Sure, but if there are injustices and abuses against humanity that happen, one should be aware--we can't afford to pretend that bad things don't happen.
Are you suggesting that protests in e.g. Iraq against a book burning in Sweden are useful actions? That violent rioting in e.g. Marseille is a useful action against police misconduct in Paris? I don't see many links between awareness of the details of something that happens far away from me and the usefulness of my actions.
It's quite unlikely that these local injustices appear in the news that you consume: local news are on life support, and everything else has a scope that massively surpassed your locality, whatever that might be.
That's an issue which can be solved. Consume more location appropriate news. Social media (ironically, when considering what kind of media is bad for you) can also provide decent local news information.
Maybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.
Yes, and recent examples show it:
- News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens.
- News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine.
- another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.
I was about to suggest it was an option piece, which is IMO worse, as news has to attempt to be reasonable while opinions just masquerade with the same reputability.
But then I scrolled to the bottom, and realised it's even worse than an option piece, it's a long-form advert:
> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
With a headline like that, I expect an article citing various sources and experts, not a book summary. As it stands it's mostly an opinion piece. They have a separate section for opinion and they use a different background colour (a light orange). I don't want to invest in an article then see it cut short with an advert for the rest of the meat in the book.
That's not true. Unchecked power allows people to become sociopaths, and the more power is accumulated in a small group, the harder it is to check. It's not an automatic process, despite what those in power want you to believe.
The only check on power that can work as intended are higher values, such as honour, generosity and justness. Written laws and regulations are a failure for ordering society. Our modern nations have hundreds of thousands of laws, which nobody can know by heart. So we have this weird situation where it supposedly is okay for rulers to abuse their power since they're not breaking any laws or regulations. Or where there's always an impeachment process going on against a ruler, for some obscure law that makes sense to nobody.
There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever.
Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.
I think it's more of a selection bias. In most structures, it's more beneficial have emotional detachment as emotion in most cases can be exploited to adds constraints to your decision space.
It's not that power holds a carrot and says, to hold me you must be a sociopath, it's that competition for power selects those lacking emotion.
I'm no anthropologist but I suspect since humans evolved from small groups, emotions developed because group work was beneficial. As humanity evolved rapidly into larger societies, it's not clear that emotion in these group sizes are so beneficial for survival.
At some point survival from the size of the group becomes nearly guaranteed and competing more within the group becomes a better survival strategy from an independent standpoint. These days you're far less likely to starve to death or be eaten by say a bear or lion because you live in large societies with all sorts of services and just basic proximity scares other predators away. Now the dynamic is about succeeding within the bounds of that system itself. Detaching from others and focusing on yourself tends to give you better success in that environment. Specific cases exist where you should work as a team but if you can do this without emotion and identify all these cases on a highly transactional basis, you can better optimize your own success.
Frankly I think it's kind of sad because, well, I have emotion and don't like to think of the world like a sociopath but... if you want to compete, you need to more and more.
"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business"
I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions.
e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share.
Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).
Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.
Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.
Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind.
And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.
Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort.
> there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort
Well you are partially right but also I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't think politics is an area where I can really effect change and I have so much going on with my life that I am also unwilling to expend the effort.
And that's fine, it's a choice you can make (we do not put the duty of being an informed and engaged citizen on the body politic), but it doesn't make what you said true. Just true for you. It's not at all uncommon for engaged people to leave significant dents in metropolitan local politics by picking up a phone or by showing up.
I find discouraging others from fully engaging in the civic process much more disappointing than choosing not to fully engage oneself, to be honest.
Additionally, the news does not present fact-centered, honest information about your government.
It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.
It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.
Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.
I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.
And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.
One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out. Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top. The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!
> The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.
Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)
> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.
This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!
As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.
It's funny sometimes seeing what people reveal about themselves unintentionally when they rail against something; if the news is all of those bad things for you, then you're not working very hard to understand it.
"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.
That's news media, not news. The media reports the news, in ways you may dislike, but the actual content they're sharing with you is rooted in literal events that took place.
Well fine, you win the argument over semantics. Everyone here is referring to news media using the term news. Now that we've come to this understanding that what we mean by news is news media then my point stands.
The problem is, the original article itself doesn’t really differentiate. It DOES call out longer form pieces like books or magazines as better alternatives (suggesting the article is primarily referring to news media) but also implies not jumping on the latest story and waiting for those that outlast the news cycle (which would suggest the article is also about “knowing things” in so much as we don’t need to know all things immediately all the time).
I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.
But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.
I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.
News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.
If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.
At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.
Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.
Potentially anyone involved in the making of the report.
Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.
What phrase, if you had to choose one, would you describe the group of people who do this work? The work, as you clearly explain here, is how bias gets introduced?
Being aware of current bills proposed and being voted on (at local, state, and federal levels) lets you contact your representatives and voice your opinion; lets you impact which bills are passed.
This kind of action does have an effect, and the effect is significant when many people do it.
Much like how participation matters during elections.
> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?
Election day is the least significant day in politics. It is merely the hiring process, and who you hire doesn't matter all that much (within reason). Your actual job as the employer starts after you have selected an employee. The onus is on you to direct and guide the employee you selected. If you don't know what is needed for your organization on an ongoing basis, how can you serve as their boss?
Or, of course, you can pray that you chose a mind reader and ignoring them will lead to satisfactory results. However, I think all employers will tell you that if you disappear into the night and leave employees to their own devices, you won't be impressed with the results.
> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
Being the boss in general leaves you pretty impotent, frankly. This is as true in government as it is in enterprise. Employees aren't robots. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep the workers aligned on the vision, and against competing leadership interests.
But it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, the wealthy among us who feel they don't have time to be the boss directly will hire other parties (a.k.a. lobbyists) to guide the workers for them. If the employees cannot be tamed, that practice would not take place. Of course, like everything in life, if you are not so well off you're going to have to do the work yourself.
Nobody ever said that democracy was easy. There is good reason why some people in the world stand by other political systems – because they don't want to put in the hard, hard work of democracy. But if democracy is the system you and your fellow neighbours have chosen, it is the one you have to accept, hard work and all.
> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?
Because you leave yourself more susceptible to recency bias, and the prevailing media narrative on election day rather than continually evaluating the actions politicians take in real-time with proper context, evaluating the raw facts for yourself.
> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?
If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)
> you have a few options a few times a year.
You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.
I think it is important and in fact moral to spend some more time understanding politics, but still don't think news is a good way to do it. Reading a few books and discussing topics With Friends will do far more than sifting through countless shallow news stories.
Especially, according to actual US politicians, people who cosplay as hardcore hardline party line people are easy to negotiate with when the cameras are off.
What you get in the news is a performance, either carefully crafted or off the cuff crazy.
The only way to "shape a perception of government" is to check how your representatives actually voted for different issues. Talk is talk, votes are fact.
On the finance point, the market has probably absorbed any news a nanosecond after it hits the wire. I don't think that understanding that AI was going to finally take off gave anyone alpha to invest into NVidia.
No, the market is surprisingly slow with this. Sure, there are some professional traders that react very quickly. But it appears that there are masses of investors that get to learn the news very late, or only react when they hear from other people who heard the news before them.
Some striking examples: look at the stock prices of pharma companies after Covid broke out. Sure they went up, but it took a full year(!) before most of them finally reached their peeks.
Or look at shares of weapon manufacturers after the Ukraine invasion. Same story, share prices went up but it took months.
A gamble vs. gambling; English is weird, the former means a general risk/reward bet, whereas the latter means to take undue risk for entertainment purposes.
Buying individual stocks is the act of taking unknown risk for entertainment purposes.
> Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).
Sorry to be that jerk, but:
If you need to follow the sports/entertainment news to engage in small talk when coworkers discuss these issues, it just means you don't know how to do small talk.
When it comes to "fake news" the bad part is the "news" and not the "fake". That is, quite a bit of "news", such as Fox News' handwringing about caravans approaching the U.S.-Mexico border is primarily relevant for the emotional effect it has. By faking it you can get a certain emotional effect more reliably and without the cost and hazard of really reporting, but the emotional effect is the same.
I'm trying to understand your point. What is fake about those caravans? Those are real people as far as I know, who are going to have a real impact on others and by others. If such a caravan was passing through your town or coming to your town, wouldn't it be odd if nobody reported on it?
It's the sense of crisis associated with it and the continuous drumbeat about it.
My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children.
Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration"
Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is
but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National.
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Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.
Beginning from the end of your comment, I don't think that hate or anger is wrong. It is a human emotion as valid as any other, and closely related to empathy. You are angry at the villain because you feel sympathy with the victim. There is a reason we are born with the capacity of these emotions and that they never go away. The same goes for all mammals. Only reptiles lack emotions and will always keep their cool. With that said, hate and anger are very unpleasant emotions, and it clashes completely with the idea of watching or reading the news to wind down in the evening or night.
The above is meant about news that makes you angry or makes you hate because they are reporting on something horrible that has happened: Wars, crime, corruption. Not news that makes people angry just by the style.
I don't watch televised news, because it is pure poison on all channels. Even if you didn't understand the language the anchor was talking, you feel bad just from the hatred and disgust of the presenters directed at their viewers. It is psychological war and it is completely on purpose. If somebody entered your house and talked to your face in the same manner as the news anchors, you'd think it was an escaped psychopath or punch the person in the face. But people tune in every night to watch these freaks, or even worse - leave them on all day.
But back to text news and articles, if you strip out all emotion and just stick to the facts you end up with basically a bunch of Excel spreadsheets for your reporting. This much money was spent on that, so many soldiers died in that offensive, that many years in prison was given to the murderer. What about interviews? Pretty much all politicians, business owners, and other influential people are so well media trained now that interviews have little value. They have endless phrases of lies that sound good to answer any question. This is where the journalist instead will have to inform the reader what's going on and that means inserting some of his or her own views and opinions. And it's good if it's done in a transparent way. It is completely ridiculous how print media today are snaking and slithering around with their words to convince their public that somebody is a bad guy or good guy, instead of just stating their opinion and getting over with it.
With all this, I think any respectable media should report on things such as immigrant caravans and immigrant fleets. It's a huge difference between that and the individual immigration that is more common. When masses of people (mostly men) arrive in this way, it is more akin to an invading army, especially when gang members and terrorists mix among the crowds, and especially when they proudly wave the banners and chant the slogans of the nations they are supposedly escaping from. Another aspect is the human trafficking involved with this kind of mass migration. Where is the investigation into the human trafficking lords when their ships sink, killing hundreds? Where is the responsibility of the human trafficker when they've helped a murderer over the border? All in all a huge deal everything and nothing to be hidden from reporting.
Plug for the Boring Report, which uses AI to strip sensationalism from news articles and present succinct, informative summaries: https://www.boringreport.org/
I would second this. Their app/website helped wean me off the emotional manipulation by news media I didn't even know I was addicted to. I would recommend people try it out.
For me, it has now been 2.5 years since having watched any local, national or cable news.
The stuff is poison.
I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties.
It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense.
It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.
I think "news" here correlates to organizations deep in the "news cycle" whereby some organization decides some goings-on of local people is a worthy national topic. HN is one or two layers removed from this; quite literally there's a crowd deciding what you see at a given moment is relative or not for consumption. This is the same effect of hearing about important events from other people and choosing to look into them further or looking into them after the topic is more settled.
The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.
Despite the name I think only about half the posts on the site are actual news. And of those many are not current news, there are many links that are months or even years old.
I think it's easy enough to "miss" this kind of news in HN. The threads often get flagged quite quickly, lead to to more comments than upvotes, which brings it to the second page, etc.
For a while now I've tried to cultivate the habit of not trying to have opinions about everything. It's quite liberating to say: sorry, <thing> may be important, but I just don't have an opinion about it at the moment.
There is something freeing about acknowledging you don't need to have an opinion and something enlightening about knowing you shouldn't have an opinion--especially on a topic that you aren't truly informed about.
My favorite meme on the subject: "Marcus Aurelius has already released you from the obligation to have a take":
> 52. You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.
Maybe part of your problem is feeling like you are required to express an opinion on things that have limited bearing on your life? You can support the people in your life without having to fabricate support for positions you don't care about.
I'm not saying this is your intent, but it is a pretty privileged and insular take.
If new events or a new policy change unfairly affects a (neighbor|friend|minority group|stranger), is it a good thing for the unaffected to plug their ears and go about life?
I don't mean to suggest following the news 24/7 is a solution to this, but I also do not see how it's healthy for every person to ignore everything that doesn't personally affect them.
You're right, that isn't my intent. I didn't say not to develop an opinion, or to learn to care about issues that affect people other than you. My aim was to communicate that you aren't required to develop and express an opinion about every single issue.
Attempting to formulate an opinion on every issue that can possibly come up is a fool's errand; carefully following the outrage cycle for the sake of expressing an opinion that falls on the "correct" side of issues you have no stakes in is even worse, as it adds empty noise to the conversation and distorts the Overton window away from the concerns of people who do have stakes in the issue.
The most relevant pieces of news to me are weather reports, those emergency alerts I get on my phone (mostly weather-related), and week-old stories. The first two are immediately useful and actionable. The last one involves topics that have clearer information and staying power.
So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.
Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.
As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.
For the last few years I vary rarely followed the national news, I'm certainly happier for it. When I do, I have noticed a decline in mood.
On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume.
Or hypothetically they think it's very much not pointless. I imagine most of us would have some current events that we think is not only worth listening to, but acting on. Which isn't an argument to watch news/etc, as it may be exceptionally rare. Just that i imagine we could all say quite similar things.
To me, if anything, it really goes to show up important "yelling with appropriate volume" is. So many of those "with a cause" as is being discussed here are pretty widely ignored, as it seems they're always yelling. I can't tell what is meaningful from them when it's almost always of equal volume, fear, etc.
> I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.
Exactly. There's almost nothing in the daily news that someone must have "privilege" not to care about. They have some articles about social issues that might fit that description, but that's a totally different thing than the news itself.
One thing I've observed, though, is that "the news" generally isn't how I get information about what fun, brave, new world people would like to make for us.
"The news", qua the comercially-produced mass media doings of the day, generally has never talked about issues important to me and mine and when they do it's largely Fox punditry or it's reaction.
I get a lot of information about the things I care about via various instagram folks and then following up by cursory searches to gt the larger picture.
But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.
> But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.
Oh certainly. There was a survey a while ago (which I can't find) that found that reading UK rightwing press was correlated with being less informed about issues than simply not reading news at all - i.e. readers would underperform random guessing on multiple choice questions.
I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.
Exactly. It's like when people complain about minimum wage. As a software developer, this will likely never impact me. Same thing with issues like abortion or gay rights. As a straight male, I gain nothing from getting bogged down in pointless arguments over those side-shows. Russian invading Ukraine? Why is that something I need to know about? I live in American, not Ukraine.
People like me just don't need to worry about these types of issues, so what do I gain by reading news about things like that?
One possibility would be if you had a girlfriend or wife, the new anti-abortion laws would fairly directly impact you as well by limiting your family planning options depending on where you live.
If your wife happens to be pregnant, there are also states you might choose to avoid because she might need medical care if she miscarries late term, and doctors in those states might choose not to save her life for fear that the authorities might try to prosecute them for the loss of the baby.
I’ve seen the word “activists” used in this manner to describe a certain type of person, who in my mind hardly qualifies as an activist. At most they are a person who follows the day to day of our political theater, but I doubt they could point to a single policy or proposal they actually advocated for in any political forum.
Coding behavior this way is misleading and counterproductive. Activism is a generally respectable activity, it entails actually showing up and giving your time towards something you care about, not just lecturing people about watching cable news.
Twenty years ago such people would have been (disparagingly) referred to as “keyboard warriors” by “boots on the ground” activists. I haven’t come across the “keyboard warriors” term in a long time – most likely because the online “activists” vastly outnumber the activists who don’t confine their political activity to the online sphere.
I get your point, but isn't this kind of a no true scotsman thing? Social media has a lot of people thinking that they are activists because they have a hashtag in their twitter name or post black squares on instagram. What would you call those people? They call themselves activists, or they at least call those activities activism.
If I had written the comment you replied to, I would have put the word in quotes. Some people use the term "slacktivist", but I think terms like that are silly. And to be clear, I'm with you - when I think of an activist, I think of someone collecting signatures door-to-door, or organizing an irl event, etc. I think of someone actually trying to accomplish something rather than just signaling virtue. But I also think that if enough people use a word a certain way, that's what the word means, and a lot of people seem to think that "just lecturing people" counts as activism.
My assumption is that parent comment was applying that label well beyond the group that labels themselves as such. Social media activism can still be activism. I’m not looking to gatekeep.
Given the context of this forum, people really love to throw this and other similar terms around in a way that reads as a pejorative. Basically, “people with a specific type of politics that I don’t like and who annoy me”. Ex. Elons “I support the current thing” tweet.
I have a hard time following that logic. To me, the opposite seems true. It's a privilege to habitually consume media that has no direct bearing on one's day-to-day life.
The news coming out of establishments like The New York Times is aimed at the upper-middle class. People who have enough power to “matter”. The news (at least some of it) is useful for them since it’s aimed at their interests and from their perspective.
The mind can be self controlled. Everyone has a choice to consume or be unconsumed. Privilege to consume is easier to control than privilege to not consume. Limits can be placed on consumption. Limiting the choice not to consume is harder to limit. Imagine a scenario involving a protest within a prison population where the prisoners hunger strike. Force feeding with sedation and a pipe is the only choice in a total control environment. The choice to not consume is less privilege than the choice to over consume.
In terms of logical analysis, the statements present a mixture of subjective claims, hypothetical scenarios, and value judgments. Some of the statements are opinion-based and lack objective evidence or logical proofs. Additionally, the argumentation is not entirely coherent, as there are shifts in the discussion from personal control over consumption to the scenario of a prison hunger strike.
Overall, the logic within this statement is subjective and reliant on hypothetical scenarios and personal judgments, making it difficult to evaluate the validity of the argument objectively.
In programming the permissions required not to consume are less than permissions required to consume. This is where the dissonance begins regarding the meme of a programmer.
A program can exist with near zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot.
In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourself.
1. In programming, the permissions required not to consume are less than permissions required to consume.
This statement asserts that in programming, there are fewer permissions or privileges needed to restrict or avoid consumption compared to the permissions required for actual consumption. It suggests that it is easier to control or limit consumption in the context of programming.
2. This is where the dissonance begins regarding the meme of a programmer.
This statement introduces the concept of dissonance regarding the meme (a cultural symbol or idea) of a programmer. It implies that there is a contradiction or inconsistency when it comes to the behavior or perception of programmers in relation to consumption.
3. A program can exist with near-zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot.
This statement compares the ability of a program and a human to exist with minimal consumption. It suggests that a program can operate with very low resource usage (represented as a few neurons) while a human cannot function without some level of consumption.
4. In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourselves.
This statement makes a broader philosophical point. It suggests that every act of breathing or consumption signifies a participation in something larger or more significant than oneself. It implies that consumption is not just a personal action but has broader implications.
The logic in these statements contains a mix of objective claims and subjective philosophical assertions. The first statement is based on the premise that permissions in programming can be differentiated between consumption and non-consumption, although it lacks specific evidence or context.
The second and third statements introduce a comparison between programming and human existence, implying that programs require less consumption than humans. However, it's important to note that the analogy between programming and human biology is not straightforward, and the comparison may be oversimplified or metaphorical.
The final statement offers a philosophical perspective, suggesting that consumption, represented by every breath, carries a symbolic meaning of participation in something greater. This statement relies on subjective interpretation and personal philosophy rather than objective logic.
Overall, while the statements touch on different aspects related to consumption, programming, and human existence, the logical coherence is weakened by subjective interpretations and philosophical assertions.
> So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.
> Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.
Honestly, I chafe a little bit at expecting the news to be "actionable" by a regular person, because I think there's some general value to being informed about your environment (especially in a democracy). However so much of modern news is neither, it's more akin to feelings-based political advertising. It's so bad that it's obvious even on the news pages of prestige outlines like the New York Times. I subscribe to their app, but I have to do a fair bit of eye rolling as I'm searching for informative things, and they're just making it harder. They've been pushing their "Opinion" section even more heavily: in the last few months they moved it up to the 2nd section after "Most Popular, knocking World News down to 3rd (or more accurately 3rd/4th since they've also stuck "Games" of all things in the 2nd slot).
One sad casualty of modern times is the weekly news magazine. The slower pace and longer deadlines meant they were much better at keeping a regular person informed without all the noise of daily updates. They were also more accurate than daily news, since they weren't as rushed they could do better fact checking and research.
> Honestly, I chafe a little bit at expecting the news to be "actionable" by a regular person, because I think there's some general value to being informed about your environment (especially in a democracy).
What democracy? The News is kind of like so-called democracy: something that every serious person needs to do but that has very little impact on anything. The most exaggerated example is the US presidential election which in fact has a very, very long media coverage (News) up until the election itself. And what does a person who can vote get back from that? They only have two parties that they can vote for if they don’t want to “waste” their vote, and the nomination is filled with a mix of serious candidates and people who want to boost their careers (Buttigieg) and then eventually the party itself circle the wagons and boosts one anointed candidate (that was the case for the Dems but I’m not sure about the Reps since I didn’t pay much attention).
One counter-example though to the News not being actionable was Covid. I felt that a lot of the news about Covid was actionable. And it was useful to know what people/experts thought about the current threat-level day-to-day.
Nowadays I’ve eschewed most media sources beyond three primary ones: BBC World News channel, Foreign Policy magazine, and Wikipedia current events portal [1]
The BBC channel only produces a few hours of news a day but manages to cover everything from the Titan sub to French protests to Israel’s anti-terrorism action in Jenin to Bolsonaro’s ban. They’re pretty much the only news source that reliably covers Latam, Africa, and the Middle East. They’ve got a rather predictable bias and a half hour a day is enough to get a broad view of what’s happening.
FP is great for deeper analysis from the perspective of the neoliberal establishment and its primary competitors. However to stay informed the only thing I feel I really need is the Wikipedia current events portal. Past days are updated as information comes in so I can go back when I have time and grab any headlines that I missed. It’s actually surprising how few eventful events actually happen in the world when you get rid of all the ragebait.
> One sad casualty of modern times is the weekly news magazine. The slower pace and longer deadlines meant they were much better at keeping a regular person informed without all the noise of daily updates. They were also more accurate than daily news, since they weren't as rushed they could do better fact checking and research.
The Economist is still going strong. It's my primary news source for exactly these reasons
I think the news affects people's behaviors more than we realize. Although it tends to be around NOT doing something. Smoky air...don't go outside. Flight delays... don't fly anytime soon. Food shortages...think of a substitute. Submersible news...don't go in submersibles, beware of overconfident charismatic people, etc.
It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?
Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. It doesn't necessarily have to be impartial too, when done properly you can gain media literacy and benefit of having a reach to the discussions.
The problem with the news lately is mostly about the way they make their money. Simply because they keep the lights on by displaying as much content as possible, they design and curate the content for improving the metrics they can objectively measure(like revenue and view counts). The second kind of problem is that sometimes they don't look in making money, but influence you and that kind of news may seem a little bit of higher quality. However, due to the sinister motives, it's actually even worse.
Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too. If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
>Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon.
I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name).
I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.
It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future.
Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context.
For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.
It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it.
If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source.
For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context.
I've been sticking to reading https://text.npr.org/ and my local PBS/NPR-affiliate's local news coverage. Yes, both are biased and lean towards the liberal end of the news spectrum, but neither seems to push modern news shock and awe tactics nearly as evidently and I feel like I'm aware enough of what's going on locally and in the world to have decent conversations in social settings.
One nice thing about not fully comprehending what's going on in the news is that in social situations you can ask others lots of questions about current events and the people you're talking to will feel very proud that they can explain things to someone else. It's a good ice breaker, at least until it gets to be all political...
I’ve never understood why we need to make these caveats. “Objective” or “just the facts” news has never existed. It’s impossible.
I’m not knocking you, I just think it’s silly you should even feel pressure to publicly acknowledge something so patently obvious, yet we both know that if you didn’t the chance is high that the first comment you’d get is a complaint about your “biased” media outlets. As if any other kind exists lol
If you don't say this, someone somewhere on the internet will accuse you of thinking your news source is perfectly unbiased, even if you never said such a thing. It's a useful caveat just to try and defuse that kind of low signal argumentation.
Understanding that unbiased reporting is a farce requires some understanding of media literacy and in my experience most people do not have that literacy nor a desire to learn about it. So the caveat is unfortunately necessary.
> It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?
Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.
Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.
Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.
If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.
Information relevant to oneself, ie to the life and management of one's local and larger communities, are what will ultimately make the difference between a well-informed and enlightened citizenry able to make collective choices that result in positive outcomes, and people that base their choices on flimsy information and passing emotion.
News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.
What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.
Don't be naive. The citizenry doesn't make any significant choices. Western democracy is a sham. There are elections, yes, but voters are subject to large-scale manipulation, mainly through mass education and mass media. Not so much to determine who they cast their vote for, as to ensure compliance with the system itself, and its very limited set of choices. The range of acceptable opinions, and the matching political choices, are determined by the real rulers - presumably the billionaire class. Significant dissent on real issues is quickly crushed.
This is an overly cynical take. Ultimately all of the power in the US resides with the voters. Yes they are susceptible to manipulation, however they have the tools to resist the manipulation if they so choose.
It's a fallacy to think that because one person can't single-handedly change the world that change is impossible or that people in aggregate have no power. It is this fallacy that is at the center of trained helplessness.
It is the idea that if people want cleaner streets, they are incapable of sweeping them. If they want more supportive communities, they can't walk out their door and help someone.
At the local level a single voter can have a huge impact because there is very little participation at the smaller scale. A citizen that engages with their local rep or councilmember can effectively advocate for tangible improvements to their own life and their neighbors, and those actions (improving a public park, helping families get their children to pre-K, coaching a youth sports team, starting up an activities program for seniors etc) can provide far more genuine impact than any amount of "global" politics.
If you want the cynical angle, you can put time and money into a local politician and do way more manipulation to enrich yourself than anything large-scale.
To paraphrase, western democracies have problems, but the other systems are worse. If one accepts that democracy remains our best bet, the question becomes how to make democracy function better. This isn't just a question of what system of government, vote, decision, etc, but also of how well informed the citizenry is, and to what extent they feel empowered to be politically active. Billionaires do have an outsized power to influence in general, and in the US in particular (super PACs, etc), but other powers can act effectively against them (justice, press, NGOs and other forms of organized civic actions..). Switzerland has very frequent votes on a wide array of issues, giving citizens constant opportunities to act on the way their country / district / city operates.
But it really doesn't take much to stay up to speed. I'm with kashuntstva; I stopped actively consuming the news a year or two back, and I find I'm not tangibly less informed than the people I know who leave CNN turned on all day. I somehow seem to absorb everything that actually matters from the atmosphere. The only thing I really miss out on is the sensationalism, the overanalysis from people who've made a career of running their mouths, and the inaccuracies and wild speculation that inevitably comes from reporters trapped in a 24 hour hamster wheel being under constant pressure to hurry up and tell the story before they've even had a chance to piece it together.
But then the question you should be asking is, is this the best way to understand what is going on in the world? I would strongly say it isn't. If you can wait 2-3 weeks you can catch up on events much quicker by reading the relevant wikipedia entry.
Yes and no. If you are set in life, know what you want and need, are able to get it, lie in stable place, fuck news, more harm than good to you, no matter how much rationale you put on it. Focus rather on learning some new skill instead if you can't just enjoy life as it comes, which is a great skill but many self-made successful people lack it completely.
If you in some unstable place, you want to move someplace else, change significant things in life, then it makes more sense to follow news, albeit it would help to curate them. But its a dopamine drug, I see otherwise very smart folks to fall prey to this completely helplessly. They even buy things like smart watches to know instantly there is some notification in phone. Of course all of these folks have higher levels of anxiety, they were there before smartwatches but those are definitely making things worse. And cycle repeats and goes deeper. For them I do hope seamless AR/VR is a thing of distant future, they will have hard time not making it into some cyberpunk version of addict.
> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.
You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.
I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.
I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.
The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.
The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.
It's even worse than this. When it's news about foreign territory then the media is even blatantly lying. They distort facts to make them conform to biases and to give a negative slant. Part of this is to maximize clicks, bad sensational news sells better. Part of this is bias inherent in the journalism circle. And because it's foreign territory, readers never find out they are being lied to.
re making money: the alternative to ad-revenue-through-clickbait is paywalls. Consumers have largely chosen the former.
Some have suggested that a subscription model to multiple papers (e.g. Spotify for news) would be appealing, and it might, but that doesn't immediately solve the problem of the form and content of the news. Longform article sources or retrospectives are probably the current best way to consume news.
> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
So much FOMO. I subscribed to and read a once-a-week article which summarizes the world events that week. Focus of the article is important catasthropes to avoid, kind of. That's enough for me.
Choose quality over quantity and don't waste much time even on the quality news outlets, just enough to keep you in the loop with what happens in the world.
Quality means doesn't use clickbait, doesn't try to build outrage, doesn't try to present all kinds of horrors and very rare events like being trivial happening daily, doesn't try to shock.
Sounds like a unicorn. I'm only slightly jesting. I know of some sources that probably qualify, but I seldom check them, or they require a subscription.
> So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.
A hyper-focus on the national news also makes people feel like they're being a good citizen, while they completely ignore the things that actually make them a good citizen. I see it here all the time. People spend hours a week - often hours a day - following news about politicians they've already made their mind up about, or even politicians from other jurisdictions they'll never have a chance to vote for or against. Yet they spend almost no attention on local leaders, and keep voting back in the same group of people with poor track records who ignore constituents.
It's not a simple difference of opinion about these people - I've had numerous conversations with the people around, and the vast majority of people don't know many of their local elected officials, and those they do know the name of they couldn't tell you anything about. Yet they could quickly tell you all the outrageous things a governor in another state did.
Most national news is like junk food, where people feel like they're satiating themselves but they aren't getting any of the news they actually need.
If my Russian friends ignored the news as much as you did, at least some of them would be feeding worms right now. Most left the country when the news made it obvious that a mobilization order is to be declared — it was confirmed a couple of days thereafter.
> Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.
Makes me wonder if there's a market for news that's only based on events that happened 3-6 months ago, so that we have some conclusiveness and perhaps something actionable or relevance to what happened.
News is the machine that manufactures opinion. If you don't read the news you will still be subject to mainline opinion and its policy consequences. It's probably more accurate, if no less unhappy, to read the news as primarily propaganda (for specific political interests or for ideological consensus building). You can, of course, "daff the world aside, And bid it pass" but the news is history in the sense that whoever wins the news cycle, wins the commanding heights of the historical record. Think of reading the news as like the spectators taking a picnic to watch 19th century battles, but today, it's a war for peoples' minds.
The main point of this article has been pointed out before and is hardly novel or original. The earliest I know of is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, but unlikely to be the first.
If anything, the only ironic thing about this is that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out to you.
I used to read the news first thing in the morning when I woke up. Lately, I started to have zero motivation to do anything. And overall I felt a bit depressed the whole day. So I made a commitment a couple of days ago to stop reading any news before mid-day. Can't yet say how much it is helping, but overall I feel better and I'm more productive.
The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.
> The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.
That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.
To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias.
The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data.
A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.
The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).
Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.
I used to see it as a choice between being uninformed and informed. Now I see it as uninformed and misinformed and I'll take the former.
Michael Crichton nailed it with Gell Mann Amnesia[0]. I see it all over the place on topics I know well such as coverage of companies I worked at or political topics I was very well informed about.
Sometimes it feels innocent - a reporter too "dumb" to get the nuance and thus missing the point, sometimes it feels deliberate - eg consistently chopping off context to create an emotional charge. Either way, I saw that the news would lead me to the wrong conclusion if I didn't already know better - and then obviously that it must be leading me to wrong conclusions on topics where I don't know. Which is most.
Reading the news is certainly not good for your productivity.
Similarly, being politically active is on average a waste of your time if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings.
But if every able citizen follows the logic of those two facts, the country will be much worse off.
Yes, I agree, its better to free-ride off the citizen-participation of other, more naive citizens than to invest your own time in improving society. But at a certain point, when everyone becomes a free-rider, the political class becomes predatory and you get a dysfunctional state. Riots. Shortages. Pollution. Failing healthcare. Invasion. Corruption. Each time the form is different but the source is citizen apathy.
In other words, if you ignore the news long enough, the news will come and knock on your door.
It is usually too late to save your house and your savings when this happens. As experienced by my ancestors who had to flee their homeland and move to America. This is why I am not politically apathetic in America. Things happen very slowly and then very quickly in a governmental collapse. By then, your savings are confiscated or inflated away before you can take action. Travel can become prohibitively expensive or forbidden. It becomes very difficult to get your family and resources out. Usually you leave penniless and arrive on foreign shores as a destitute refugee no matter what your status and expectations were in your former life and country. Engineers become taxi drivers. Scientists become house cleaners. Then you rebuild and you teach your kids that you should always prepare for the worst case and never take civil society for granted.
Another approach is to accept news as it is: entertainment.
The same way we're not looking at documentaries on Amazon frogs and arguing if watching them led to any improvements in our daily life, we shouldn't expect random news to be actionable or useful.
Sure there is local and national info that is beneficial, but those can be earned in way more efficient ways on other media (for instance offical accounts on Twitter were my go-to for my local council's announcements and govs policy updates, and they also posted it on their respective PR pages).
Actually I really wish we 100% stopped alluding as news and journalists as a primary source of information: press conferences and somewhat official interviews should always have a directly accessible feed of the whole thing, uncut, and distributed by the entity opening the event. Having to go through second hand reporting and selected tidbits to understand what was happening there is just nonsense.
Question is really whether news has ever been good for you. I think it probably has — and you can basically recreate that environment by checking a major newspaper of your choice between once a day and once a week.
There’s a balance between being completely uninformed about what’s happening in the world vs. refreshing twitter every 30 seconds.
The news has been making me feel increasingly sad over the last few months, and coincidentally last night I decided to do something about it.
I deleted news apps from my devices, deleted news site bookmarks frm Firefox, and used LeechBlock to block the news sites that I'm likely to visit. Also blocked Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. I almost never watch broadcast tv so that doesn't need any special measures.
I still get a "morning briefing" email from the Guardian, which I probably stay subscribed to, but I won't (can't) click any links. I hope to establish a routine for scanning and then deleting it. If not I'll unsubscribe.
I'm considering a subscription to a dead tree weekly news summary like the Guardian Weekly - but I'd like to wait a few months first.
Half-way through Day One I feel pretty good and noticeably less distracted. I'm interested to see how this goes.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadMaybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.
But then I scrolled to the bottom, and realised it's even worse than an option piece, it's a long-form advert:
> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top
This indicates that the book advertised by this article doesn't add anything original, novel or interesting to the world.
There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever.
Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.
It's not that power holds a carrot and says, to hold me you must be a sociopath, it's that competition for power selects those lacking emotion.
I'm no anthropologist but I suspect since humans evolved from small groups, emotions developed because group work was beneficial. As humanity evolved rapidly into larger societies, it's not clear that emotion in these group sizes are so beneficial for survival.
At some point survival from the size of the group becomes nearly guaranteed and competing more within the group becomes a better survival strategy from an independent standpoint. These days you're far less likely to starve to death or be eaten by say a bear or lion because you live in large societies with all sorts of services and just basic proximity scares other predators away. Now the dynamic is about succeeding within the bounds of that system itself. Detaching from others and focusing on yourself tends to give you better success in that environment. Specific cases exist where you should work as a team but if you can do this without emotion and identify all these cases on a highly transactional basis, you can better optimize your own success.
Frankly I think it's kind of sad because, well, I have emotion and don't like to think of the world like a sociopath but... if you want to compete, you need to more and more.
Also, this should be marked as 2013.
I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions.
e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share.
Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).
Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.
Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.
Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind.
And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.
Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort.
You can get pretty far just by talking to people.
Well you are partially right but also I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't think politics is an area where I can really effect change and I have so much going on with my life that I am also unwilling to expend the effort.
I find discouraging others from fully engaging in the civic process much more disappointing than choosing not to fully engage oneself, to be honest.
It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.
It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.
Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.
I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.
And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.
The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.
> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.
'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.
> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!
Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.
Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)
> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.
This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!
As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.
"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.
Your point doesn’t make sense once you realize there’s a difference between news and news media.
I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.
But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.
I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.
News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.
If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.
At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.
Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.
Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.
Maybe, perhaps, news media?
This kind of action does have an effect, and the effect is significant when many people do it.
Much like how participation matters during elections.
Election day is the least significant day in politics. It is merely the hiring process, and who you hire doesn't matter all that much (within reason). Your actual job as the employer starts after you have selected an employee. The onus is on you to direct and guide the employee you selected. If you don't know what is needed for your organization on an ongoing basis, how can you serve as their boss?
Or, of course, you can pray that you chose a mind reader and ignoring them will lead to satisfactory results. However, I think all employers will tell you that if you disappear into the night and leave employees to their own devices, you won't be impressed with the results.
> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
Being the boss in general leaves you pretty impotent, frankly. This is as true in government as it is in enterprise. Employees aren't robots. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep the workers aligned on the vision, and against competing leadership interests.
But it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, the wealthy among us who feel they don't have time to be the boss directly will hire other parties (a.k.a. lobbyists) to guide the workers for them. If the employees cannot be tamed, that practice would not take place. Of course, like everything in life, if you are not so well off you're going to have to do the work yourself.
Nobody ever said that democracy was easy. There is good reason why some people in the world stand by other political systems – because they don't want to put in the hard, hard work of democracy. But if democracy is the system you and your fellow neighbours have chosen, it is the one you have to accept, hard work and all.
Because you leave yourself more susceptible to recency bias, and the prevailing media narrative on election day rather than continually evaluating the actions politicians take in real-time with proper context, evaluating the raw facts for yourself.
If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)
> you have a few options a few times a year.
You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.
What you get in the news is a performance, either carefully crafted or off the cuff crazy.
The only way to "shape a perception of government" is to check how your representatives actually voted for different issues. Talk is talk, votes are fact.
Some striking examples: look at the stock prices of pharma companies after Covid broke out. Sure they went up, but it took a full year(!) before most of them finally reached their peeks. Or look at shares of weapon manufacturers after the Ukraine invasion. Same story, share prices went up but it took months.
Buying individual stocks is the act of taking unknown risk for entertainment purposes.
Sorry to be that jerk, but:
If you need to follow the sports/entertainment news to engage in small talk when coworkers discuss these issues, it just means you don't know how to do small talk.
My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children.
Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration"
Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is
https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be...
but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National.
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Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.
The above is meant about news that makes you angry or makes you hate because they are reporting on something horrible that has happened: Wars, crime, corruption. Not news that makes people angry just by the style.
I don't watch televised news, because it is pure poison on all channels. Even if you didn't understand the language the anchor was talking, you feel bad just from the hatred and disgust of the presenters directed at their viewers. It is psychological war and it is completely on purpose. If somebody entered your house and talked to your face in the same manner as the news anchors, you'd think it was an escaped psychopath or punch the person in the face. But people tune in every night to watch these freaks, or even worse - leave them on all day.
But back to text news and articles, if you strip out all emotion and just stick to the facts you end up with basically a bunch of Excel spreadsheets for your reporting. This much money was spent on that, so many soldiers died in that offensive, that many years in prison was given to the murderer. What about interviews? Pretty much all politicians, business owners, and other influential people are so well media trained now that interviews have little value. They have endless phrases of lies that sound good to answer any question. This is where the journalist instead will have to inform the reader what's going on and that means inserting some of his or her own views and opinions. And it's good if it's done in a transparent way. It is completely ridiculous how print media today are snaking and slithering around with their words to convince their public that somebody is a bad guy or good guy, instead of just stating their opinion and getting over with it.
With all this, I think any respectable media should report on things such as immigrant caravans and immigrant fleets. It's a huge difference between that and the individual immigration that is more common. When masses of people (mostly men) arrive in this way, it is more akin to an invading army, especially when gang members and terrorists mix among the crowds, and especially when they proudly wave the banners and chant the slogans of the nations they are supposedly escaping from. Another aspect is the human trafficking involved with this kind of mass migration. Where is the investigation into the human trafficking lords when their ships sink, killing hundreds? Where is the responsibility of the human trafficker when they've helped a murderer over the border? All in all a huge deal everything and nothing to be hidden from reporting.
I am not affiliated with them.
The stuff is poison.
I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties.
It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense.
It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.
Well phew! Thankfully someone's still paying attention.
You mention tv news, but I suspect online news is what most people consume, streaming killed tv news many years ago.
The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.
You cannot simply say "Go current good thing! End the current bad thing!" as people will think you are being sarcastic.
> 52. You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.
If new events or a new policy change unfairly affects a (neighbor|friend|minority group|stranger), is it a good thing for the unaffected to plug their ears and go about life?
I don't mean to suggest following the news 24/7 is a solution to this, but I also do not see how it's healthy for every person to ignore everything that doesn't personally affect them.
Attempting to formulate an opinion on every issue that can possibly come up is a fool's errand; carefully following the outrage cycle for the sake of expressing an opinion that falls on the "correct" side of issues you have no stakes in is even worse, as it adds empty noise to the conversation and distorts the Overton window away from the concerns of people who do have stakes in the issue.
Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.
As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.
On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume.
There is so much truth to "ignorance is bliss".
To me, if anything, it really goes to show up important "yelling with appropriate volume" is. So many of those "with a cause" as is being discussed here are pretty widely ignored, as it seems they're always yelling. I can't tell what is meaningful from them when it's almost always of equal volume, fear, etc.
I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.
Exactly. There's almost nothing in the daily news that someone must have "privilege" not to care about. They have some articles about social issues that might fit that description, but that's a totally different thing than the news itself.
One thing I've observed, though, is that "the news" generally isn't how I get information about what fun, brave, new world people would like to make for us.
"The news", qua the comercially-produced mass media doings of the day, generally has never talked about issues important to me and mine and when they do it's largely Fox punditry or it's reaction.
I get a lot of information about the things I care about via various instagram folks and then following up by cursory searches to gt the larger picture.
But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.
Oh certainly. There was a survey a while ago (which I can't find) that found that reading UK rightwing press was correlated with being less informed about issues than simply not reading news at all - i.e. readers would underperform random guessing on multiple choice questions.
Exactly. It's like when people complain about minimum wage. As a software developer, this will likely never impact me. Same thing with issues like abortion or gay rights. As a straight male, I gain nothing from getting bogged down in pointless arguments over those side-shows. Russian invading Ukraine? Why is that something I need to know about? I live in American, not Ukraine.
People like me just don't need to worry about these types of issues, so what do I gain by reading news about things like that?
Coding behavior this way is misleading and counterproductive. Activism is a generally respectable activity, it entails actually showing up and giving your time towards something you care about, not just lecturing people about watching cable news.
If I had written the comment you replied to, I would have put the word in quotes. Some people use the term "slacktivist", but I think terms like that are silly. And to be clear, I'm with you - when I think of an activist, I think of someone collecting signatures door-to-door, or organizing an irl event, etc. I think of someone actually trying to accomplish something rather than just signaling virtue. But I also think that if enough people use a word a certain way, that's what the word means, and a lot of people seem to think that "just lecturing people" counts as activism.
My assumption is that parent comment was applying that label well beyond the group that labels themselves as such. Social media activism can still be activism. I’m not looking to gatekeep.
Given the context of this forum, people really love to throw this and other similar terms around in a way that reads as a pejorative. Basically, “people with a specific type of politics that I don’t like and who annoy me”. Ex. Elons “I support the current thing” tweet.
Who’s the privileged one? Hard to say.
Overall, the logic within this statement is subjective and reliant on hypothetical scenarios and personal judgments, making it difficult to evaluate the validity of the argument objectively.
A program can exist with near zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot.
In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourself.
1. In programming, the permissions required not to consume are less than permissions required to consume. This statement asserts that in programming, there are fewer permissions or privileges needed to restrict or avoid consumption compared to the permissions required for actual consumption. It suggests that it is easier to control or limit consumption in the context of programming.
2. This is where the dissonance begins regarding the meme of a programmer. This statement introduces the concept of dissonance regarding the meme (a cultural symbol or idea) of a programmer. It implies that there is a contradiction or inconsistency when it comes to the behavior or perception of programmers in relation to consumption.
3. A program can exist with near-zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot. This statement compares the ability of a program and a human to exist with minimal consumption. It suggests that a program can operate with very low resource usage (represented as a few neurons) while a human cannot function without some level of consumption.
4. In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourselves. This statement makes a broader philosophical point. It suggests that every act of breathing or consumption signifies a participation in something larger or more significant than oneself. It implies that consumption is not just a personal action but has broader implications.
The logic in these statements contains a mix of objective claims and subjective philosophical assertions. The first statement is based on the premise that permissions in programming can be differentiated between consumption and non-consumption, although it lacks specific evidence or context.
The second and third statements introduce a comparison between programming and human existence, implying that programs require less consumption than humans. However, it's important to note that the analogy between programming and human biology is not straightforward, and the comparison may be oversimplified or metaphorical.
The final statement offers a philosophical perspective, suggesting that consumption, represented by every breath, carries a symbolic meaning of participation in something greater. This statement relies on subjective interpretation and personal philosophy rather than objective logic.
Overall, while the statements touch on different aspects related to consumption, programming, and human existence, the logical coherence is weakened by subjective interpretations and philosophical assertions.
Taking a break also makes it easier for me to identify those that are steeped in the rhetoric of the day. It's educational and a little unnerving.
> Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.
Honestly, I chafe a little bit at expecting the news to be "actionable" by a regular person, because I think there's some general value to being informed about your environment (especially in a democracy). However so much of modern news is neither, it's more akin to feelings-based political advertising. It's so bad that it's obvious even on the news pages of prestige outlines like the New York Times. I subscribe to their app, but I have to do a fair bit of eye rolling as I'm searching for informative things, and they're just making it harder. They've been pushing their "Opinion" section even more heavily: in the last few months they moved it up to the 2nd section after "Most Popular, knocking World News down to 3rd (or more accurately 3rd/4th since they've also stuck "Games" of all things in the 2nd slot).
One sad casualty of modern times is the weekly news magazine. The slower pace and longer deadlines meant they were much better at keeping a regular person informed without all the noise of daily updates. They were also more accurate than daily news, since they weren't as rushed they could do better fact checking and research.
What democracy? The News is kind of like so-called democracy: something that every serious person needs to do but that has very little impact on anything. The most exaggerated example is the US presidential election which in fact has a very, very long media coverage (News) up until the election itself. And what does a person who can vote get back from that? They only have two parties that they can vote for if they don’t want to “waste” their vote, and the nomination is filled with a mix of serious candidates and people who want to boost their careers (Buttigieg) and then eventually the party itself circle the wagons and boosts one anointed candidate (that was the case for the Dems but I’m not sure about the Reps since I didn’t pay much attention).
One counter-example though to the News not being actionable was Covid. I felt that a lot of the news about Covid was actionable. And it was useful to know what people/experts thought about the current threat-level day-to-day.
The BBC channel only produces a few hours of news a day but manages to cover everything from the Titan sub to French protests to Israel’s anti-terrorism action in Jenin to Bolsonaro’s ban. They’re pretty much the only news source that reliably covers Latam, Africa, and the Middle East. They’ve got a rather predictable bias and a half hour a day is enough to get a broad view of what’s happening.
FP is great for deeper analysis from the perspective of the neoliberal establishment and its primary competitors. However to stay informed the only thing I feel I really need is the Wikipedia current events portal. Past days are updated as information comes in so I can go back when I have time and grab any headlines that I missed. It’s actually surprising how few eventful events actually happen in the world when you get rid of all the ragebait.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
The Economist is still going strong. It's my primary news source for exactly these reasons
I think the news affects people's behaviors more than we realize. Although it tends to be around NOT doing something. Smoky air...don't go outside. Flight delays... don't fly anytime soon. Food shortages...think of a substitute. Submersible news...don't go in submersibles, beware of overconfident charismatic people, etc.
Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. It doesn't necessarily have to be impartial too, when done properly you can gain media literacy and benefit of having a reach to the discussions.
The problem with the news lately is mostly about the way they make their money. Simply because they keep the lights on by displaying as much content as possible, they design and curate the content for improving the metrics they can objectively measure(like revenue and view counts). The second kind of problem is that sometimes they don't look in making money, but influence you and that kind of news may seem a little bit of higher quality. However, due to the sinister motives, it's actually even worse.
Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too. If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon.
I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name).
I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.
Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context.
For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.
If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source.
For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight
I think one could argue that perhaps keeping up with news in order to understand news is too much work but that's an entirely different issue.
One nice thing about not fully comprehending what's going on in the news is that in social situations you can ask others lots of questions about current events and the people you're talking to will feel very proud that they can explain things to someone else. It's a good ice breaker, at least until it gets to be all political...
I’ve never understood why we need to make these caveats. “Objective” or “just the facts” news has never existed. It’s impossible. I’m not knocking you, I just think it’s silly you should even feel pressure to publicly acknowledge something so patently obvious, yet we both know that if you didn’t the chance is high that the first comment you’d get is a complaint about your “biased” media outlets. As if any other kind exists lol
Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.
Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.
Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.
If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.
News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.
What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.
It's a fallacy to think that because one person can't single-handedly change the world that change is impossible or that people in aggregate have no power. It is this fallacy that is at the center of trained helplessness.
It is the idea that if people want cleaner streets, they are incapable of sweeping them. If they want more supportive communities, they can't walk out their door and help someone.
If you want the cynical angle, you can put time and money into a local politician and do way more manipulation to enrich yourself than anything large-scale.
If you in some unstable place, you want to move someplace else, change significant things in life, then it makes more sense to follow news, albeit it would help to curate them. But its a dopamine drug, I see otherwise very smart folks to fall prey to this completely helplessly. They even buy things like smart watches to know instantly there is some notification in phone. Of course all of these folks have higher levels of anxiety, they were there before smartwatches but those are definitely making things worse. And cycle repeats and goes deeper. For them I do hope seamless AR/VR is a thing of distant future, they will have hard time not making it into some cyberpunk version of addict.
The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.
You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.
I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.
I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.
The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.
The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.
Some have suggested that a subscription model to multiple papers (e.g. Spotify for news) would be appealing, and it might, but that doesn't immediately solve the problem of the form and content of the news. Longform article sources or retrospectives are probably the current best way to consume news.
So much FOMO. I subscribed to and read a once-a-week article which summarizes the world events that week. Focus of the article is important catasthropes to avoid, kind of. That's enough for me.
Quality means doesn't use clickbait, doesn't try to build outrage, doesn't try to present all kinds of horrors and very rare events like being trivial happening daily, doesn't try to shock.
A hyper-focus on the national news also makes people feel like they're being a good citizen, while they completely ignore the things that actually make them a good citizen. I see it here all the time. People spend hours a week - often hours a day - following news about politicians they've already made their mind up about, or even politicians from other jurisdictions they'll never have a chance to vote for or against. Yet they spend almost no attention on local leaders, and keep voting back in the same group of people with poor track records who ignore constituents.
It's not a simple difference of opinion about these people - I've had numerous conversations with the people around, and the vast majority of people don't know many of their local elected officials, and those they do know the name of they couldn't tell you anything about. Yet they could quickly tell you all the outrageous things a governor in another state did.
Most national news is like junk food, where people feel like they're satiating themselves but they aren't getting any of the news they actually need.
Makes me wonder if there's a market for news that's only based on events that happened 3-6 months ago, so that we have some conclusiveness and perhaps something actionable or relevance to what happened.
The author is careful to carve out an exception for "independent journalism" rather than news but, ironically, in a newspaper.
If anything, the only ironic thing about this is that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out to you.
That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.
The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data.
A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.
The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).
Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.
Michael Crichton nailed it with Gell Mann Amnesia[0]. I see it all over the place on topics I know well such as coverage of companies I worked at or political topics I was very well informed about.
Sometimes it feels innocent - a reporter too "dumb" to get the nuance and thus missing the point, sometimes it feels deliberate - eg consistently chopping off context to create an emotional charge. Either way, I saw that the news would lead me to the wrong conclusion if I didn't already know better - and then obviously that it must be leading me to wrong conclusions on topics where I don't know. Which is most.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Similarly, being politically active is on average a waste of your time if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings.
But if every able citizen follows the logic of those two facts, the country will be much worse off.
Yes, I agree, its better to free-ride off the citizen-participation of other, more naive citizens than to invest your own time in improving society. But at a certain point, when everyone becomes a free-rider, the political class becomes predatory and you get a dysfunctional state. Riots. Shortages. Pollution. Failing healthcare. Invasion. Corruption. Each time the form is different but the source is citizen apathy.
In other words, if you ignore the news long enough, the news will come and knock on your door.
I would argue that for the vast amount of things that happen in the world, this is a good thing. Just about the right level of care and concern.
The same way we're not looking at documentaries on Amazon frogs and arguing if watching them led to any improvements in our daily life, we shouldn't expect random news to be actionable or useful.
Sure there is local and national info that is beneficial, but those can be earned in way more efficient ways on other media (for instance offical accounts on Twitter were my go-to for my local council's announcements and govs policy updates, and they also posted it on their respective PR pages).
Actually I really wish we 100% stopped alluding as news and journalists as a primary source of information: press conferences and somewhat official interviews should always have a directly accessible feed of the whole thing, uncut, and distributed by the entity opening the event. Having to go through second hand reporting and selected tidbits to understand what was happening there is just nonsense.
If you keep eating at bad restaurants, does that mean food in general is bad? No. It means you need to find better restaurants or cook at home.
There’s a balance between being completely uninformed about what’s happening in the world vs. refreshing twitter every 30 seconds.
I deleted news apps from my devices, deleted news site bookmarks frm Firefox, and used LeechBlock to block the news sites that I'm likely to visit. Also blocked Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. I almost never watch broadcast tv so that doesn't need any special measures.
I still get a "morning briefing" email from the Guardian, which I probably stay subscribed to, but I won't (can't) click any links. I hope to establish a routine for scanning and then deleting it. If not I'll unsubscribe.
I'm considering a subscription to a dead tree weekly news summary like the Guardian Weekly - but I'd like to wait a few months first.
Half-way through Day One I feel pretty good and noticeably less distracted. I'm interested to see how this goes.