Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions.
If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not.
Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring person.
Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?
It's actually funny reading your post, because you sound exactly like me when I was your age. As you get older, I think you'll learn to appreciate relationships with people more. The 18+ hour startup days lose their appeal.
I don't think your point is at odds with the OP. Even though the OP essentially advocates cutting out all new sources from your life at the end of the article, the real point of the article is to disabuse you of the illusion that these news sources are contributing to your productivity. So, if you want to keep up with the news so you can participate in water cooler discussions and build your social network[1], that's fine. But if you are spending large fractions of your time reading news because you think it will somehow improve your productivity, or even make you more informed, you're fooling yourself.
[1] I mean your actual social network, in the sense we all used that term before Facebook came along.
Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?
If you are not an expert on a political issue. You are uninformed, period. You don't have time to write papers, do extensive research, email scientists. The reality of being humans is that we don't know most of everything and we can't. We specialize, not have uber intelligent men decide the fate of humanity.
This is the problem with politics. It's not that we are stupid, it's just that our brain can't store and think through the vast amount of knowledge needed to decide on multiple complex issues. To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.
>To believe we can do anything else is the road back to Dachau.
I am arguing that democracies can't work due to the impossibility of having informed voters by the way our democracies are organized. The first step to the road of better governance is acknowledging human limitation and nature.
Yes, and the US is a federal republic, with a very specific electoral system to boot...so many other types of democracy exist before we get to non-democracy lol
That's argument from ignorance. Just because we doesn't know a better solution doesn't mean there aren't any. Hackers build solutions. And as the above poster said, the first step to start building better practical solutions is to acknowledge the limitations of the resources and tools at our disposal.
Lichtenstein, Singapore. Consumer capitalism is not tied to democracy. And it is consumer capitalism that is raising the world's desperate out of subsistence.
Democracy is a luxury good that rich nations purchase.
I was wondering just that a few weeks ago. I found this perspective interesting to think about, even if it's impractical...
http://www.see.org/garcia/e02.htm
Fortunately, most of the time voters choosing "representatives". As human creatures, we do tend to be better (yet far from optimal) at recognizing worthy people to follow.
Sure you can! Like everything else, you have to pick your sources. I go with NYT and the IHT for "American" sources, and the BBC and Al Jaz, and then occassionally the local newspapers if I'm bored. NYT is quite decent, IMO, although obviously far from perfect.
If you watch AJ/BBC you've probably spotted what my comment was up to. If not, just compare it to their respective US alternatives and you get it. I sometimes click on to mainstream US news just to check what's the POV on foreign affairs and I always feel like there's an echo chamber with a very thick wall (not to mention the quality of journalism), and it's not only the one with F and X in their name. It's a pity though, and what makes me more annoyed is that popular news channels in my country also went that direction.
> If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?
This reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that showed how Time magazine offers different cover stories for their international and their US issues on the same date. One example was the Arab Spring (international) and something on "doing chores" for us here in the US.
Yeah, and puppies. Sometimes when I take a glance at American news it looks like there'd be a conspiracy going on not to expose citizens to any issue possibly widening their field of view on world affairs. It's pathetic.
Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot.
Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.
(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)
>Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone.
One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.
Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.
I think it’s not a problem in the utility equation for an individual voter, it’s a problem in the system. By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.
Empirically, a good showing for a third-party candidate has no significant effect on the political discourse, and your individual share of giving that candidate a strong showing is negligible.
Voting in the US is badly broken. I strongly favor equal representation, a multiparty system, and other reforms. Part of getting to them is admitting things like my vote, for one, being foregone.
By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.
This is only true in the context of a single election. Over multiple election cycles, small movements in voting patterns can announce the start of a trend. Saying your vote doesn't count is an abdication of responsibility - 'somebody ought to do something about it, but 'they' would never allow it, hurf durf.'
In our winner-take-all system, the natural constituency for a third party would have to be willing to withdraw their support from the less unfavorable major party candidates, and give elections over to the other side's nutjobs. That's a very high cost just to communicate a trend to politicians, which could have been done by straw poll without the resulting damage to civil rights, the economy, church-centric values, or whatever you're most concerned about. The cure for tactical voting is some other polling system like IRV or approval, where I don't lose all possible effect on outcome just because my favorite doesn't win.
As I said, empirically, those announcements are not important. Look at Perot, Nader, Paul – those votes might have been half an epsilon further from wasted than a vote for Obama or McCain, but they were still vastly less effective than any of a dozen other political actions using equal time and effort. And your importance to any trend is inversely proportional to its importance.
As prodigal_erik points out in a sibling comment, this is a systemic problem with our electoral system. It has nothing to do with hurf durf.
Seriously, saying the median American’s vote doesn’t count is a statistically founded observation, not an ethical action. In terms of ethical actions, I’m advocating for the opposite of laziness-posing-as-cynicism. I want a kind of intellectual vigor about politics where we care enough to spend our resources where they’ll do the most good. We should care about school boards and our own jobs, not the essentially symbolic presidential vote.
Voting is like buying a spatula with a pink handle. Refusing to work with a company that donates to an irresponsible county commissioner is like convincing a bright student to work in cancer research. It’s way less cool and way more important.
The best way out of this is the (virtual) abolition of the Electoral College or the adoption of true electoral reform. These are more realistic goals than they might seem.
It's only badly broken because voters don't participate in the process. The US political system only works when you have an engaged, educated citizenry actively shaping government. Cynicism about one's vote being foregone is one thing that leads to a broken system.
This article has relevance to this problem as well. The vast majority of people won't realize that news is just noise, noise meant to misdirect voters. If you really want to know about the candidates, you can look up their record and do some research. Unfortunately, this isn't taught in civics classes, and most voters are content with what their favorite news channel tells them about how good one candidate is and how evil another candidate is. Then they regurgitate the same talking points with their friends and neighbors and reinforce the media message, entrenching an opinion in non-swing states. The system will work if people would be more willing to participate and educate themselves, like Roshan decided he would do.
Saying it’s bad to think your vote is foregone is different from saying it’s wrong.
And I’m not sure it is bad. It’s the truth, and it’s best to trust people with that. Knowing that my vote is effectively uncounted makes me more, not less, politically effective.
"If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year."
I think I'm going to use this method - it's an interesting exercise, and it's a great excuse to get people to stop talking to me about bread-and-circuses politics (e.g. what's discussed in this blog post: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000436.html ).
"Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot."
This is an uplifting and encouraging message - and a far better argument in favor of anarchism than torching a Starbucks. Thank you.
Oh please. Politicians change their positions so much once they are elected that you can't judge what they will do on foreign policy or any other matter.
Let me be the contrarian here. If you limit yourself to a few content sources, you won't be able to make the leaps that come out of having access to information outside those sources and will eventually fall prey to group-think.
Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.
I agree. Good creative output requires at least some degree of good creative input (especially, IMHO, in more artistic endeavors like creative writing). You need other people's ideas to help expand your own, even as you try to escape from their boxes. Yet, if you spend all your time doing that, you'll never reap the benefits.
One of the OP's points is that most "news" sources are not actually informative, but rather just another form of entertainment. That is, they tell you things that your brain latches on to and wants to hear about, not things that you actually need to hear about. How do you respond to that?
In my experience, a good book about the past is worth a thousand news articles. (And then some.)
History repeats itself more often than we think.
Prime example:
One of the first hacks for the TX-0 was Peter Samson's music compiler, even though the TX-0 was not designed to have such capabilities and to most people the thought was ridiculous.
The first hack for the Altair was Steve Dompier's rendition of "Fool on the hill" using the Altairs radio interference. The Altair wasn't designed for this purpose either.
For some reason, two different people from different decades looking at similar (But very different) machines decided to do the same thing with them, without any prompting.
There are universal concepts that humans try to implement, improve, and expand upon. Keeping these in mind while trying to do cool stuff will go further than most news pieces. (Even the ones about other people doing cool stuff.)
I totally agree. I love seeing how a story varies as reported in the ny post, ny times, and la times for example. It definitely gets me thinking about what tthe issues behind the text are, and forming ideas in response.
"Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life."
Great quote. Two thoughts. One, i hope irving was referring to the medioocre tabloids as opposed to real papers. I've had the opportunity to attend some of the social functions for pulitzer judges in the past and they get some really quality content. Second, that cheesburger metaphor is hilarious in today's context of lolcat memes/speak/etc
I think 99.99% of news in all papers, tabloid or not, falls under that quote.
Unless your job is to directly action the news (e.g. if you're a trader, in which case I hope you have better sources than newspapers), "news" makes zero difference to your life, no matter how greatly written it might be. This is true of all papers, not just tabloids.
Most of what's in a newspaper is junk food, but there are very worthy parts: I find columns in NYT by Krugman, Brooks and Douthat to be thought-provoking even if I don't agree. And I find feature pieces of social or economic trends to be enlightening and helpful in terms of understanding people and the workings of our world.
You might not find such understanding of people and of the world to be worthy goal in itself, but even so such an understanding is useful as a framing device or an anology store for general reasonsing. In the same way that a mastery of philosophy has value as a reasoning device.
And, there is the value as source of inspiration: pointers towards topics to read up on or ideas to incorporate into one's life/work
I think what Irving was going for was less about news being worthless in the sense of the content being garbage, but rather that the distractions introduced into ones life by caring about national/world affairs of which we as individuals have little impact come at a great cost to our reserve of emotional energy.
I actually find RSS extremely useful for keeping up on scientific journals and blogs. For instance, there's no way I'll check every journal that might have papers of interest to me, but if I subscribe then I'll get thirty papers or so every month. If i haven't seen anything of interest in a few issues (or blog posts) then I remove it. I also subscribe to R bloggers, stats.stackexchange.com and the R tag on Stackoverflow. I've learned a huge amount from these sites, and for me RSS is a way to avoid pointlessly surfing news/political/science sites for hours. YMMV.
I don't read newspapers, or watch news, or follow current events at all, except for hn, and I agree that most if not all news is of completely no consequence to my life but I do have ~130 feeds in my rss reader and derive a lot of value from them.
From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).
So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.
I think you're using RSS very well (unlike what I used to do).
I like Apple products and use/write for them. I used to have MacRumors, 9to5mac, Cult of Mac, TUAW, The Apple Blog, TC, and a dozen more Apple-related feeds in my RSS (among other feeds). When there was a keynote or a new product announcement, all those websites would publish essentially the same thing over and over again, and I had to 'mark all as read'. I was using RSS wrong, and I'm glad I changed my bad habit. You're using it right and I'm sure you derive value from such a diverse collection of blogs!
I agree with this. I still keep some news/tech news sites in my Google Reader, but the vast majority of feeds are ones that update infrequently, from once a day and fewer, most of them being developer/designer blogs.
This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.
Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this.
"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."
It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.
You sound like me 3 years ago. I used to go into zombie-mode for long periods of time just reading every single link on Reddit, Google Reader, random news sites, etc. and afterwards I'd hardly be able to remember any of it. I still do this on occasion, but it's much less of a problem now. I had to take a tough approach with myself to build some better habits, but it worked.
I decided was that if I was going to take the time to read something, I would get something out of it. I would only read things that were genuinely useful, interesting, or valuable in some way. I had to come up with a way to force myself to think about what I was reading a little, so I kept a text file on my desktop with a record of every single article I had read. I started with just copying the URL and writing a 1-3 sentence summary, and even this was enough to make me think twice before opening links - "Is this article worth the effort to think about it enough to write a summary?" That was still pretty quick, so I added two more requirements- a 1-3 sentence critique of the article- just what I thought about it, whether I thought the author was incorrect/lying/exaggerating, etc. - and something interesting in the article- the kind of thing I might bring up if I was telling somebody about it.
Writing these things for every article started to feel a little like English class, but it worked. I got in the habit of pausing to think about whether I should click a link or continue reading, I started reading closely and critically, rather than just skimming half of it and moving on, I started paying attention to which news sites, blogs, and domains had worthwhile content and which had garbage, and most importantly, I would actually remember what I had read, and could talk or think intelligibly about it. Also, even though I was only 'requiring' myself to write a few sentences about each article, I found that I often didn't mind writing more, and trying to put some simple structure into my written thoughts would lead to new insights.
I've stopped regularly keeping the journal, but the habit of thinking about what I'm doing while surfing sites like HN has stayed with me.
I've been thinking about this since I read the blog post, and it might be time to take it up another notch. Instead of focusing on important articles, maybe I should focus on important topics, and do more of my own research, rather than just reading whatever comes up here. For example, I might read an article here about weird Javascript tricks, find the topic interesting, then read whatever I can find about the Javascript type system, closures, prototype-based programming, until I feel that I have a solid understanding of the topic, or my interest has been satiated. Maybe this takes a few days and I skip HN entirely in the meantime.
I think some people probably do this naturally but I've found that I tend toward zombie-mode.
This is a wonderful idea that I've had before, but never got around to trying. I think I'll start now! If only it wasn't such a pain on the iPad -- or maybe that's an advantage.
I've recently taken to discarding my bookmarks and relying on other methods to save interesting links. If I want to save something for later use, I'll tweet about it, write a tiny blog post about it, or jot it down in a notebook. I'm not terribly diligent about it, but it's made a huge impact towards helping me filter what is truly important.
Perhaps we sometimes expect too much. You don't listen to music to remember the lyrics, you just enjoy it. And you can enjoy and discard a piece of writing too.
You can easily idle away time. Right now I'm procrastinating.
It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read.
HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.
I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.
Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:
* Microsoft unveils new, more window-like logo for Windows 8
* Robin Thicke Arrested for Pot Possession
* The mostly good and sometimes bad Top 10 moments of Tim Wakefield's Red Sox career
* [John] Glenn worries the US is ceding its space leadership
* Ohio AG DeWine switches from Romney to Santorum
* Identity Theft Tops IRS's 2012 "Dirty Dozen" Tax Scams
* GOP candidates fighting over Michigan
* Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, dies at 43
* FDA Still Wary of Diet Pill's Side Effects
I don't want noise, but sometimes I need noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.
Frequency and quality are negatively correlated when it comes to news.
I would recommend Instapaper's curated list of articles, which tend to be long-form and more interesting than most, as well as The Browser ("Writing Worth Reading") for curated quality content. http://www.thebrowser.com
But you're not going to find quality content many times a day, no matter where you look.
I'm sure you're right. There's just not enough people writing to explain random complex subjects to people that don't study that field. And i'm correlating the concept of "news" with interesting information, when news reporting is basically repeating that which happens every single day. Thank you for the link, that may be just what I was looking for.
It almost makes you think creating a successful blog would be easy -- after all, there's so little worth reading. :-)
Creating writing that's thoughtful, attractive, linkable, rewarding, and current is, apparently, a hugely challenging activity that even a billion people only manage to pull off a few times a day.
"I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation."
Then I think you may be on the wrong news site. I'm not saying that to be a jerk, I'm just saying that HN is a community-curated news site where the stories that the majority of users find interesting gets to the top. If you don't fit into that majority then maybe it would be better to find a new site that is more suited to your tastes.
"It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays."
You sound like a typical bored teenager, with too much time on their hands, wearing their boredom as a nihilistic badge of honor, expecting everyone to entertain them, while simultaneously acting as if they know everything, thereby supposedly being superior to the entertainers. If you can't find anything good to read, then use your apparently copious time to write something which you would want to read, and then anyone who responds positively to it will probably be someone like you. Find enough of these people, and you'll have created a self-entertaining community. Hackers build solutions.
Yes. I am 16. I stay home from school because learning civics and history and math and science are super boring, so in between sessions of wallhacking on legacy counter-strike servers I refresh a startup tech news site looking for intellectually stimulating articles.
You're right. I do know everything. Everything except how best to use my time when I occasionally want to waste it broadening my horizon with unusual and interesting information. I typically walk around the house in underroos bragging about how bored I am. Then I zone out to American Idol.
I'm not sure what kind of parallel universe I'd have to exist in where writing about things I don't know anything about is possible, but once I find that reality, by golly I'll take your suggestion to heart.
Hackers really are the Thomas Edisons of our time. Extremely productive in everything they do and never piddling away on something just out of intellectual curiosity. Hackers only seem to create practical solutions to the big problems facing the world today. I'm so glad every college graduate who's just landed his first job writing JavaScript for a start-up can refer to themselves with such a prestigious title. And with so much credibility!
What I don't understand about your comment is that you seem to believe that nobody ever gets bored at work or needs a break from a grind of meetings, coding, red tape, conference calls, etc. I envy your steadfast dedication. I, however, do actually need a break once in a while and enjoy reading about things that are interesting and new to me, or just enlightening in some fashion. Forgive me for crying about it into a thread about distraction.
10 out of 10 for the put down but seriously between libraries, a kindle and google you have access (mostly free) to virtually the sum total of human knowledge. There is lots of stuff out there that will distract you and feed your brain, you're just going to have to cycle through more than 4 sites to get it.
Yes. I am 16. I stay home from school because learning civics and history and math and science are super boring, so in between sessions of wallhacking on legacy counter-strike servers I refresh a startup tech news site looking for intellectually stimulating articles.
No, they are pretty interesting. The teachers are boring, may be. History? The civil war? The Isreali-Palestini conflict? The poverty in the world? Water distribution in the world?
Go and look for the interesting parts. There are lot of interesting stuff in the world, apart from the tech scene. I wish I spent more time when I was your age reading about politics.
If you want real intellectual stimulation, go to a university. Seriously. There are some super interesting things going on at universities, but you have to take some initiative to find them.
Sit in on some classes, check out the university library, find some clubs that seem interesting and hang out at their meetings, talk to professors and students -- maybe even get involved in some of the projects happening there. You'll get a lot out of this, I guarantee it. I can recommend this to people who've already attended universities too. Many of them could use some intellectual stimulation.
The BBC's programmes aren't, as far as I'm aware, geoblocked.
I loved Americana... until Radio 4 removed it and replaced it with an interminable panel game featuring four of the usual suspect "comedians" who seem to take up an inordinate amount of the station's airtime.
Now, I go the other way, and listen to a lot of stuff on NPR stations from the US.
The TV stuff tends to be. The radio programmes are not. This is because one needs to pay a license fee in the UK to watch television, which funds the BBC. Listening to the radio is free, however.
In your list of "choice excerpts," an obituary for Anthony Shadid, one of the greats in journalism. He won 2 Pulitzer prizes and a bullet in the shoulder for his coverage of the Middle East over the last decade. Go read his obit and some of his old work.
There's lots of great journalism out there, and I mostly don't see anything wrong with that list you have there. Maybe little of interest to you, but all still news.
You could start playing games online. I like to play Carcassonne on Brettspielwelt, but presumably chess or Go would work, too. Give you a 30 minute break.
Make something. Make something, make something, make something! Make. Something. Now. I can't say this enough; the next time you go in a loop, just stop right then and there and make something. Your life will be 1000 times better.
I make things when I have a reason to make something. I've done my time in OSS and bug killing and it's boring and a waste when you don't need the thing you're working on.
I did make something recently, but with my free time and not at work, because basically work didn't feel it was important enough to pay me to make it. So instead of making it at work I look for other noise to fill in the gap when i've been coding for 5 hours and need a break.
But making something for the sake of making? I'm sorry but i'll never be one of those people. (Well, anymore. I have a directory full of 1/4 finished projects as proof of how productive it is to just make stuff for no reason)
I suspect you're trolling. But just in case you're not, and the problem really is that you cannot find interesting, educational and/or enlightening material... have you tried:
I appreciate the attempt but these are examples of what I find uninteresting. Toys, gadgets, household tips and trivia are not the kind of noise I want when trying to optimize for value.
Sure, knowing that Osama was killed isn't a life or death piece of information but staying informed is important to many people. It doesn't have to be binary - read it all or read nothing. You can quickly stay informed if you pick news sources that respect your time.
IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.
In "The Four Hour Work Week", Timothy Ferriss claims to not have read a newspaper for years. It's all about maximum output. Minimizing input is one great way to free up time and energy to drastically increase output.
Like everything, it's all about moderation. It's very useful to have something to say in social and work situations.
Spending 10-minutes a week reading pop culture or sports news, or keeping up on what concerts, events etc are coming to your area payoff huge in meeting new friends, dating, building relationships at work and so forth.
Once you've generally sussed out how all of the different perspectives view issues, and thereby understand the patterns by which the world operates, the news starts seeming repetitious.
If you work in a tech startup, obviously you don't have to read every political story but I believe you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry.
If you're not aware of these things, your boss is, and they are going to ask you to implement a screen that informs the user you are uploading their address book. If you've seen a large breadth of products and companies like Kickstarter, you will easily pick up on macro trends like UI/UX paradigms and significant technologies.
If you had some sophisticated filtering like a user has in another popular HN post today to get rid of things you don't like, you might miss out on trends like NoSQL or Node or Redis or Clojure, or you might upload a user's address book without permission and get caught.
If you are not up-to-date with your industry, I think in reality you will always be an employee of or a laggard to the person who knows about those things.
I think the author's is people make mistakes way too much more on the other end of the spectrum where they read news while deceiving themselves into thinking it's a productive activity. I know I'm guilty.
It might be worth it to push the boundaries in the other direction until you get too little information and miss out. You might be surprised how far that boundary is. It was certainly true in the author's case. Until you try, you don't know and you won't be able to calibrate your system correctly.
> you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry.
I don't think so. The Path situation is a problem precisely because we know that it is a wrong thing to do. So if you haven't heard of it you would probably decide not to do it like them.
I would even argue that this is actually the stuff you should ignore. The latest Sillicon Valley affairs, bloggers bickering between each other and so on. That's not even news, that's more like celebrity gossip.
The articles that I appreciate the most on HN are about how somebody has done something (which I perhaps thought of doing myself) and writes up precisely how.
I agree that the so-called "news" is entertainment, but being completely uninformed about current events will make you non-discerning in addition to more productive. Perhaps it would be better to consume better information as opposed to less information.
lots of people are remembered for being well read. Take someone like Noam Chomsky. He has written many books based on facts he has read, remembered, and used to support his point of view. his opinion is included, but it is always supported by countless examples and recitation of facts. I have friends that read everything and know a lot on most subjects that intrest me. I admire that a lot, and it is always refreshing to converse with them and learn new things. Some people have the skill of great memory and ability to conjure up information at the right time to create powerful statements.
First of all Chomsky is still alive, and secondly, I'm almost certain that he won't be remembered for his poltical writings, but for his scientific contributions.
People don't even read his very early political works much anymore. His new material is what gets most consumed and keeps his name in people's minds.
Chomsky's writings are still standard reading for people in various activist communities. He will most likely be remembered for both, and for the fact that he contributed both.
I just went to a free Chomsky lecture last week and of the dozens of people I've talked to who also went, all went for the political works, even the linguists.
Chomsky is well-read because he wants to say insightful things. No one is remembered for being well read Chomsky is well-know because of his contributions to human knowledge - being well-read is a step towards building interesting things.
It implies your life has meaning (if it affects those around you). After all, if we remove you from the universe and nothing changes, you really didn't exist or may as well not have existed in practice.
I use a combination of IRC(active) and Twitter/Tweetdeck(passive) for most of my online "reading" these days. It tracks the most social things: people, global topics, and "meeting places," rather than "bloggers", "pop news", or "discussion forums", which have a service/task-oriented feel to them. It is addictive, of course, so I do have to turn it off occasionally, but on balance, I get a lot of benefit out of it, since it's low-maintenance and fairly high-signal, albeit a bit prone to "what i ate for dinner" type spam.
I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest-common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.
News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.
*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.
This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)
The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.
Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.
"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and
politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired
in the naivest way who he might be and what he
had done. My surprise reached a climax, however,
when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of
the Copernican Theory and of the composition of
the Solar System. That any civilized human being
in this nineteenth century should not be aware that
the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to
me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly
realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do
know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a
man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic,
and you have to stock it with such furniture as
you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every
sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge
which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or
at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so
that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as
to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have
nothing but the tools which may help him in doing
his work, but of these he has a large assortment,
and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to
think that that little room has elastic walls and can
distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes
a time when for every addition of knowledge you
forget something that you knew before. It is of the
highest importance, therefore, not to have useless
facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted
impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun.
If we went round the moon it would not make a
pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I love that excerpt. The Holmes books were among my favorites growing up, read all of them several times, and that was one of the most memorable exchanges.
I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce (blog posts, daily news articles) is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce (books, journal articles, working code). If you want to fill your 'empty attic' with high-value information, focus on the latter as much as possible.
> I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce (blog posts, daily news articles) is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce (books, journal articles, working code).
I agree with you, especially in light of your "generally" caveat, but taking the lesson from the Holmes quote above... there are contexts in which the easily accessible approach of a blog post is far more valuable than a journal article on the same topic, along with the ability to provide prompt updates when the situation changes.
I agree in principle. The link between the "hard-to-produce factor" and the medium (blog vs. paper) is not in my eyes so strong. There's a lot of overlap and I don't think the generalization is that valuable.
It sounds pretty, but I'm not convinced this is a sound analogy. I think the walls are elastic to some extent. The real limitation on how much you can learn is not storage space, but time spent "moving furniture". You only have so much time to spend learning things, and you have to choose where to allocate it.
I don't really think his qualifications have much of a bearing on that - you could easily think of knowledge as a function of time and effort, which are certainly limited and finite resources for everyone, so the analogy still holds.
I subscribe to this as well, but I still think Doyle has a point. Sherlock wasn't talking about neural biology, but about the structure of the conscious mind. In practice, the advantage of an "efficient brain" might not be very important compared to having focus in one' thinking.
In other words, the problem is not that we have too many pathways in the brain, rather that we spend too many cycles traveling down redundant ones. Let this allegory warn us to accept the scarcity of attention.
The more efficient it is, but as an economist, I'd say those are two different things.
Your efficiency per unit resource may increase, but your total resources are still finite. Therefore, unless your efficiency increases asymptotically fast enough that the integral diverges (ie, infinite area), your total end product will still be finite. And I have a hard time believing that efficiency would increase that quickly.
One should not take this quote seriously. Doyle was not hoping his Holmes should be a model for anyone to follow. He is some kind of anti-humanist. I see Holmes stories as some kind of exercice de style, and in real life the reasoning part of a detective work is anecdotal, I believe the real good detective is the one who can put himself in the brain of his prey, see Maigret for example.
TLDR: BS! Reading good books unrelated to your main work is more necessary than ever. And that'a why closing the pipes of the noise is a good idea.
"But this post isn’t about politics, it’s about noise."
No! It is about politics. Note that most of the examples given are related to political events.
The OP does have a great point (I waste too much time on HN, perhaps); however, the kind of political aloofness desc/prescribed in the post is what, I think, is the root of the biggest political problem (not just in the US, everywhere): the best people who should be involved in politics are not. It is a common adage that the word idiot was used in Ancient Greek for a person who was not interested in politics (unless of course you were a woman, slave, or farmer).
I budget between one and two hours of my self-directed workday to skimming various tech and business blogs. I save HN for last and scan every new title line. I usually read about 15 - 30 articles during this period.
Furthermore, while I'm waiting for a build, or for a test to reach the point where my interaction is required, I go back to HN and check the page or two of new title lines.
I consider myself a productive Java programmer, writing about 30K lines of code per year for my startup project. I could create more LOC if I did not read the tech news, but I would face two issues: (1) burnout, and (2) the need to stay current with the technology.
My project is heavily leveraged with open source Java /JavaScript libraries, nearly all discovered from tech blogs. For example: Jenkins, JQuery, JSON, JavaCV, OpenChord, Netty, Sesame, the Chrome web browser, Lubuntu, etc. I build my own development & server machines so I need to keep up with hardware.
Additionally, I have steered away from possible infrastructure dead ends by observing trends, such as the move to mobile HTML5 apps.
I disagree with your fundamental point that all news sources are not trying to educate or inform you, but are instead trying to entertain you in some bias way. Of course nearly all of them are in order to make a profit (Fox News for instance), but I'm frustrated that you don't see the value that organizations like The Associated Press offer to a free society. The AP is a non-profit, un-biased organization that provides a service that our constitution guarantees. I hope see this is powerful and important and try out AP Mobile.
211 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadGood advice nonetheless.
If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not.
Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring person.
Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?
It's actually funny reading your post, because you sound exactly like me when I was your age. As you get older, I think you'll learn to appreciate relationships with people more. The 18+ hour startup days lose their appeal.
i'd like to mention that i wasn't really writing this from the perspective of productivity. i think it's a wellness thing to fade out noise.
My first step was keeping my iPhone out of the bed room :)
[1] I mean your actual social network, in the sense we all used that term before Facebook came along.
If you are not an expert on a political issue. You are uninformed, period. You don't have time to write papers, do extensive research, email scientists. The reality of being humans is that we don't know most of everything and we can't. We specialize, not have uber intelligent men decide the fate of humanity.
This is the problem with politics. It's not that we are stupid, it's just that our brain can't store and think through the vast amount of knowledge needed to decide on multiple complex issues. To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.
To believe we can do anything else is the road back to Dachau.
I am arguing that democracies can't work due to the impossibility of having informed voters by the way our democracies are organized. The first step to the road of better governance is acknowledging human limitation and nature.
And I am arguing that undemocratic forms of government have been tried repeatedly and found wanting repeatedly.
- Sir Winston Churchill
Democracy is a luxury good that rich nations purchase.
To believe we can do anything else is the road back to Dachau.
These are the stakes: http://www.archive.org/details/nazi_concentration_camps
For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?
The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.
If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?
This reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that showed how Time magazine offers different cover stories for their international and their US issues on the same date. One example was the Arab Spring (international) and something on "doing chores" for us here in the US.
Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.
(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)
One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.
Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.
I think it’s not a problem in the utility equation for an individual voter, it’s a problem in the system. By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.
Empirically, a good showing for a third-party candidate has no significant effect on the political discourse, and your individual share of giving that candidate a strong showing is negligible.
Voting in the US is badly broken. I strongly favor equal representation, a multiparty system, and other reforms. Part of getting to them is admitting things like my vote, for one, being foregone.
This is only true in the context of a single election. Over multiple election cycles, small movements in voting patterns can announce the start of a trend. Saying your vote doesn't count is an abdication of responsibility - 'somebody ought to do something about it, but 'they' would never allow it, hurf durf.'
As prodigal_erik points out in a sibling comment, this is a systemic problem with our electoral system. It has nothing to do with hurf durf.
Seriously, saying the median American’s vote doesn’t count is a statistically founded observation, not an ethical action. In terms of ethical actions, I’m advocating for the opposite of laziness-posing-as-cynicism. I want a kind of intellectual vigor about politics where we care enough to spend our resources where they’ll do the most good. We should care about school boards and our own jobs, not the essentially symbolic presidential vote.
Voting is like buying a spatula with a pink handle. Refusing to work with a company that donates to an irresponsible county commissioner is like convincing a bright student to work in cancer research. It’s way less cool and way more important.
The best way out of this is the (virtual) abolition of the Electoral College or the adoption of true electoral reform. These are more realistic goals than they might seem.
This article has relevance to this problem as well. The vast majority of people won't realize that news is just noise, noise meant to misdirect voters. If you really want to know about the candidates, you can look up their record and do some research. Unfortunately, this isn't taught in civics classes, and most voters are content with what their favorite news channel tells them about how good one candidate is and how evil another candidate is. Then they regurgitate the same talking points with their friends and neighbors and reinforce the media message, entrenching an opinion in non-swing states. The system will work if people would be more willing to participate and educate themselves, like Roshan decided he would do.
And I’m not sure it is bad. It’s the truth, and it’s best to trust people with that. Knowing that my vote is effectively uncounted makes me more, not less, politically effective.
I think I'm going to use this method - it's an interesting exercise, and it's a great excuse to get people to stop talking to me about bread-and-circuses politics (e.g. what's discussed in this blog post: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000436.html ).
"Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot."
This is an uplifting and encouraging message - and a far better argument in favor of anarchism than torching a Starbucks. Thank you.
Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.
I'm yet to find the balance.
History repeats itself more often than we think.
Prime example:
One of the first hacks for the TX-0 was Peter Samson's music compiler, even though the TX-0 was not designed to have such capabilities and to most people the thought was ridiculous.
The first hack for the Altair was Steve Dompier's rendition of "Fool on the hill" using the Altairs radio interference. The Altair wasn't designed for this purpose either.
For some reason, two different people from different decades looking at similar (But very different) machines decided to do the same thing with them, without any prompting.
There are universal concepts that humans try to implement, improve, and expand upon. Keeping these in mind while trying to do cool stuff will go further than most news pieces. (Even the ones about other people doing cool stuff.)
"Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life."
Unless your job is to directly action the news (e.g. if you're a trader, in which case I hope you have better sources than newspapers), "news" makes zero difference to your life, no matter how greatly written it might be. This is true of all papers, not just tabloids.
You might not find such understanding of people and of the world to be worthy goal in itself, but even so such an understanding is useful as a framing device or an anology store for general reasonsing. In the same way that a mastery of philosophy has value as a reasoning device.
And, there is the value as source of inspiration: pointers towards topics to read up on or ideas to incorporate into one's life/work
That said... I work in politics.
(Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928
From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).
So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.
I like Apple products and use/write for them. I used to have MacRumors, 9to5mac, Cult of Mac, TUAW, The Apple Blog, TC, and a dozen more Apple-related feeds in my RSS (among other feeds). When there was a keynote or a new product announcement, all those websites would publish essentially the same thing over and over again, and I had to 'mark all as read'. I was using RSS wrong, and I'm glad I changed my bad habit. You're using it right and I'm sure you derive value from such a diverse collection of blogs!
"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."
It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.
Thank you for making me realize it.
I decided was that if I was going to take the time to read something, I would get something out of it. I would only read things that were genuinely useful, interesting, or valuable in some way. I had to come up with a way to force myself to think about what I was reading a little, so I kept a text file on my desktop with a record of every single article I had read. I started with just copying the URL and writing a 1-3 sentence summary, and even this was enough to make me think twice before opening links - "Is this article worth the effort to think about it enough to write a summary?" That was still pretty quick, so I added two more requirements- a 1-3 sentence critique of the article- just what I thought about it, whether I thought the author was incorrect/lying/exaggerating, etc. - and something interesting in the article- the kind of thing I might bring up if I was telling somebody about it.
Writing these things for every article started to feel a little like English class, but it worked. I got in the habit of pausing to think about whether I should click a link or continue reading, I started reading closely and critically, rather than just skimming half of it and moving on, I started paying attention to which news sites, blogs, and domains had worthwhile content and which had garbage, and most importantly, I would actually remember what I had read, and could talk or think intelligibly about it. Also, even though I was only 'requiring' myself to write a few sentences about each article, I found that I often didn't mind writing more, and trying to put some simple structure into my written thoughts would lead to new insights.
I've stopped regularly keeping the journal, but the habit of thinking about what I'm doing while surfing sites like HN has stayed with me.
I've been thinking about this since I read the blog post, and it might be time to take it up another notch. Instead of focusing on important articles, maybe I should focus on important topics, and do more of my own research, rather than just reading whatever comes up here. For example, I might read an article here about weird Javascript tricks, find the topic interesting, then read whatever I can find about the Javascript type system, closures, prototype-based programming, until I feel that I have a solid understanding of the topic, or my interest has been satiated. Maybe this takes a few days and I skip HN entirely in the meantime.
I think some people probably do this naturally but I've found that I tend toward zombie-mode.
I've recently taken to discarding my bookmarks and relying on other methods to save interesting links. If I want to save something for later use, I'll tweet about it, write a tiny blog post about it, or jot it down in a notebook. I'm not terribly diligent about it, but it's made a huge impact towards helping me filter what is truly important.
Perhaps we sometimes expect too much. You don't listen to music to remember the lyrics, you just enjoy it. And you can enjoy and discard a piece of writing too.
You can easily idle away time. Right now I'm procrastinating.
HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.
I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.
Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:
I don't want noise, but sometimes I need noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.I would recommend Instapaper's curated list of articles, which tend to be long-form and more interesting than most, as well as The Browser ("Writing Worth Reading") for curated quality content. http://www.thebrowser.com
But you're not going to find quality content many times a day, no matter where you look.
Creating writing that's thoughtful, attractive, linkable, rewarding, and current is, apparently, a hugely challenging activity that even a billion people only manage to pull off a few times a day.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/
Quite how you measure that though... I always liked the idea.
http://www.aldaily.com/
http://3quarksdaily.com/
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/
http://edge.org/
Then I think you may be on the wrong news site. I'm not saying that to be a jerk, I'm just saying that HN is a community-curated news site where the stories that the majority of users find interesting gets to the top. If you don't fit into that majority then maybe it would be better to find a new site that is more suited to your tastes.
You sound like a typical bored teenager, with too much time on their hands, wearing their boredom as a nihilistic badge of honor, expecting everyone to entertain them, while simultaneously acting as if they know everything, thereby supposedly being superior to the entertainers. If you can't find anything good to read, then use your apparently copious time to write something which you would want to read, and then anyone who responds positively to it will probably be someone like you. Find enough of these people, and you'll have created a self-entertaining community. Hackers build solutions.
Hell, I could read Wikipedia for 8 hours a day and not get bored.
Interesting aside, I read "... a typical bored engineer..." the first time, which also worked.
You're right. I do know everything. Everything except how best to use my time when I occasionally want to waste it broadening my horizon with unusual and interesting information. I typically walk around the house in underroos bragging about how bored I am. Then I zone out to American Idol.
I'm not sure what kind of parallel universe I'd have to exist in where writing about things I don't know anything about is possible, but once I find that reality, by golly I'll take your suggestion to heart.
Hackers really are the Thomas Edisons of our time. Extremely productive in everything they do and never piddling away on something just out of intellectual curiosity. Hackers only seem to create practical solutions to the big problems facing the world today. I'm so glad every college graduate who's just landed his first job writing JavaScript for a start-up can refer to themselves with such a prestigious title. And with so much credibility!
What I don't understand about your comment is that you seem to believe that nobody ever gets bored at work or needs a break from a grind of meetings, coding, red tape, conference calls, etc. I envy your steadfast dedication. I, however, do actually need a break once in a while and enjoy reading about things that are interesting and new to me, or just enlightening in some fashion. Forgive me for crying about it into a thread about distraction.
No, they are pretty interesting. The teachers are boring, may be. History? The civil war? The Isreali-Palestini conflict? The poverty in the world? Water distribution in the world?
Go and look for the interesting parts. There are lot of interesting stuff in the world, apart from the tech scene. I wish I spent more time when I was your age reading about politics.
Sit in on some classes, check out the university library, find some clubs that seem interesting and hang out at their meetings, talk to professors and students -- maybe even get involved in some of the projects happening there. You'll get a lot out of this, I guarantee it. I can recommend this to people who've already attended universities too. Many of them could use some intellectual stimulation.
Boom, boredom problem solved, plus nice contact network from all the cool folks I contacted and got to write something.
Go solve this one: http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/podcasts/)
I recommend:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/maths
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/americana
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/analysis
...well, you get the hint. There are very many hours of great quality reporting there.
I loved Americana... until Radio 4 removed it and replaced it with an interminable panel game featuring four of the usual suspect "comedians" who seem to take up an inordinate amount of the station's airtime.
Now, I go the other way, and listen to a lot of stuff on NPR stations from the US.
There's lots of great journalism out there, and I mostly don't see anything wrong with that list you have there. Maybe little of interest to you, but all still news.
Make something.
Now. Make!
I did make something recently, but with my free time and not at work, because basically work didn't feel it was important enough to pay me to make it. So instead of making it at work I look for other noise to fill in the gap when i've been coding for 5 hours and need a break.
But making something for the sake of making? I'm sorry but i'll never be one of those people. (Well, anymore. I have a directory full of 1/4 finished projects as proof of how productive it is to just make stuff for no reason)
Random Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Ask.Metafilter (with accepted answer): http://ask.metafilter.com/home/answered
Hack a Day: http://hackaday.com/
LifeHacker Top posts: http://lifehacker.com/top/ or http://lifehacker.com/tag/top/index.xml
Wood Gears: http://woodgears.ca/
Cool Tools: http://kk.org/cooltools
IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.
[1] http://skimthat.com - Crowd sourced news summaries.
Another source for news summaries is http://www.newser.com and if you like videos you can try http://www.newsy.com/
Spending 10-minutes a week reading pop culture or sports news, or keeping up on what concerts, events etc are coming to your area payoff huge in meeting new friends, dating, building relationships at work and so forth.
Nothing is frivolous except excess.
If you're not aware of these things, your boss is, and they are going to ask you to implement a screen that informs the user you are uploading their address book. If you've seen a large breadth of products and companies like Kickstarter, you will easily pick up on macro trends like UI/UX paradigms and significant technologies.
If you had some sophisticated filtering like a user has in another popular HN post today to get rid of things you don't like, you might miss out on trends like NoSQL or Node or Redis or Clojure, or you might upload a user's address book without permission and get caught.
If you are not up-to-date with your industry, I think in reality you will always be an employee of or a laggard to the person who knows about those things.
It might be worth it to push the boundaries in the other direction until you get too little information and miss out. You might be surprised how far that boundary is. It was certainly true in the author's case. Until you try, you don't know and you won't be able to calibrate your system correctly.
I don't think so. The Path situation is a problem precisely because we know that it is a wrong thing to do. So if you haven't heard of it you would probably decide not to do it like them.
I would even argue that this is actually the stuff you should ignore. The latest Sillicon Valley affairs, bloggers bickering between each other and so on. That's not even news, that's more like celebrity gossip.
The articles that I appreciate the most on HN are about how somebody has done something (which I perhaps thought of doing myself) and writes up precisely how.
No one is remembered for being well read. - some blog post I've lost, but the quote is still written on my chalkboard, luckily.
when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. _why
EDIT: I know it's ironic that these came from online sources. I guess the point is about balance and focused, purposeful consumption you later use.
People don't even read his very early political works much anymore. His new material is what gets most consumed and keeps his name in people's minds.
About 4 paragraphs of international news every day, saving you both your time and social dignity.
I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest-common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.
*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.
Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html
This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)
The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.
Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.
"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce (blog posts, daily news articles) is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce (books, journal articles, working code). If you want to fill your 'empty attic' with high-value information, focus on the latter as much as possible.
I agree with you, especially in light of your "generally" caveat, but taking the lesson from the Holmes quote above... there are contexts in which the easily accessible approach of a blog post is far more valuable than a journal article on the same topic, along with the ability to provide prompt updates when the situation changes.
Context, my dear Watson.
In other words, the problem is not that we have too many pathways in the brain, rather that we spend too many cycles traveling down redundant ones. Let this allegory warn us to accept the scarcity of attention.
Your efficiency per unit resource may increase, but your total resources are still finite. Therefore, unless your efficiency increases asymptotically fast enough that the integral diverges (ie, infinite area), your total end product will still be finite. And I have a hard time believing that efficiency would increase that quickly.
Okay, I'll stop being pedantic now.
TLDR: BS! Reading good books unrelated to your main work is more necessary than ever. And that'a why closing the pipes of the noise is a good idea.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1993JBAA..103...30S
No! It is about politics. Note that most of the examples given are related to political events.
The OP does have a great point (I waste too much time on HN, perhaps); however, the kind of political aloofness desc/prescribed in the post is what, I think, is the root of the biggest political problem (not just in the US, everywhere): the best people who should be involved in politics are not. It is a common adage that the word idiot was used in Ancient Greek for a person who was not interested in politics (unless of course you were a woman, slave, or farmer).
I budget between one and two hours of my self-directed workday to skimming various tech and business blogs. I save HN for last and scan every new title line. I usually read about 15 - 30 articles during this period.
Furthermore, while I'm waiting for a build, or for a test to reach the point where my interaction is required, I go back to HN and check the page or two of new title lines.
I consider myself a productive Java programmer, writing about 30K lines of code per year for my startup project. I could create more LOC if I did not read the tech news, but I would face two issues: (1) burnout, and (2) the need to stay current with the technology.
My project is heavily leveraged with open source Java /JavaScript libraries, nearly all discovered from tech blogs. For example: Jenkins, JQuery, JSON, JavaCV, OpenChord, Netty, Sesame, the Chrome web browser, Lubuntu, etc. I build my own development & server machines so I need to keep up with hardware.
Additionally, I have steered away from possible infrastructure dead ends by observing trends, such as the move to mobile HTML5 apps.
I'll give AP Mobile a try, thanks!