Passivity and Usefulness of Information Do Not Positively Correlate

Previously I posted that we shouldn't be surprised that media information that we receive passively isn't necessarily useful to us. It costs money for all the information to get transmitted so broadly, and the reason it happens is because the people on the other end think it is benefiting them, usually financially. This of course doesn't correlate positively with that information being useful to the recipient, and might even correlate negatively. If you put in effort to find information you used to make a decision, it is more likely to be useful to you. Robin Hanson approaches this same idea in his post Why Info Push Dominates.