Compared to other sites I've frequently visited in the past HN is on the tame side of things. I'm grateful that it exists, limiting where I get my daily info has been great for my mental health.
This very comment section is a great example. Insulting people who read the news, pretending that all media is just propaganda, anti-intellectualism, etc.
HN is great for tech, it's good to passable for tech-adjacent things (science*, math**) and usually really bad for anything far removed from tech (politics, humanities, philosophy, ...). Which should not be surprising, there is no a priori reason to believe that people experienced with technology should have interesting things to say about other topics.
(*) This excludes heavily politicised science topics.
(**) Though I have yet to see a math submission with more than a handful of comments without somebody complaining (and being upvoted!) about "math is too complicated" or "why don't they just use variables with more than one letter?".
I've actually done this, because most immediately important stories bubble up to the top, even though this isn't a site strictly for world news or politics.
Anything related to race and most news that could be construed as political gets flagged off the front page no matter how important it is or how many up votes it gets. You need to be constantly browsing or hope dang is browsing and decides to actually save an article against people using the flag button against the rules of the site to ever see any such news if this is your main news source.
I didn't say I never read any other news source. I just try to avoid them on a daily basis because they're almost never actionable, and just make me depressed and unable to function. If there's something that's immediately actionable, then I find it will generally bubble up somewhere like Hacker News.
It is litterally the best part of any article - I dont bother reading the article, jsut check the most upvoted comments - then the most downvoted and you wont care about the story anymore.
Then you will watch Idiocracy (2006) and realise it is not a comedy at all...
How does a constant stream of news about things we can't change keep us real and grounded? In my experience, it makes me almost entirely unable to function, which feels like the opposite of being grounded.
We're entering a recession, tech jobs are starting to get cut, we're in a bear market, in a war in Europe, Covid is not leaving. Those are big news items one certainly can chose to ignore. Ignorance is bliss. Or one can chose to get informed and try to act accordingly as well as one can. There's a lot of knock on effects of the news such as chip crisis, a wheat/food crisis etc.
It doesn't mean those aren't real big (currently negative) news stories or that it's "rare" to have bad news.
Listen, I am not saying 'the world is coming to an end' or something. But putting our heads in the sand and hoping problems go away that way isn't a solution either.
I find paying for high-quality journalism goes a long way in how you feel about what you just read. Great journalism will leave you feeling contemplative and informed. Most of the "journalism" on "free" sites leave you feeling confused, anxious, or outright manipulated. It's like junk food... yeah it did the job, but at what cost?
A couple of months ago I stopped checking the news except for once a week, and found weekly news summaries from the Economist to be extremely helpful. I found that I was more relaxed during the week, more contemplative about the events of the world, and had stronger reactions to things that occurred because I didn’t feel bombarded by so much information.
For posterity, I'll mention there is also The Economist Espresso for those of us who prefer a daily dose. It's a concise summary of the events of the day and entirely void of polemic.
note when you find something that impresses you, it has probably been curated by an editor or an institution with standards, and follow that thread. And look for things written on a slower cadence than daily.
To start with, the NYT has traditionally been considered high-quality but since the internet age is torn by interests in attention-grabbing topics, controversial and contrarian takes, having SOMETHING to say about everything, and "being fair to both sides" (and to various class backgrounds) to maintain its "centrist" / "paper of record" industry position. Sometimes the long-form articles are high-quality, but often they are the way they are for some of those other reasons.
Every publication is going to have SOME bias, but as a starting point the Atlantic (leans left) and the Economist (pretty much defines Sober Neoliberal Center) are good. I like Harper's but it's more literary/essay-focused. A nice mix of substacks can be good. Most good writers will be annoying to you in some way, you have to put up with that for good informed writing, as opposed to "comfort zone" writing that is going to validate everything you feel by oversimplifying reality. E.g. I like Matt Yglesias' and Noah Smith's substack as news and as statements of a certain centrist/economic-realist takes, and good zoomed-out commentary on politics, but I find their contrarian voices on twitter annoying (:
In all the work is: finding writers you like, and resisting the urge to fall into things that are too comfortable or appeal to your "baser" tendencies, for informedness, to know what-to-think-to-be-on-the-right-side, etc.
Great input! I forgot all about Harper's for some years now... your mention prompted me to resubscribe.
Would also like to throw in the Wall Street Journal for news. If you stay away from the opinion sections, they are pretty firmly center and provide some great coverage of current events.
Incidentally, several of these (Atlantic, Economist, WSJ) are available on Apple News+ if you already happen to be paying for it.
If you're overwhelmed with bad feelings when confronted with negative information then you're probably better suited to not trying to stay informed. It's normal to feel negatively about things that suck. That isn't lost on the people deciding what to publish. The world will keep on turning whether you're tuned in to the latest stress event or not. If it's any consolation, you can't affect anything happening anyway so torturing yourself is pointless.
End of the day all journalism is trying to control how you feel to get you to do something. Just realize that the concept and worry about "staying informed" is something they're using so they can force you to listen to them.
Just stop looking at it for a week or two, learn how suddenly you only really hear about things that actually affect you and how much better your mental health is for it.
I always thought the point of "staying informed" wasn't to have the news inform our everyday decisions but just to have something to talk about.
Imo "good news" is the kind that tells us stuff we hadn't known prior in a way that isn't overtly sensationalist. It's dry and informative, at the cost of being entertaining. There aren't many outlets that actually do this.
It's also kind of ironic (and telling) seeing this type of article come out of Wired. You wouldn't see this kind of article in an outlet like the Economist
I agree with you, it is interesting this came from Wired.
But I have a strong personal bias against the Economist, and I feel like you used it as an example of a more serious journalist-y news.
I feel that the Economist is resting on its historic good name but has become a simple liberal rag that people use as a virtue signal. It's a terrible news source, incredibly and unabashedly biased, and the only time I have ever heard of it has been in Washington DC where only the most insufferable people smugly declare they read it cover to cover.
I would humbly submit better outlets like The Week, Barron's, or maybe Quanta.
I’d like to understand more about the perception that the Economist is a liberal publication. I’ve heard this before and it’s hard for me to reconcile this view with the articles I read. In my opinion, the economist more often than not errs on the side of being comprehensive and including facts that may or may not be relevant. Some of those facts may point to liberal conclusions, sometimes not.
I also know that they’ve taken a strong conservative stance on gender-specific sports. If they were “unabashedly biased” that would not fly.
"From its beginnings in 1843, when The Economist newspaper was founded by a Scottish hat manufacturer to further the cause of free trade [...]" [0]
It is liberal in the classical sense and in my opinion this was quite transparent in the writing at least when I was a subscriber throughout the 2000s.
> I feel that the Economist is resting on its historic good name but has become a simple liberal rag that people use as a virtue signal.
You mean liberal as in economically liberal or liberal as in woke liberal?
The magazine doesn't really publish a lot of the latter type of content, but I can definitely imagine people flexing the magazine out of snobbishness (kind of like the New Yorker). But that's a different kind of virtue signal
> maybe start to pay more attention as your home country deteriorates
The reasons for why countries deteriorate are vast and complicated. During such trying times, there’s always a group selling the line that deterioration is happening because some “other” is causing it, and those tends to be immigrants, refugees, Jews, or any of the other go-to scape goats.
So by the time your country is so bad that you notice it at the local level (I believe that dysfunction really is trickle down), the dysfunction at all levels is so deep that it’s too late for you to find the cause if you haven’t been paying close attention all along. Because any such quest for knowledge is filled with so many land mines and sand traps that the truth is completely obscured. You’re liable to get sucked into the easy to understand and straightforward explanation with a simple solution; the others cause it, so get rid of the others to fix it. Problem solved right?
I don't think anyone's advocating for sticking your head in the sand, there's a huge difference between not actively seeking/'keeping up to date with' the news, and not noticing deterioration in your country until there is 'deep dysfunction at all levels'.
Other people mention things, or you overhear things, you notice things, you walk past a newspaper stand, something references something, etc.
I mostly disengaged with the news (having previously been a newspaper subscriber), apart from via HN really, and yet I was still (not via HN) aware of Russia's impending (as it was at the time) invasion of Ukraine.
(And I do not live in Ukraine. I imagine it was very much more obvious there. A country in Ukraine's position - the threat of Russia on the border - is the sort of thing I mean that perhaps should make you pay more attention anyway with regard to your ex-pat vs. refugee concern. I live in the UK, and say what you want about whatever, a lot of excrement would have to hit a lot of fans before I would have any concern about becoming an ex-pat before being made a refugee. I (fortunately) do not have to read the news everyday to prevent that.)
Someone who ignores the news but spends 20 minutes looking at the Vote411 guide right before they vote is going to be more informed about who they're voting for than 99% of the population. If you've already decided that you aren't going to vote for Biden/Trump/whomever, spending an hour everyday for four year reading about how terrible they are and how right you are isn't going to change anything.
Not all journalism is created equal. If you reject all journalism equally disinformative, you're left with nothing to believe but conspiracy theories. You really should understand how the different news outlets function, what their business models and sources of funding are, and their biases. You should be realistic about news media, but not so cynical that you think everything is make believe and nothing matters.
One thing that is lost with online v. physical print papers is the story breaks (…continue on A5…) and the folds. I get the physical paper and skim the headlines above the fold - I promise myself I will only finish a story (continue on …) if the story impacts me personally in some tangible way.
Another tip - I read geographically close to far. So start with hyper locally news, then metro news, then state/province news, then national/international. As in most democracies and communities, my vote and efforts matter a lot more locally, so being up on the local politics and happenings better informs real life actions I can take to help.
Most UK papers are in the tabloid format now (i.e. in the physical sense, not that they're all about sex and celebrities), with very few stories written over pages, nor a meaningful fold (I like it when the crossword is on half a page but beyond that it's irrelevant).
Glad that you mentioned voting though, as much as I don't think there's much I can do about most world events, I do still feel the responsibility to be an informed voter, however slim the pickings might be. I have also found that print media (both newspapers and magazines) have made it much easier to engage my kids on various issues.
"stay informed" is really overrated. People seem informed on outrage headlines and celebrity gossip. The best tip I heard was to read month old newspapers - you quickly see you dont need this.
Long form journalism mainly like the New Yorker, Economist. Apart from that just the headlines on the Reuters or something like that. Avoid most American news channels and websites especially ones like Cnn , Fox, NYT.Avoid anything that is user-engagement and ad based .
I largely agree with Aaron Swartz on this matter[1]: news is a waste of time. Well, maybe except when it's about your industry, in which case it's only 95% a waste of time. I mostly "stay informed" as a way to slack off.
> But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
> With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.
I would pay $100 for a book documenting how Microsoft ran the trade press in the 90's and 00's. You can't tell me that they didn't throw gobs of money at outfits like Ziff-Davis and IDG after what has been revealed in their underhanded funding of SCO v IBM.
Is there any reason to think it's more than buying ads and giving exclusive contact? That leads to the kind of influence that doesn't need any vast conspiracy, Microsoft controlled the information they want and the money they need.
I treat industry news as a glimpse of the far future. I.e. I read about some "awesome new database", and I try to make a mental note to check in 5 years which companies totally failed on it and why, and which companies use it with some success and if so for what use cases.
But yes...don't use industry news to guide your decisions. Let other suckers do that for you, and then you can avoid their mistaken :-)
I agree that consuming up to the minute reporting of TV news and social media is not good (and can be paralyzing), but I used to read daily & especially weekly newspapers when they were more of a thing. They aren't just news, but I think that's besides the point.
There is skill in understanding your sphere of influence as it relates to what's important to you. Some high level examples:
The mentioned China and NK conflict? Outside of my sphere of influence and interest. It probably would mostly be a waste of time to read stuff like that.
The mentioned soldiers in Iraq? Some of them could have been my buddies, so while it was outside of my sphere of influence, it was definitely of interest.
Then there's local news, including new things to do, see, hear, eat, etc. and these are well within both my sphere of influence and interests. This is definitely valuable to me.
Mainstream news tries to subvert that filter too. You'll see a trending headline above the fold of some horrible personal disaster and find out it's in a place far, far away. I always feel like those stories should all have country tags, and then I realize I keep succumbing to their tactics just by visiting.
> With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper.
I wouldn't make the time investment to read a whole book about Chinese economic policy, but I like to read a summary in something like The Economist. I agree that reading the NYT headlines every day is a waste of time though. Depends what he called "news".
> but I like to read a summary in something like The Economist.
What makes you think anyone at the economist knows anything or would know anything about chinese economic policy. Even if they did, what makes you think they wouldn't spin it or mislead? The only thing the economist is good for is revealing the western elites' political opinions of china. If the economist says nice things about china, it means our elites want to exploit cheap chinese labor for their financial benefit. If the economist says bad things about china, it means our elites want better deal on exploiting cheap chinese labor.
> I agree that reading the NYT headlines every day is a waste of time though. Depends what he called "news".
The economist is a greater waste of time. At least the NYT is well written. Arguably the best written "news" out there. Though at the end of the day, it's ultimately a waste of time as well.
Reading the news is like the blind leading the deaf. But we have to waste our time somehow.
> What makes you think anyone at the economist knows anything or would know anything about chinese economic policy.
I don't know enough to evaluate that, so replace it with whatever they are more versed in, like US economic policy. It's just an example.
> The only thing the economist is good for is revealing the western elites' political opinions of china.
But even their negative articles about China are two-sided. They usually don't catastrophise. I've read a lot of them and they don't fit with the Econ being a mouthpiece for "western elites".
> But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
> With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.
This just screams to me that Aaron Swartz didn't have any experience with realtime programming.
book *send_scoop_the_week_before_the_election(scoop *s)
{
book *b = block_for_months_if_not_years(s);
return b;
}
Mainstream news is also in the business of manufacturing consent. When you see the big picture that what you're consuming is not facts, but an elaborate operation to sell you a narrative and make you feel a certain way, you feel like staying far away from it.
Agreed. News used to be concerned with local municipalities, less so with state gov, and Sunday paper for national/intl news.
We've just got billions of people glued to know what Andrew Cuomo is doing in NYC.
The effects of this centralization/globalisation are massive. Local gov are becoming more corrupt because there is no one to police from a journalistic standpoint.
OK, here's a specific case that's relevant to the HN audience: I want to stay informed about programming languages and frameworks so I can make tech decisions for new projects without becoming set in my ways and making decisions that are suboptimal in the current world. For example, I don't want to become my generation's equivalent of a person who assumes that all new applications should be developed in C. At the same time, I don't want to get too sucked into hype. Any suggestions?
Not my area of expertise, but perhaps trade journals, conference proceedings,industry blogs, and maybe HN.
The point is that now that you have a goal, you can search and evaluate sources against it. You can also rule out sources that would not meet your goal. For example you can determine that Fox News or CNN is probably a terrible source for you to try to achieve this goal
News is only news because it focuses on long tail statistical anomalies. The more news you consume, the more decoupled you become from what is happening in the ‘average’ reality.
The solution is to look towards national or local statistics and trends, or read Wikipedia articles months after an event.
I've lived decently well for 15+ years under the assumption that "if it's important, it'll find its way to me." Haven't watched/read the news in that time span and don't think I've lost out on much because of it.
I do rely on that, specifically in my case HN users posting big stuff even though it's not tech/startup/hacking news
Obviously by definition I'm lacking the information to disprove but I don't think I've missed anything I needed to know about. I've not been blindsided by any big events or anything
Yeah it does rely on other folks reading the news, people are already doing that though so no worries! I'd be surprised if even 1% of the world's news-available population decides to cut down (to point out also, this entire policy can be reevaluated in minutes if I find myself incorrect)
In any case I think the only news I actually needed to know over the past decade or so was regarding covid and that instantly got through the bubble without issue
For the sake of being on the same page my definition of needed in the case of news is: I need to act in some way to prevent negative results, or I can act on the information in some way that may lead to positive results for good people.
Informed decisions are meaningless on an individual level. The government will be the same no matter who I vote for. Voting is just a way to feel like you did something without any effort
> The government will be the same no matter who I vote for.
"Both sides"/"my vote doesn't count" fatalism is boring and unsupported by evidence. Australians just strongly voted their support of mitigating climate change, and it wouldn't have happened if millions of them thought like you.
> Voting is just a way to feel like you did something without any effort
So what's your solution? What's your alternative to voting?
We know the historical alternative: killing, dying, suffering, or (most likely) a combination of all of the above.
The dramatically lower instance of tyranny in post-democratic societies proves that you're wrong.
The irony here is that whining about the government is the ultimate "feeling like you're doing something without any effort".
I don't disagree completely on that. It was factored into my lifestyle. I was OK with that. We only have so much energy in our lives. Waking up each morning and being the best I could be to myself and those in my vicinity seemed a worthwhile goal. Tend to the part of the garden you can touch.
The following podcasts once or twice a week have been the totality of my topical news diet for many years and I feel pretty informed, not terribly overwhelmed, and only a _little_ partisan.
- Morgan Stanley's Thoughts on the Market
- NPR's Marketplace
- New York Time's The Daily
- NPR's Up First
Stay away from always-online cultures like Twitter or Facebook, click-bait warrens like most "blog-news" sites, and try to read a few economic or historical non-fiction books a few times a year and you're good to go.
You should probably question what "stay informed" means. Do you need to know every move and event that happens all over the world? Probably not. Most of it is useless and insignificant.
One thing I found that helps is to go cold turkey on the media. Speak to people and friends and you'll learn about what they're reading, albeit distilled down. If something catches your interest then follow up research is warranted. In this way the news is pull rather than push.
> I now designate daily subway rides for reading New York Times breaking news emails so that clients don’t find me in an anxiety-ridden state when they arrive for tutoring sessions.
"Intellectuals [are] virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons:
1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information;
2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;
3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves'.
They literally need propaganda."
Konrad Kellen in the introduction of Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul
I think there's a lot of social pressure also contributed by other intellectuals to "stay informed", and pressure within political parties to make sure that people are also reading the news with the right interpretations. Just to say, I think the anxiety-ridden mess mentioned previously has some reinforcement behind it.
"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"
George Orwell, 1984
If one grants primacy over their own mental faculties - believing that anybody else's word has more relevance than their very interpretation of the world - then that other group now has the power to make one believe, and ultimately do, anything. At scale, that is a recipe for horrible things.
A society with a freedom of thought will never have a utopia because we just can't stop finding falsehoods appealing. But you will also never have a dystopia because society will always trend towards the truth as the past of least resistance, even if the road there might be quite bumpy. But in the grand scheme of things this is the state mankind has been in that sent us from being glorified apes to to being glorified apes with vast cities, neat toys, and being on the verge of setting out in exploration and settlement of the stars.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadHN is great for tech, it's good to passable for tech-adjacent things (science*, math**) and usually really bad for anything far removed from tech (politics, humanities, philosophy, ...). Which should not be surprising, there is no a priori reason to believe that people experienced with technology should have interesting things to say about other topics.
(*) This excludes heavily politicised science topics.
(**) Though I have yet to see a math submission with more than a handful of comments without somebody complaining (and being upvoted!) about "math is too complicated" or "why don't they just use variables with more than one letter?".
Allowing them here would likely have a negative snowball effect.
- people who think solutions imply most often technical ideas
- people who are educated enough to understand HN
- people who talk english
So you don't see much of the rest of the world here... For example, there's not much on political strategies...
Avoid news with a comment section.
Buy and read high quality print media.
It is litterally the best part of any article - I dont bother reading the article, jsut check the most upvoted comments - then the most downvoted and you wont care about the story anymore.
Then you will watch Idiocracy (2006) and realise it is not a comedy at all...
What a beautifully ironic comment.
Make Twitter lists and only look at feeds from these lists.
No tv.
HN.
It shouldn't paralyze but keep us real and grounded. Just ignoring it to feel 'happier' isn't a solution. It's news, not entertainment.
It doesn't mean those aren't real big (currently negative) news stories or that it's "rare" to have bad news.
Listen, I am not saying 'the world is coming to an end' or something. But putting our heads in the sand and hoping problems go away that way isn't a solution either.
There will be happier times again, no doubt!
Most of human life in 2022 is pretty great, and getting better. But that headline will never bring in the clicks.
I will have to try this weekly approach.
To start with, the NYT has traditionally been considered high-quality but since the internet age is torn by interests in attention-grabbing topics, controversial and contrarian takes, having SOMETHING to say about everything, and "being fair to both sides" (and to various class backgrounds) to maintain its "centrist" / "paper of record" industry position. Sometimes the long-form articles are high-quality, but often they are the way they are for some of those other reasons.
Every publication is going to have SOME bias, but as a starting point the Atlantic (leans left) and the Economist (pretty much defines Sober Neoliberal Center) are good. I like Harper's but it's more literary/essay-focused. A nice mix of substacks can be good. Most good writers will be annoying to you in some way, you have to put up with that for good informed writing, as opposed to "comfort zone" writing that is going to validate everything you feel by oversimplifying reality. E.g. I like Matt Yglesias' and Noah Smith's substack as news and as statements of a certain centrist/economic-realist takes, and good zoomed-out commentary on politics, but I find their contrarian voices on twitter annoying (:
In all the work is: finding writers you like, and resisting the urge to fall into things that are too comfortable or appeal to your "baser" tendencies, for informedness, to know what-to-think-to-be-on-the-right-side, etc.
Would also like to throw in the Wall Street Journal for news. If you stay away from the opinion sections, they are pretty firmly center and provide some great coverage of current events.
Incidentally, several of these (Atlantic, Economist, WSJ) are available on Apple News+ if you already happen to be paying for it.
Just stop looking at it for a week or two, learn how suddenly you only really hear about things that actually affect you and how much better your mental health is for it.
Imo "good news" is the kind that tells us stuff we hadn't known prior in a way that isn't overtly sensationalist. It's dry and informative, at the cost of being entertaining. There aren't many outlets that actually do this.
It's also kind of ironic (and telling) seeing this type of article come out of Wired. You wouldn't see this kind of article in an outlet like the Economist
But I have a strong personal bias against the Economist, and I feel like you used it as an example of a more serious journalist-y news.
I feel that the Economist is resting on its historic good name but has become a simple liberal rag that people use as a virtue signal. It's a terrible news source, incredibly and unabashedly biased, and the only time I have ever heard of it has been in Washington DC where only the most insufferable people smugly declare they read it cover to cover.
I would humbly submit better outlets like The Week, Barron's, or maybe Quanta.
I also know that they’ve taken a strong conservative stance on gender-specific sports. If they were “unabashedly biased” that would not fly.
It is liberal in the classical sense and in my opinion this was quite transparent in the writing at least when I was a subscriber throughout the 2000s.
[0] https://www.economistgroup.com/about-us
You mean liberal as in economically liberal or liberal as in woke liberal? The magazine doesn't really publish a lot of the latter type of content, but I can definitely imagine people flexing the magazine out of snobbishness (kind of like the New Yorker). But that's a different kind of virtue signal
The reasons for why countries deteriorate are vast and complicated. During such trying times, there’s always a group selling the line that deterioration is happening because some “other” is causing it, and those tends to be immigrants, refugees, Jews, or any of the other go-to scape goats.
So by the time your country is so bad that you notice it at the local level (I believe that dysfunction really is trickle down), the dysfunction at all levels is so deep that it’s too late for you to find the cause if you haven’t been paying close attention all along. Because any such quest for knowledge is filled with so many land mines and sand traps that the truth is completely obscured. You’re liable to get sucked into the easy to understand and straightforward explanation with a simple solution; the others cause it, so get rid of the others to fix it. Problem solved right?
Other people mention things, or you overhear things, you notice things, you walk past a newspaper stand, something references something, etc.
I mostly disengaged with the news (having previously been a newspaper subscriber), apart from via HN really, and yet I was still (not via HN) aware of Russia's impending (as it was at the time) invasion of Ukraine.
(And I do not live in Ukraine. I imagine it was very much more obvious there. A country in Ukraine's position - the threat of Russia on the border - is the sort of thing I mean that perhaps should make you pay more attention anyway with regard to your ex-pat vs. refugee concern. I live in the UK, and say what you want about whatever, a lot of excrement would have to hit a lot of fans before I would have any concern about becoming an ex-pat before being made a refugee. I (fortunately) do not have to read the news everyday to prevent that.)
While I agree, I don’t think we can expect everyone to do this research themselves, and we can’t always trust others opinions on the matter either.
Another tip - I read geographically close to far. So start with hyper locally news, then metro news, then state/province news, then national/international. As in most democracies and communities, my vote and efforts matter a lot more locally, so being up on the local politics and happenings better informs real life actions I can take to help.
Glad that you mentioned voting though, as much as I don't think there's much I can do about most world events, I do still feel the responsibility to be an informed voter, however slim the pickings might be. I have also found that print media (both newspapers and magazines) have made it much easier to engage my kids on various issues.
(why in the world Wired needs to load total of 33 ads/trackers?)
[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Some quotes:
> But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
> With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.
Industry news is 105% waste of time...
(Hype, marketing, snake-oil, fads)
That's already a conspiracy, as ad spendings are only supposed to buy you ads, not editorial influence.
But yes...don't use industry news to guide your decisions. Let other suckers do that for you, and then you can avoid their mistaken :-)
There is skill in understanding your sphere of influence as it relates to what's important to you. Some high level examples:
The mentioned China and NK conflict? Outside of my sphere of influence and interest. It probably would mostly be a waste of time to read stuff like that.
The mentioned soldiers in Iraq? Some of them could have been my buddies, so while it was outside of my sphere of influence, it was definitely of interest.
Then there's local news, including new things to do, see, hear, eat, etc. and these are well within both my sphere of influence and interests. This is definitely valuable to me.
I wouldn't make the time investment to read a whole book about Chinese economic policy, but I like to read a summary in something like The Economist. I agree that reading the NYT headlines every day is a waste of time though. Depends what he called "news".
What makes you think anyone at the economist knows anything or would know anything about chinese economic policy. Even if they did, what makes you think they wouldn't spin it or mislead? The only thing the economist is good for is revealing the western elites' political opinions of china. If the economist says nice things about china, it means our elites want to exploit cheap chinese labor for their financial benefit. If the economist says bad things about china, it means our elites want better deal on exploiting cheap chinese labor.
> I agree that reading the NYT headlines every day is a waste of time though. Depends what he called "news".
The economist is a greater waste of time. At least the NYT is well written. Arguably the best written "news" out there. Though at the end of the day, it's ultimately a waste of time as well.
Reading the news is like the blind leading the deaf. But we have to waste our time somehow.
I don't know enough to evaluate that, so replace it with whatever they are more versed in, like US economic policy. It's just an example.
> The only thing the economist is good for is revealing the western elites' political opinions of china.
But even their negative articles about China are two-sided. They usually don't catastrophise. I've read a lot of them and they don't fit with the Econ being a mouthpiece for "western elites".
> With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.
This just screams to me that Aaron Swartz didn't have any experience with realtime programming.
We've just got billions of people glued to know what Andrew Cuomo is doing in NYC.
The effects of this centralization/globalisation are massive. Local gov are becoming more corrupt because there is no one to police from a journalistic standpoint.
For myself, I use Google News and I immediately filter out any source for any fearmongering headlines.
Complete the sentence:
"I want to stay informed about X so that I can do Y. "
It doesn't matter what X and Y are. You will never be informed by just sampling random information.
You can't be informed about everything in the world, and you can't achieve your goal unless you articulate it.
Media companies can't tell you what X and Y are.
What do you care about and what impact do you want to have, on yourself or on the world.
Once you figure out your goal it is relatively easy to find high quality information.
The point is that now that you have a goal, you can search and evaluate sources against it. You can also rule out sources that would not meet your goal. For example you can determine that Fox News or CNN is probably a terrible source for you to try to achieve this goal
The solution is to look towards national or local statistics and trends, or read Wikipedia articles months after an event.
.. because someone else has been watching/reading/listening to the news.
I too don't follow live news, I'm not suggesting others do it. Description, not prescription.
If you don't rely on that, good for you.
Obviously by definition I'm lacking the information to disprove but I don't think I've missed anything I needed to know about. I've not been blindsided by any big events or anything
Yeah it does rely on other folks reading the news, people are already doing that though so no worries! I'd be surprised if even 1% of the world's news-available population decides to cut down (to point out also, this entire policy can be reevaluated in minutes if I find myself incorrect)
In any case I think the only news I actually needed to know over the past decade or so was regarding covid and that instantly got through the bubble without issue
For the sake of being on the same page my definition of needed in the case of news is: I need to act in some way to prevent negative results, or I can act on the information in some way that may lead to positive results for good people.
I imagine it's great for your mental health. I wouldn't dispute that.
If you are lucky enough to live in a functioning democracy, you did lose something: the ability to make informed decisions about your government.
"Both sides"/"my vote doesn't count" fatalism is boring and unsupported by evidence. Australians just strongly voted their support of mitigating climate change, and it wouldn't have happened if millions of them thought like you.
> Voting is just a way to feel like you did something without any effort
So what's your solution? What's your alternative to voting?
We know the historical alternative: killing, dying, suffering, or (most likely) a combination of all of the above.
The dramatically lower instance of tyranny in post-democratic societies proves that you're wrong.
The irony here is that whining about the government is the ultimate "feeling like you're doing something without any effort".
- Morgan Stanley's Thoughts on the Market
- NPR's Marketplace
- New York Time's The Daily
- NPR's Up First
Stay away from always-online cultures like Twitter or Facebook, click-bait warrens like most "blog-news" sites, and try to read a few economic or historical non-fiction books a few times a year and you're good to go.
One thing I found that helps is to go cold turkey on the media. Speak to people and friends and you'll learn about what they're reading, albeit distilled down. If something catches your interest then follow up research is warranted. In this way the news is pull rather than push.
"Intellectuals [are] virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons:
1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information;
2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;
3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves'.
They literally need propaganda."
Konrad Kellen in the introduction of Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul
George Orwell, 1984
If one grants primacy over their own mental faculties - believing that anybody else's word has more relevance than their very interpretation of the world - then that other group now has the power to make one believe, and ultimately do, anything. At scale, that is a recipe for horrible things.
A society with a freedom of thought will never have a utopia because we just can't stop finding falsehoods appealing. But you will also never have a dystopia because society will always trend towards the truth as the past of least resistance, even if the road there might be quite bumpy. But in the grand scheme of things this is the state mankind has been in that sent us from being glorified apes to to being glorified apes with vast cities, neat toys, and being on the verge of setting out in exploration and settlement of the stars.