Signal Should Flow.