How to Tell Signal From Noise, at Work and in the AI Headlines

Jalen Brunson said something during the Knicks' championship run this year that's stuck with me. "You just gotta block out the noise. You gotta do whatever you can to make sure you're locked in." He wasn't talking about AI. He was talking about staying steady while the entire internet had an opinion about every possession he played. But the advice holds up almost anywhere, including a lot closer to your inbox than a basketball court.

Every week brings a new headline about AI. It'll replace your job, save your job, or make your job unrecognizable within a year. Most of it contradicts something else you read the week before. And somehow, after enough repetition, all of it starts to feel true anyway, even the parts that can't possibly all be right at once.

There's a real reason for that, and it's the same reason a normal week at work can start to feel like an emergency by Friday.

Repetition feels like truth, even when it isn't

There's a psychological phenomenon called the illusory truth effect. The finding is almost annoying in how simple it is. The more often you hear a claim, the more true it starts to feel, whether or not it's actually accurate. Familiarity gets mistaken for validity. Your brain isn't fact checking the tenth AI headline, it's just recognizing something it's seen before, and recognition feels a lot like belief.

This is basically what's happening with AI coverage right now. No single headline is out to deceive you. It's just that the sheer volume, optimistic, alarmist, all equally confident, creates a kind of ambient certainty that none of the individual claims actually earned.

The same thing happens in meetings, not just headlines

I've noticed the same pattern show up in a much smaller, everyday way too. That low hum of urgency that builds across a week of meetings. Someone flags something as important, someone else repeats it the next meeting, it shows up again in a message thread, and by Friday it feels like a five-alarm situation even though nothing about it actually changed. Nobody's doing anything wrong here. That's just how urgency spreads, through repetition, not through anything new becoming true.

Urgency is a perception, not a fact

Urgency isn't objective. It's shaped by whoever's feeling it, their role, their history, how much context they actually have. Someone burned before by something small turning into something big will read ambiguous signals as urgent by default. Someone further removed might look at the same situation and see something that can wait. Same facts, completely different read. Naming that gap out loud, "how urgent does this feel to you, and why," does more than any amount of arguing over the facts ever will.

None of this means real urgency doesn't exist. Some things genuinely can't wait, and treating everything as noise is its own kind of mistake. The useful move isn't dismissing urgency across the board, it's asking yourself a real question before reacting to it: is this actually time sensitive, or does it just feel that way because three people mentioned it today. Those two things get confused constantly, and the fix isn't ignoring urgency, it's checking whether it's earned.

A better question than “is this urgent”

Real change and real problems are usually incremental, not dramatic. They don't show up as a five-alarm headline or a meeting that suddenly feels critical because it's been mentioned three times this week. They show up quietly, and they get drowned out by everything else fighting for the same reaction. A more useful question than whether something feels urgent right now is whether it's actually changing anything anyone needs to act on, or whether it's just the same thing wearing the urgent costume for the third time this week.

Most weeks aren't actually on fire

AI isn't going away, and most weeks aren't actually on fire either. Both get buried under so much repetition that they stop feeling like facts and start feeling like just more noise. The noise wants urgency. The real signal is patient, quiet, and a lot less interested in alarm bells than the noise is. Brunson had it right. Block it out as best you can, and stay locked in on what's actually true.

Happy Learning,

KP