Yes! Definitely! It is such an incredibly excellent book. I listened to the Audible version twice in one month (26 hours in total). I think everyone should check it out, at least for the alternate viewpoints on doing things. I actually wrote about this on my own site (link in my profile).
On topic, I absolutely love the part in the book that says "Replace reading the newspaper over breakfast or dinner with activities like speaking with your spouse, playing with your children, etc."
It's funny but this book has made me better at relationships, and even life. I wholeheartedly believe in the notion of not reading the news. It makes you more present, and more engaged with your own life.
Tim, it's ok, we get it, you love your own book. Calm down babe. ;)
Joking aside, the book has some very interesting ideas and personally has inspired me to seek change in my professional and personal life. Although, a blueprint everyone can follow word by word it's not.
I agree. It has some great and inspiring ideas but definitely not a blueprint for anyone. For example, I have no desire to live abroad so I completely disregarded the travel parts of the book, which is at least half of the book's content. I mean I did listen to those parts (via audiobook), but I focused my attention elsewhere.
Whenever reading or listening to something, whether a book, podcast, or blog post, I look for at least one idea that I can apply to my own life. If I find something, then it was a worthwhile read/listen.
I'm amazed to see an article trying to inform me that, indeed, ignorance is bliss. While I think people should watch their garbage intake, I'd certainly not encourage tuning out world events any more than I'd encourage running with both earbuds in. In either case one is likely to be taken off guard.
Indeed. The article seemed quite hypocritical. For someone who decries the public knowing about how miserable the world is and emphatically preaches ignorance, he seems quite keen on informing the world about how much news sucks. (And undoubtedly selling books in the process.)
That's not what it says at all. What it says is that there are really big, deep, important, and world-changing stories happening all around us, but you won't get them from what passes for news. What you will get is a fragmentary sugar-high that actually damages your ability to grasp more meaningful accounts of the world. That is to say, the kind of news this story refers to (and which the Guardian sees itself as being above) will make you ignorant. Moreover, that ignorance is characterizes by anxiety and aggression. In other words, the opposite of bliss.
I see what you're saying... It's just that the author says "news" when he means "the stuff called news that isn't news" which is hard to talk about without sounding like a hypocrite; he describes the phenomena - factoids - for example, but is ultimately participating in the proliferation of exactly the type of water-cooler/factoid/self-help pseudo-intellectual article that he's deriding. His article is filler in the "Media" section on guardiannews.com. The author might have said "too much junk 'news' makes people unhappy" and I'd have promptly carried on ignoring those types of articles. :)
Not neutral at all. I believe that certain companies have their employees come here to flag or to ^ certain stories. Maybe not organized, but it happens regardless. I have noticed stories go from being on top to page 3 within minutes, simply because it was bad PR for a certain online monopoly.
There are a lot of positive things about HN, without it being "real news". The major value for me is that it is (often) interesting. I learn a lot here that helps me find new ways to think about technology and the web industry.
But it is not:
* neutral: there are some pretty obvious biases, though they aren't consistent
* need-to-know: there's nothing I've learned on HN which has been strictly necessary to me, though there's a lot which was interesting
* concise: the net information density is relatively low, than higher on many other discussion sites. (Low bar, I know...)
It's really funny, because HN is much like slashdot at it's high point (I would argue it's even better). Many parallels exist; for example, people will claim "groupthink" (in this case "bias"), but minimize "inconsistencies" when they disprove their point.
As for need to know, might I be so bold as to suggest that if you haven't learned anything of use at HN, perhaps it's not suited for your interests/profession?
The fact it's not neutral is probably why I'm coming back to it. I don't really keep track of general news, because they are very boring, and highly irreverent. (The only side I'm exposed about news is that people around me going nuts over what they heard in the news.)
What comes up on HN to me, is more entertaining, and somewhat more relevant (I do run across the things once in a while that I could apply to what I do at my work.)
I may be opening myself up to some flak here but I think it is generally accepted that the BBC is one of, if not the, least biased news source (Excepting climate change.)
Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news
Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.
I agree that the organisations are on the left but as far as I can see (for the BBC, do not know al-jazeera) they do not let their organisational bias affect their reporting as much as other organisations.
The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.
Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.
Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?
Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....
True, I was probably a bit hasty in 'always', but think that 'usually' fits.
My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.
As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).
It depends on the monitoring. If you cook that you're golden regardless of what you do.
Actually determining bias is difficult.
There is also Meet the Press on the commercial stations and Sky News is actually well worth watching if you have it. Richo's show and Peter Van Onselen's are really good.
I don't know anything about ABC, but generally speaking, I imagine that the likelihood of a media company's internal team declaring that their own company's reporting is biased is about as likely as BP creating an internal team that reports offshore drilling creates uncontainable environmental risks.
I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.
No-one can be unbiased about the news because it's inherently subjective. I agree, an internal-only team can't help but be biased, which is why they try to balance it against an external team.
Sadly, no such thing exists. One thing that I've found useful is to use wikipedia as a news source. It seems odd, but for big, complex events wikipedia often has the best overall coverage. Most news stories are just little bites which assume you're caught up contextually, or just don't care about context. Whereas wikipedia will usually do a much better job of providing all the information together. For example, take a look at this roundup of the current crisis over North Korea and compare it to contemporary news coverage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_Korean_crisis
the other advantage of the Economist is that it only comes out once a week. I've gotten slack about reading it lately but I should just cut out the time I spend reading daily news. What you'll notice if you read the Economist regularly is that after a few months or a year you realize that virtually everything of consequence you see on the TV news or the front pages of daily newspapers (with the exception of truly surprising stuff) is stuff you already read about weeks previously.
Seems an odd thing for someone who was involved with RSS to write, considering that it lets you keep up with (selected) 'news' more effectively (sure, it might be the longer form stuff he says is more useful, but ultimately it lets you skim more individual articles which is the root of the problem).
I agree that most mass media news is a waste of time since you have no control over the stories or the level of detail. I think news via feed is a lot better; you have more power to investigate the things that actually matter to you.
When it comes to mass media (and increasingly the web, too, thanks marketers), skimming content is not the problem, the sheer deluge of useless, distracting up to outright BS content is. Hence skipping that, and being selective about what you subscribe to RSS-wise :P
In the article (written in 2006), Aaron Swartz wrote:
"This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me?"
Ironically, he did unfortunately end up as a news story in which the government did something bad and he was personally involved.
The article argues in large part that news reporting generally lacks context and depth. You just left a comment that perfectly illustrates why this is problematic.
Oh the irony.
If you care: What's at issue in the Aaron Swartz case is the proportionality of the government response to the infraction. Whether he committed a crime (or not) is largely a moot point.
The sentence they gave him seemed to have been way out of proportion to the crime he committed, and the time and taxpayer dollars that the federal prosecutor spent on him could have been spent on more significant crimes that actually put citizens in danger. So yes, I think the government did do something pretty bad here.
Which is ironic, seeing as how his own website is now guilty of many different things he rails on the mainstream media establishment for in that book. Off the top of my head, unlabeled advertising masquerading as news, equal time for nutjobs, headlines that contradict articles...
Kind of sad, really. It ruins a good analysis with the stench of hyprocrisy.
Yeah honestly I've learned to repress my need to be informed due to just how depressing the news is in general. I don't find out about politics or world events until they are so big somebody IRL relays it. I keep it to HN, tech news, science, Nat Geo, etc, informative and positive (mostly).
Most of those reasons seem exaggerated, except one: News wastes time. It's just to easy and effortless to click on news stories and bam - there goes 45 minutes of time.
Does anyone know a good program that blocks you from e.g. wasting more than 25 minutes reading news each day? Browser tools are too easy to bypass to be effective. (Editing the hosts file works, but then you can't visit those sites at all.)
Most of those reasons seem exaggerated, except one: News wastes time. It's just to easy and effortless to click on news stories and bam - there goes 45 minutes of time.
At least, but then you also need to know what's happening and not every second can be monetized, we'd become robots. I wish I could limit it to 15 minutes in the morning (Earthquake in ...; shooting ...; health care law ...; ....), 15 midday; 15 at night and then just chill looking at special interest sites like tech, archeology, history etc.
I believe I get positive value from HN. So while it's a good way to procrastinate, I'm think HN is a good news source to learn about new stuff, new frameworks, neat projects, etc.
There are some apps that let you block sites effectively for a block of time (like selfcontrol for mac), but I didn't see any that monitor your daily usage and then block the sites. (Though various extensions do that.)
I totally agree, hardly ever read the news even with a slight background in journalism. But I have to say the title alone sounds a tad Nineteen Eighty-Four. News does have a purpose as a balance of power.
> Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which
> require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities
> of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for
> the mind.
...and the manner of publication:
> 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
But there's a good case to be made for knowing your
audience. In that sense, this version is actually much
more likely to reach those who might be influenced by it.
It looks like the author of the article wants to promote his book (see the end of the article) and The Guardian will profit since it provides a link to the book in their own "book shop". And they figure that nobody will actually give up their news addiction after having read the article, so there's no risk to the newspaper's business.
For those who like the article, the complete version from which this article is excerpted can be found here, in PDF form:
I used to read HN all day and felt good, elevated, enlightened ... pretty soon I was trying to learn every new language, trying every new framework, trying a new todo regime - needless to say I was getting no where. Soon I was very unhappy ... everybody was doing something cool other than me! Every Show HN: makes me feel I'm wasting my life in school ... and should dropout and start building what I've started sometime back ...
But then someone told me, "Believe what you are doing is cool, inundating yourself with what others are doing won't get you anywhere other than giving you the false sense of wisdom!"
Now I spend a lot less time on HN. And since it has the best content of the net .. I don't need to look anywhere else.
I had a similar experience with Twitter, especially in terms of keeping tabs on competitors. Recently, I've stopped reading the tech blogs and I've found it's made me a ton happier and allowed me to focus on what I'm doing and stop looking in the rear view mirror.
On the other hand, when my own personal problems seem immense, sometimes it can give me a lot of perspective to see the problems the world as a whole has to face. Surely in doses too large or too often, it can be a major detriment to my ability to work (especially when there is a news "crisis" going on, real or imagined). However, I'd say overall the net effect of regularly ingesting the news has been to make me feel closer to my fellow human beings than before I read the news often and had only the things and people in my immediate surroundings to ponder about.
I've come to a similar conclusion. Because news emphasizes the dramatic over the contextual, they're always providing me poor information in an even poorer context. That's just the way the business works.
I've done something weird, though: I switched to plaintext commentary. So each day I scan my personal news site, http://newspaper23.com. It only does commentary.
I find that by scanning the titles I can see what news items are hot in the world without getting so wrapped up in them. If I like, I can always read commentaries with opposing views on a particular issue. But the kicker is, somehow once the material is slanted, once I know it's spin, it no longer has the high level of emotional engagement. Writing an Op-Ed along the lines of "We must do X!" is simply a different art form than news fearmongering.
Seriously, if you haven't given up MSM news, you need to. That shit will rot your brain. It's crisis-of-the-hour stuff over there. And the pundits just make it worse.
http://newspaper23.com looks like a great site. I've been looking for something that just shows headlines and doesn't require launching into an image-heavy site just to read the article.
However, the JavaScript appears to be broken in Chrome. Switching categories doesn't work, for example.
I'm not certain if the analogy that news is bad for you is true. I've heard this multiple times from multiple people and practiced going on a news diet (temporarily) even though I'm used to being on top of what's happening.
What I ended up realizing was that the news wasn't really affecting me, because, what I was reading was not the crap about celebs, gossip and other nonsense, but actual stuff around me that was having an impact on the world.
I don't know if I could go on without reading about the Arab Spring, or the Nuclear tests in North Korea, even though they don't directly impact me or my daily life.
I've found that if anything is truly important, I'll hear about through non-news channels (friends, family, cow-orkers, personal blogs, etc.). It works remarkably well.
Tragedy of the commons. Though that will never happen, so we're more or less free to choose the course of action that suits us best, without it having any overarching effects.
This is amazing. Just glancing through that newspaper23.com site for a few seconds, I am amazed at how many headlines are written to be panic-inducing or inflammatory, rather than simply calm reporting. That was more an eyeopener to me about the status of today's news than anything else.
Headline-writing has always been an art, and grabbing attention a significant aspect of it. The eyeball / viral / advertising / pageview economy of the web has really taken it several stages too far.
I read The New York Times (which generally stays away from this) and the Economist. I've all but given up on several local news sites which, as their economic underpinnings continue to be knocked out from under them, have devolved into ever more shrill (and banal) headlines. Up until the past year or so they were still somewhat relevant, but I've noticed a marked downturn in quality even in the past few months.
Your argument rests on the flawed premise that the reader is a passive fool waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration. An article may be the top story of the day, but that doesn't mean it is important or relevant to me. Clearly there is a "news cycle" and every day there must be some top story. The reader is not compelled to pay heed. The discriminating reader does not perceive a newspaper to be some distilled briefing of matters important to them personally.
As with anything else, you must research your news if you hope to understand it, and you must seek out the truly pertinent things.
I truly fear that the research culture fostered by Google searches, etc. is greatly damaging our own ability to parse sources. It is a wonderful convenience to have indexing machines working in concert with query engines, allowing the researcher to skip the 300pp of drivel to unearth some crucial paragraph by asking the question in their own words.
It troubles me greatly that the solution always is to find a better indexing engine or aggregator (or sharpen one's skills with the software), rather than refining one's own ability to parse sources. Yes, these engines expose an impossible amount of information, and this is tremendously valuable technology. It will never be a full substitute for the pain of manual research.
We have a real problem if the masochistic few who have historically embraced hard questions by parsing original sources either choose not to or never discover their interest when regularly presented with an easy way out. Can the self-interested pursuit of real knowledge & understanding exist in a world of algorithmically generated bite-sized morsels?
I believe it can. People have bemoaned society's advancements negatively impacting the dissemination of information to a thoughtful populace since before paper boys shouted headlines from corners. It happened with radio, it happened with television, it happened with dotcom portals.
Smart people aren't so easily distracted from learning.
The pain of manual research means most people don't bother to do it. Improved indexers, aggregators, and summarizers improve access to those with attention which only affords the surface.
Citizens surrender their control of information flow when they accept mandatory public education and learn to accept a regimented doses of "knowledge" by schedule. The alternatives are to become "knowledge" rebels, which often means not just bucking the establishment, but one's peer groups as well, whom you can't escape in mandatory educational institutions.
Real education begins when mandatory learning ends.
>Citizens surrender their control of information flow when they accept mandatory public education and learn to accept a regimented doses of "knowledge" by schedule.
WTF? Did I step into an Alex Jones site by mistake here?
checks URL
Guess not.
Here's the thing.. mandatory public education, for its flaws, is still better than the alternative. Some minimum level of knowledge and socialization is all but required in order for a child to grow into a productive member of society (and I'd almost argue that the socialization is somewhat more important than the knowledge), especially when you're dealing with STEM topics that directly relate to and impact our economic and infrastructure backbone.
Complaints that education is either stunting the growth of our children or training them to become consumers or indoctrinating them or whatever are the marks of someone who should not be taken seriously.
> Complaints that education is either stunting the growth of our children or training them to become consumers or indoctrinating them or whatever are the marks of someone who should not be taken seriously.
Dropping the critical context of "mandatory" and "public"...hard to take that seriously.
> Here's the thing.. mandatory public education, for its flaws, is still better than the alternative.
What is the alternative again? "Non-mandatory" education, "non-public" education, or simply no education? Since the context was already dropped, the uncareful reader may be lead (like a student) down the wrong track of assuming the original poster (vis-a-vis me) doesn't like education. If you can accept that education can be non-mandatory and/or non-public, then the educated reader can agree that education is still a good.
> Some minimum level of knowledge and socialization is all but required in order for a child to grow into a productive member of society (and I'd almost argue that the socialization is somewhat more important than the knowledge), especially when you're dealing with STEM topics that directly relate to and impact our economic and infrastructure backbone.
I firmly believe being educated is important to each individual, which is why leaving it to the machinations of local, state or federal political will and self-serving bureaucracy is an uneducated leap of faith. The socialization aspect of mandatory public education is the goal of said education, it isn't to make the individual better, it is to make a person that the rest of society can keep in formation.
That said, since the original article was about mass media, this is precisely what mass media's goal also is, once the pupil's graduate; provide the same ordering of knowledge and socialization of issues, and common responses to predetermined stories.
>Dropping the critical context of "mandatory" and "public"...hard to take that seriously.
....it was implied. Add "mandatory" and "public" to the same sentence and my views and overall point do not change. Whenever someone refers to the education system as a whole, they are generally speaking about public schooling, and so was I. My intent was not to mislead, here.
>What is the alternative again?
Non mandatory? Then there's no point. There is a certain section of population that would rather see their kids doing something other than going to school every day, probably the ones that need it most. Inner cities where education is poor and money is tight, farms where there's more impetus to have help doing the work rather than getting educated, single working parents, etc etc.
Non-public? We already have private schools, they're almost completely the domain of the wealthy.
No education? .. don't think anything needs to be said here.
>leaving it to the machinations of local, state or federal political will and self-serving bureaucracy
What is the alternative? Schooling is arguably a type of infrastructure, and privatizing infrastructure seldom ever works out in the public's benefit. It's one of those high cost, low margin, delayed return activities that don't look good on a corporation's balance sheet.
>That said, since the original article was about mass media, this is precisely what mass media's goal also is, once the pupil's graduate; provide the same ordering of knowledge and socialization of issues, and common responses to predetermined stories.
I guess I don't see what you mean by this. I don't recall going to an "Everybody panic!!" class in elementary school, nor do I remember any sort of conditioning along those lines. Heck the only thing that felt 'off' about public school were the lockdown drills a couple times a year, and those have a valid purpose.
Your analysis completely smacks of unjustified paranoia, at least to me. I see no connection whatsoever between public education and the utter broken-ness of the mainstream media. Both are broken, but for different reasons, in different ways, in different degrees.
> Your argument rests on the flawed premise that the reader is a passive fool waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration.
Is this really so flawed, at least in aggregate? Large parts of our society judge people by their awareness of these wider events over which they have no control, and by the value judgments they make concerning those events. When this is what it takes to be considered a good person, people will line up to do it: passively waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration, just as you describe.
The stuff I read in the morning is very different from the stuff I read through the day. The morning is all about news - where I am playing catch up to what the world's editors think is important for me. I hardly look back at yesterdays news. In contrast, what I read through the day is largely intent/search driven, suggested by a friend or colleague, discovered through email etc. This content typically has longer shelf life, and is more valuable to me.
This is why I think, what I read as "News" should be largely driven by what I'm doing throughout the day. I'm working on Pugmarks.me [1] with this exact premise. Here are some design principles we're using:
1. What I read should be greatly influenced by my professional interests, as opposed to what is popular
2. My colleagues often have an overlap with my interests, and their experiences should help me discover great content
3. If have a set of sources that I trust, and this is continually evolving. A system should attempt to help me discover content from these sources (and potential new sources) before reaching out to the larger web
4. When I discover great content, I should be able to hold on to it, and rediscover it when I'm in a similar context again in the future
With these principles in action at Pugmarks.me, I've been able to significantly improve the quality of my reading.
"New has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world." Which news is this? weather.com has some rather shallow "news" but it's a pretty big blanket statement..
in america each election is similar to an exam in school. you need to study to pass an exam. your textbook is the news outlets of your choice. hopefully you've been keeping up on your studies so you can vote for the right candidate and pass the exam. you can determine for yourself if you've passed by...reading the news.
There's also a certain arbitrariness to what the media establishment chooses to cover and how they choose to cover it. It often seems as if the "news" is nothing more than what entrenched political and/or private interests want people to be thinking that day.
That's one of the reasons I'm really enjoying the new Vice show on HBO -- they're covering topics nobody else is touching, they don't censor or clean up the horrific aspects of the human behavior they're covering, and their presentation doesn't try to pretend that their reporters are anything other than human beings who possess their own viewpoints (rather than "objective" beings capable of transcending their own subjective perceptions and beliefs, like poor CNN still claims).
This article irks me. Although most "news" has regressed into banal link bait just plain yellow journalism, and the notion of the "news organization" has undergone an inexorable transition towards the likes of Buzzfeed the the Huffington Post, it's absurd to assert that all news is worthless.
First, his point that no news can be of value to one's personal situation or decision-making is false. News has impacted my life thoroughly throughout the past year. Off the top of my head, some stories that have provoked meaningful consideration and or action from me include: Aaron Swartz, the election, several Supreme Court cases, the Bitcoin bubble (which inspired me to start my first true weekend project this week, http://twitter.com/Bitcoin_Ticker)... There are still valuable and significant things happening in the world every day.
Moreover, there is something incredibly presumptuous in his assertion that "we are not rational enough to be exposed to the press." The fact that many people are not particularly analytical and prefer to consume simple, superficial stories does not mean that every person is necessarily incapable of thinking critically about events and about how we ought to consider the dangers in society. Even if we can't help instinctive, irrational fear or bias, most people can acknowledge the irrational nature of their opinions and still intellectually acknowledge the true nature of the news. It's simply perverse to state that everyone is too stupid and or manipulable to rationally understand the news.
His other problematic assertion, that "learned helplessness" is detrimental, is questionable. Regardless of knowledge, the world will still be filled with misery, poverty, death, bigotry, and fear. Is it better to be knowingly miserable or ignorantly blissful? I tend towards the former. John Mill's famous line, "it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied," comes to mind. This is a question that philosophers have puzzled over forever, and I won't get into it, but the fact that he dismisses such a philosophically significant and contentious argument so quickly is worrisome. Maybe it is better to know what the world is like, regardless of our ability to change it.
About your last paragraph. It has always puzzled and bothered me that there is this popular notion that to truly understand the world is to be miserable and hopeless - that there exists this trade-off between knowledge and happiness.
For me, the one blinding truth that exists about humanity is its undeniable progress on the grand timescale. You won't find anyone arguing really that we are worse off now than we were 100 years ago. I'm talking about the extremely basic progress indicator of the average quality of life of a human being on Earth (which is of course mostly subjective). Expand the timescale back beyond 100 years, and our progress just becomes more and more clear. We are so much better than we were 500 years ago in every single aspect of living on this planet: health care, wealth distribution, civil rights, freedom, scientific discovery, overall happiness... There is not a single aspect of humanity that was better back then.
I should note that a huge reason our progress is not always as evident within 100 years is this pattern of people's adamant belief that the generation below them is somehow screwing up the world forever. Technology is making people stupid/socially retarded, music these days sucks, no one cares about other people anymore, blah blah blah. I could talk for hours about how much I hate this, but I'll just say that it is incorrect, and aspects of that idea that are true stem from the fact that younger people are generally stupider than older people, because they haven't lived as much. Everyone was once stupid, and "Kids these days" will eventually learn, like everyone does.
If you let yourself become affected by the misery and despair that is definitely still around us on Earth, then in my opinion you are a part of the problem. You may not be Joseph Kony or Kim Jong-Un, but you are contributing just as much to the fear and hopelessness on Earth by becoming a part of it. And you are short-sited. The world is certainly not perfect, but it is also most certainly getting better. The most knowledgeable people on this planet are optimistic. They understand that horrific things are happening across the globe right now, but they also understand the world's natural condition of progress. These are also the people that contribute most to the progress of humanity.
Sorry to rant. I agreed with your comment for the most part aside from that.
Being "provoked to action" is not the same "making better decisions".
The relevancy that the author is talking of is of things that you need to decide where the need to decide did not come from news. In other words, if you read no news you would still have many decisions to make, right? The question is - does news help you make better choices in those decisions?
Said another way, how many decisions can you think of that:
1.) the need to make a choice did not arise from reading the news, and
2.) reading the news led to a better decision?
The election is probably closest to these type of decisions. But I like Tim Ferriss's approach to discuss pros and cons of candidates with trusted friends instead of the press.
I think the best counter to the faff in this article is simply: Talk to someone who watches the news. Then talk to someone who doesn't. Even if nothing else, watching the news is at least indicative of an interest in the world beyond arms'-length.
Besides, there's a world of difference between "read the news being aware that the news-maker has an agenda" and "ignore the news entirely".
That may tell you more about who buys into the popular notion of keeping up with the news than who's interested in the world. There's a lot of social signaling involved in appearing informed about a somewhat arbitrary selection of current events.
I totally agree with what you said, some of my coworkers are blissfully ignorant to anything that happens beyond their household and talking to them feels almost like talking to a child. Sometimes it even gives me a sense of superiority when I see I am way more "prepared" than them.
Having said that, I feel exhausted from news. Specially link bait or biased media. Almost like I have a burnout of BS and I am becoming very skeptical from almost all news source. Example, started watching CNN ditched in favor of BBC then stopped BBC in favor of Al Jazeera then... You get the point.
I must say that I have an urge that I keep coming back to check the news, every so often, to satiate this weird need to staying informed. But if I could, talking almost like an addicted person here, I would totally stop reading all this "crap".
Yeah, it's this exhaustion from reading news that I think the article is trying to help avoid. It's great to be engaged in the world, but being engaged by consuming news is exhausting, literally causes constant anxiety, and is bad for you!
That's not to say you should ignore the world, you should just try getting your information from in-depth reporting, long essays on topics of interest, from people who have actually been there, and so on. There's no freaking rush!
If it's so important that I can't wait a month to read an in depth article with context and correct details, I will hear about it from friends.
As in most things, moderation is the key. There's a lot of room to move between "avoid all news" and "constantly check the news".
I also find that keeping abreast of the news provides a history that helps things make sense. Why the news has to provide some sort of life-shattering function for you (as the article describes) is beyond me. Why is politician A pushing Article 1? Well, there's been several strings of related articles, and then there was Incident 2 a couple of months ago...
Your talk experience works as well with football, basketball, cinema, HN, weather... Sharing a common interest with someone make talk a lot more interresting.
'speaking in metaphor' is a bit self-referential and is another way of saying 'talking around the issue without having to exactly specify everything in a bullet-pointed list that is clear to even the most basic speaker of the language, all the while allowing for all the usual disclaimers to be applied, the most salient being that the item in question is a general trend that has been noted by the utterer, and not a cast-iron ruling applicable to every possible combination of subject parties when applied in a Condorcet-style fashion'. It's a kind of shorthand.
As for 'what do I mean', I mean that I find people who actually follow news (and I mean in general, not news junkies) generally have a better understanding of why one event follows another, are generally more worldly in that way. You can of course find exceptions, because these are humans and there is little that is absolute or even near absolute in that realm, but I think that 'following news' and 'having a more worldly view' are two items that are not completely orthogonal; the relationship between them is a positive one and is not lost in statistical noise.
You should really revise what you wrote earlier in light of what you've just written and, in the process, get off the high horse. It would have been a lot shorter and less annoying for everybody involved. (Hint: "best counter to the faff in this article is simply: Talk to someone who watches the news. Then talk to someone who doesn't." implies that one is "better" than the other and which one, but not at all why)
Now that you've explained why, I can tell you my experience is not like yours at all, I find that many people who actively follow the news tend to parrot them out without true understanding.
Now that you've explained why, I can tell you my experience is not like yours at all
This is what pissed me off from your first utterance. You already knew what I meant. And you already knew what you wanted to say. But rather than just step forward with what you had to say, you did this stupid fucking charade where I have to explain myself in detail before you'll deign to provide your side of the argument. And that would have played out in a way that both of us already knew. You could have just as easily said what you thought I meant and why you think it's wrong, instead of turning it into this stupid pantomime. And then if you had misunderstood me, I would have the opportunity to clarify. Instead you started an entirely predictable path of drek, and I thought 'fuck that, I'll go a different way'.
My 'high horse' was born of being tired of your "I say you're wrong with no support on my side; explain yourself further!" style of argument. It's lazy and unfair and requires minimal commitment from you while not making any statement of substance that can be addressed. That's why I went over the top in my previous comment, nothing to do with the particular topic at hand.
Also, if you want to lecture people about getting off high horses and not implying that one is better than the other, it would behoove you not to use condescending mechanisms like "(Hint:".
I was not sure what you meant and that's why I asked, especially given that you gave no extra context or argumentation for your position.
If that bores or tires you, stop answering instead of derailing the conversation with anger stemming from paranoid delusions about second and third intentions.
A few other points: not everything we do ought to be subject to the criteria he laid out. Any hobby could be said to be a waste of your time or insignificant to your "real" life.
I also agree that while the news may be designed to make readers emotional and cause them to miss details or make cognitive errors, whether or not those negative effects happen depends on the reader. I find reading the news to be an excellent exercise in figuring out which facts are really important in a story, especially when those facts are missing from whatever article you happen to be reading. One of my favorite things to do after reading an obviously lacking article is to ask myself "What fact or number could the author have presented to conclusively prove his point?" And then try to find that fact or number.
As superficial as the news tends to be, it can still function as an entry point into a new subject. A sufficiently bad article on a sufficiently interesting subject will prompt me to seek out some additional information on my own. For example, silly rants about educational quality led me to read up on the ways that teacher performance is calculated. Lackluster articles about the visual changes in Windows 8 made me seek out articles on theories of computer UI design.
Lastly, I will argue that some news consumption is in fact the imperative of good citizens in a democracy. Without some background on current events, a citizen can't make informed decisions in elections, or in their other civic activities. While following every gaffe is obviously not necessary, a critical review of politician's claims requires that people understand what problems the politicians will be solving.
I looked into this and experimented with it a while back. My conclusion was that:
a. If something is actually important to me, I will find out about it whether I read the news or not.
b. Keeping in mind (a), any news that I don't hear about through other channels is not urgent.
c. A quick "news" piece will have almost no depth or context that could actually give the story relevance. And will very often just be outright wrong.
My conclusion from these three observations was that I should read news magazines like the new yorker, forbes, etc instead of reading the nytimes. With a goal of trying to find a reasonable mix of biases so that I don't get too closed off to different points of view.
If the story is actually important, yet I didn't hear about it from friends, it won't matter that they spent a month investigating it and writing it up before publishing it.
And strangely, facebook becomes much more useful when thought of as a news aggregator. It will of course have a tendency to produce a bubble, but I certainly found out about Aaron Swartz on facebook far before I saw it anywhere else.
How do you test a) ? How do you know what you don't know? :) It seems like you're saying that something is not important if you do not find out about it..
Certainly a risk; in my personal case I read news magazines to see what I missed with the assumption that anything important would eventually be covered there. There were a variety of things that I was glad to be hearing about, but which I don't think hearing about sooner would have made me more informed.
I could be wrong, certainly I missed Paris Hilton's sex tape entirely.
But more seriously, there are very specific topics which I will miss by not watching the news if I have no other source of information -- particularly political action items and dangerous weather on the horizon. But both of those topics I am certain to hear about on facebook. Might vary by friend circle though, I have friends who work at NOAA as well as obama's campaign.
There's a ton of useful news out there. I get it filtered through serious people, or people interested in important things like labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, local politics, urban development, civil liberties, and hacker news :). These are things that will affect me, and I can affect (in groups of course).
I do like the concept of information obesity, and the importance of budgeting one's attention. The article seemed to borrow it from The Information Diet:
"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.
The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you."
I agree, yet I find my main use for news is to make me feel connected with other humans... If I cut myself off from it, I feel disconnected and lonely. I feel like I'm missing relevant context.
Is that an unfounded fear, and I should find ways to get rid of it?
Or is it a valid concern, but are there better ways to feel connected?
I work from home so I don't interact with a lot of people regularly.
As the article pointed out, you don't have to consume an endless, up to the minute, stream of news to know what's happening in the world. There are magazine articles, which are better researched and go into the stories in more detail, and there are also tons of books about recent history and politics. If you wait a week or a month before reading about some event, you can weed out a lot of the sensationalistic noise that constitutes news reporting, not to mention all the things that the reporters got wrong in the heat of the moment and had to correct later.
I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune.
" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "
" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "
" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "
" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "
I played with options for a bit. Nearly all the "financial news" is information free. No matter what happens, there'll be an article explaining why. Even decent-seeming publications would join along in the "Stock X moved <direction> because of event Y", even though you could flip the predicates around and still have a coherent story.
As Eliezer writes, "If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge"[1].
To be fair though, I suppose the real "news" is subtle information and isn't likely to become a simple headline and the people able to make use of it are unlikely to detail the causation afterwards. Although, sometimes I wonder, at least in stocks, if the nonsense "news" ends up driving things more than any fundamental reasons.
I used to like watching the news but these days supposedly reputable news organizations are what tabloid shows were 20 years ago. "Guess what happened today!?" instead of just reading the news.
And everyone editorializes, everything has to be dramatic no news organizations seem to be impartial anymore news organizations are classed as either left or right of centre and people have to choose their side.
Someone once said about watching TV news "Your central nervous system isn't meant to handle seeing death and disaster everyday".
The only US news I like is PBS. Here in Canada CBC isn't too bad but I find it drifting to the left instead of the impartial center and also it seems to also be fascinated with making everything dramatic.
I think this problem with news these days is only for the under 30 crowd since it seems nobody I know under that age reads a newspaper or watches TV news, maybe at most a one paragraph blip on a website.
I gave up my multiple time per day reads of news.google.com. I decided that it didn't improve my life to hear what shooting took place, or what North Korea had done this time, every day. I still read technology news, but the normal day to day stuff I've completely stopped following. It's been a few months since I gave it up and I must say that I'm happy with my change. I did the same thing with reddit. I gave that one up because it was too much of a time sink.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadOn topic, I absolutely love the part in the book that says "Replace reading the newspaper over breakfast or dinner with activities like speaking with your spouse, playing with your children, etc."
It's funny but this book has made me better at relationships, and even life. I wholeheartedly believe in the notion of not reading the news. It makes you more present, and more engaged with your own life.
Joking aside, the book has some very interesting ideas and personally has inspired me to seek change in my professional and personal life. Although, a blueprint everyone can follow word by word it's not.
I agree. It has some great and inspiring ideas but definitely not a blueprint for anyone. For example, I have no desire to live abroad so I completely disregarded the travel parts of the book, which is at least half of the book's content. I mean I did listen to those parts (via audiobook), but I focused my attention elsewhere.
Whenever reading or listening to something, whether a book, podcast, or blog post, I look for at least one idea that I can apply to my own life. If I find something, then it was a worthwhile read/listen.
Could, not, resist.
Though on the subject of neutrality, humans aren't neutral, so expecting their publications to be is itself insane.
Guess I'll think twice before posting something positive about HN from now on.
But it is not:
* neutral: there are some pretty obvious biases, though they aren't consistent
* need-to-know: there's nothing I've learned on HN which has been strictly necessary to me, though there's a lot which was interesting
* concise: the net information density is relatively low, than higher on many other discussion sites. (Low bar, I know...)
As for need to know, might I be so bold as to suggest that if you haven't learned anything of use at HN, perhaps it's not suited for your interests/profession?
What comes up on HN to me, is more entertaining, and somewhat more relevant (I do run across the things once in a while that I could apply to what I do at my work.)
For US political news realclearpolitics.com is pretty good. They also aggregate news on other topics but I haven't explored those personally.
Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news
The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.
Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.
Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?
Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....
My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.
As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).
Actually determining bias is difficult.
There is also Meet the Press on the commercial stations and Sky News is actually well worth watching if you have it. Richo's show and Peter Van Onselen's are really good.
But reading news is far better at any rate.
I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.
It's not neutral. It's pro-market.
But it is concise and if you just read it you'd be better informed than almost everyone.
I agree that most mass media news is a waste of time since you have no control over the stories or the level of detail. I think news via feed is a lot better; you have more power to investigate the things that actually matter to you.
"This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me?"
Ironically, he did unfortunately end up as a news story in which the government did something bad and he was personally involved.
I kinda read that he broke the law and the government were prosecuting him for it.
Oh the irony.
If you care: What's at issue in the Aaron Swartz case is the proportionality of the government response to the infraction. Whether he committed a crime (or not) is largely a moot point.
http://www.fark.com/2007/book/
Kind of sad, really. It ruins a good analysis with the stench of hyprocrisy.
Does anyone know a good program that blocks you from e.g. wasting more than 25 minutes reading news each day? Browser tools are too easy to bypass to be effective. (Editing the hosts file works, but then you can't visit those sites at all.)
Consider doing that for a week (or however long) and see if your habit changes. I've found that sense of effortlessness declines after such a break.
Almost 5 months in and I'm not going back. The next step is blocking reddit.
What's their angle here?
> Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which > require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities > of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for > the mind.
...and the manner of publication:
> 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
But there's a good case to be made for knowing your audience. In that sense, this version is actually much more likely to reach those who might be influenced by it.
For those who like the article, the complete version from which this article is excerpted can be found here, in PDF form:
http://www.theartofthinkingclearly.com/no-news-2?lang=en
But then someone told me, "Believe what you are doing is cool, inundating yourself with what others are doing won't get you anywhere other than giving you the false sense of wisdom!"
Now I spend a lot less time on HN. And since it has the best content of the net .. I don't need to look anywhere else.
This post really resonated with me.
I've done something weird, though: I switched to plaintext commentary. So each day I scan my personal news site, http://newspaper23.com. It only does commentary.
I find that by scanning the titles I can see what news items are hot in the world without getting so wrapped up in them. If I like, I can always read commentaries with opposing views on a particular issue. But the kicker is, somehow once the material is slanted, once I know it's spin, it no longer has the high level of emotional engagement. Writing an Op-Ed along the lines of "We must do X!" is simply a different art form than news fearmongering.
Seriously, if you haven't given up MSM news, you need to. That shit will rot your brain. It's crisis-of-the-hour stuff over there. And the pundits just make it worse.
However, the JavaScript appears to be broken in Chrome. Switching categories doesn't work, for example.
Also, what do you the stars signify? And I think Lifehacker is showing double links.
Stars mean it's new (last x hours, x is adaptive). Checked and yes lifehacker is showing double links...should fix itself...no idea why... :)
Drop some feedback in the box under the title if you want anything added/removed/changed.
I think the design is why it works. Nice and simple - a lot of this stuff is over designed I find.
Will get using it and provide feedback if I have it!
What I ended up realizing was that the news wasn't really affecting me, because, what I was reading was not the crap about celebs, gossip and other nonsense, but actual stuff around me that was having an impact on the world.
I don't know if I could go on without reading about the Arab Spring, or the Nuclear tests in North Korea, even though they don't directly impact me or my daily life.
I read The New York Times (which generally stays away from this) and the Economist. I've all but given up on several local news sites which, as their economic underpinnings continue to be knocked out from under them, have devolved into ever more shrill (and banal) headlines. Up until the past year or so they were still somewhat relevant, but I've noticed a marked downturn in quality even in the past few months.
As with anything else, you must research your news if you hope to understand it, and you must seek out the truly pertinent things.
I truly fear that the research culture fostered by Google searches, etc. is greatly damaging our own ability to parse sources. It is a wonderful convenience to have indexing machines working in concert with query engines, allowing the researcher to skip the 300pp of drivel to unearth some crucial paragraph by asking the question in their own words.
It troubles me greatly that the solution always is to find a better indexing engine or aggregator (or sharpen one's skills with the software), rather than refining one's own ability to parse sources. Yes, these engines expose an impossible amount of information, and this is tremendously valuable technology. It will never be a full substitute for the pain of manual research.
I believe it can. People have bemoaned society's advancements negatively impacting the dissemination of information to a thoughtful populace since before paper boys shouted headlines from corners. It happened with radio, it happened with television, it happened with dotcom portals.
Smart people aren't so easily distracted from learning.
The pain of manual research means most people don't bother to do it. Improved indexers, aggregators, and summarizers improve access to those with attention which only affords the surface.
"Your argument rests on the flawed premise that the reader is a passive fool waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration."
Real education begins when mandatory learning ends.
WTF? Did I step into an Alex Jones site by mistake here?
checks URL
Guess not.
Here's the thing.. mandatory public education, for its flaws, is still better than the alternative. Some minimum level of knowledge and socialization is all but required in order for a child to grow into a productive member of society (and I'd almost argue that the socialization is somewhat more important than the knowledge), especially when you're dealing with STEM topics that directly relate to and impact our economic and infrastructure backbone.
Complaints that education is either stunting the growth of our children or training them to become consumers or indoctrinating them or whatever are the marks of someone who should not be taken seriously.
Dropping the critical context of "mandatory" and "public"...hard to take that seriously.
> Here's the thing.. mandatory public education, for its flaws, is still better than the alternative.
What is the alternative again? "Non-mandatory" education, "non-public" education, or simply no education? Since the context was already dropped, the uncareful reader may be lead (like a student) down the wrong track of assuming the original poster (vis-a-vis me) doesn't like education. If you can accept that education can be non-mandatory and/or non-public, then the educated reader can agree that education is still a good.
> Some minimum level of knowledge and socialization is all but required in order for a child to grow into a productive member of society (and I'd almost argue that the socialization is somewhat more important than the knowledge), especially when you're dealing with STEM topics that directly relate to and impact our economic and infrastructure backbone.
I firmly believe being educated is important to each individual, which is why leaving it to the machinations of local, state or federal political will and self-serving bureaucracy is an uneducated leap of faith. The socialization aspect of mandatory public education is the goal of said education, it isn't to make the individual better, it is to make a person that the rest of society can keep in formation.
That said, since the original article was about mass media, this is precisely what mass media's goal also is, once the pupil's graduate; provide the same ordering of knowledge and socialization of issues, and common responses to predetermined stories.
....it was implied. Add "mandatory" and "public" to the same sentence and my views and overall point do not change. Whenever someone refers to the education system as a whole, they are generally speaking about public schooling, and so was I. My intent was not to mislead, here.
>What is the alternative again?
Non mandatory? Then there's no point. There is a certain section of population that would rather see their kids doing something other than going to school every day, probably the ones that need it most. Inner cities where education is poor and money is tight, farms where there's more impetus to have help doing the work rather than getting educated, single working parents, etc etc.
Non-public? We already have private schools, they're almost completely the domain of the wealthy.
No education? .. don't think anything needs to be said here.
>leaving it to the machinations of local, state or federal political will and self-serving bureaucracy
What is the alternative? Schooling is arguably a type of infrastructure, and privatizing infrastructure seldom ever works out in the public's benefit. It's one of those high cost, low margin, delayed return activities that don't look good on a corporation's balance sheet.
>That said, since the original article was about mass media, this is precisely what mass media's goal also is, once the pupil's graduate; provide the same ordering of knowledge and socialization of issues, and common responses to predetermined stories.
I guess I don't see what you mean by this. I don't recall going to an "Everybody panic!!" class in elementary school, nor do I remember any sort of conditioning along those lines. Heck the only thing that felt 'off' about public school were the lockdown drills a couple times a year, and those have a valid purpose.
Your analysis completely smacks of unjustified paranoia, at least to me. I see no connection whatsoever between public education and the utter broken-ness of the mainstream media. Both are broken, but for different reasons, in different ways, in different degrees.
Is this really so flawed, at least in aggregate? Large parts of our society judge people by their awareness of these wider events over which they have no control, and by the value judgments they make concerning those events. When this is what it takes to be considered a good person, people will line up to do it: passively waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration, just as you describe.
This is why I think, what I read as "News" should be largely driven by what I'm doing throughout the day. I'm working on Pugmarks.me [1] with this exact premise. Here are some design principles we're using:
1. What I read should be greatly influenced by my professional interests, as opposed to what is popular 2. My colleagues often have an overlap with my interests, and their experiences should help me discover great content 3. If have a set of sources that I trust, and this is continually evolving. A system should attempt to help me discover content from these sources (and potential new sources) before reaching out to the larger web 4. When I discover great content, I should be able to hold on to it, and rediscover it when I'm in a similar context again in the future
With these principles in action at Pugmarks.me, I've been able to significantly improve the quality of my reading.
[1]: http://pugmarks.me
That's one of the reasons I'm really enjoying the new Vice show on HBO -- they're covering topics nobody else is touching, they don't censor or clean up the horrific aspects of the human behavior they're covering, and their presentation doesn't try to pretend that their reporters are anything other than human beings who possess their own viewpoints (rather than "objective" beings capable of transcending their own subjective perceptions and beliefs, like poor CNN still claims).
First, his point that no news can be of value to one's personal situation or decision-making is false. News has impacted my life thoroughly throughout the past year. Off the top of my head, some stories that have provoked meaningful consideration and or action from me include: Aaron Swartz, the election, several Supreme Court cases, the Bitcoin bubble (which inspired me to start my first true weekend project this week, http://twitter.com/Bitcoin_Ticker)... There are still valuable and significant things happening in the world every day.
Moreover, there is something incredibly presumptuous in his assertion that "we are not rational enough to be exposed to the press." The fact that many people are not particularly analytical and prefer to consume simple, superficial stories does not mean that every person is necessarily incapable of thinking critically about events and about how we ought to consider the dangers in society. Even if we can't help instinctive, irrational fear or bias, most people can acknowledge the irrational nature of their opinions and still intellectually acknowledge the true nature of the news. It's simply perverse to state that everyone is too stupid and or manipulable to rationally understand the news.
His other problematic assertion, that "learned helplessness" is detrimental, is questionable. Regardless of knowledge, the world will still be filled with misery, poverty, death, bigotry, and fear. Is it better to be knowingly miserable or ignorantly blissful? I tend towards the former. John Mill's famous line, "it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied," comes to mind. This is a question that philosophers have puzzled over forever, and I won't get into it, but the fact that he dismisses such a philosophically significant and contentious argument so quickly is worrisome. Maybe it is better to know what the world is like, regardless of our ability to change it.
For me, the one blinding truth that exists about humanity is its undeniable progress on the grand timescale. You won't find anyone arguing really that we are worse off now than we were 100 years ago. I'm talking about the extremely basic progress indicator of the average quality of life of a human being on Earth (which is of course mostly subjective). Expand the timescale back beyond 100 years, and our progress just becomes more and more clear. We are so much better than we were 500 years ago in every single aspect of living on this planet: health care, wealth distribution, civil rights, freedom, scientific discovery, overall happiness... There is not a single aspect of humanity that was better back then.
I should note that a huge reason our progress is not always as evident within 100 years is this pattern of people's adamant belief that the generation below them is somehow screwing up the world forever. Technology is making people stupid/socially retarded, music these days sucks, no one cares about other people anymore, blah blah blah. I could talk for hours about how much I hate this, but I'll just say that it is incorrect, and aspects of that idea that are true stem from the fact that younger people are generally stupider than older people, because they haven't lived as much. Everyone was once stupid, and "Kids these days" will eventually learn, like everyone does.
If you let yourself become affected by the misery and despair that is definitely still around us on Earth, then in my opinion you are a part of the problem. You may not be Joseph Kony or Kim Jong-Un, but you are contributing just as much to the fear and hopelessness on Earth by becoming a part of it. And you are short-sited. The world is certainly not perfect, but it is also most certainly getting better. The most knowledgeable people on this planet are optimistic. They understand that horrific things are happening across the globe right now, but they also understand the world's natural condition of progress. These are also the people that contribute most to the progress of humanity.
Sorry to rant. I agreed with your comment for the most part aside from that.
The relevancy that the author is talking of is of things that you need to decide where the need to decide did not come from news. In other words, if you read no news you would still have many decisions to make, right? The question is - does news help you make better choices in those decisions?
Said another way, how many decisions can you think of that: 1.) the need to make a choice did not arise from reading the news, and 2.) reading the news led to a better decision?
The election is probably closest to these type of decisions. But I like Tim Ferriss's approach to discuss pros and cons of candidates with trusted friends instead of the press.
Besides, there's a world of difference between "read the news being aware that the news-maker has an agenda" and "ignore the news entirely".
Having said that, I feel exhausted from news. Specially link bait or biased media. Almost like I have a burnout of BS and I am becoming very skeptical from almost all news source. Example, started watching CNN ditched in favor of BBC then stopped BBC in favor of Al Jazeera then... You get the point.
I must say that I have an urge that I keep coming back to check the news, every so often, to satiate this weird need to staying informed. But if I could, talking almost like an addicted person here, I would totally stop reading all this "crap".
That's not to say you should ignore the world, you should just try getting your information from in-depth reporting, long essays on topics of interest, from people who have actually been there, and so on. There's no freaking rush!
If it's so important that I can't wait a month to read an in depth article with context and correct details, I will hear about it from friends.
I also find that keeping abreast of the news provides a history that helps things make sense. Why the news has to provide some sort of life-shattering function for you (as the article describes) is beyond me. Why is politician A pushing Article 1? Well, there's been several strings of related articles, and then there was Incident 2 a couple of months ago...
Besides being able to talk about latest news themselves, of course.
As for 'what do I mean', I mean that I find people who actually follow news (and I mean in general, not news junkies) generally have a better understanding of why one event follows another, are generally more worldly in that way. You can of course find exceptions, because these are humans and there is little that is absolute or even near absolute in that realm, but I think that 'following news' and 'having a more worldly view' are two items that are not completely orthogonal; the relationship between them is a positive one and is not lost in statistical noise.
Now that you've explained why, I can tell you my experience is not like yours at all, I find that many people who actively follow the news tend to parrot them out without true understanding.
This is what pissed me off from your first utterance. You already knew what I meant. And you already knew what you wanted to say. But rather than just step forward with what you had to say, you did this stupid fucking charade where I have to explain myself in detail before you'll deign to provide your side of the argument. And that would have played out in a way that both of us already knew. You could have just as easily said what you thought I meant and why you think it's wrong, instead of turning it into this stupid pantomime. And then if you had misunderstood me, I would have the opportunity to clarify. Instead you started an entirely predictable path of drek, and I thought 'fuck that, I'll go a different way'.
My 'high horse' was born of being tired of your "I say you're wrong with no support on my side; explain yourself further!" style of argument. It's lazy and unfair and requires minimal commitment from you while not making any statement of substance that can be addressed. That's why I went over the top in my previous comment, nothing to do with the particular topic at hand.
Also, if you want to lecture people about getting off high horses and not implying that one is better than the other, it would behoove you not to use condescending mechanisms like "(Hint:".
I was not sure what you meant and that's why I asked, especially given that you gave no extra context or argumentation for your position.
If that bores or tires you, stop answering instead of derailing the conversation with anger stemming from paranoid delusions about second and third intentions.
I also agree that while the news may be designed to make readers emotional and cause them to miss details or make cognitive errors, whether or not those negative effects happen depends on the reader. I find reading the news to be an excellent exercise in figuring out which facts are really important in a story, especially when those facts are missing from whatever article you happen to be reading. One of my favorite things to do after reading an obviously lacking article is to ask myself "What fact or number could the author have presented to conclusively prove his point?" And then try to find that fact or number.
As superficial as the news tends to be, it can still function as an entry point into a new subject. A sufficiently bad article on a sufficiently interesting subject will prompt me to seek out some additional information on my own. For example, silly rants about educational quality led me to read up on the ways that teacher performance is calculated. Lackluster articles about the visual changes in Windows 8 made me seek out articles on theories of computer UI design.
Lastly, I will argue that some news consumption is in fact the imperative of good citizens in a democracy. Without some background on current events, a citizen can't make informed decisions in elections, or in their other civic activities. While following every gaffe is obviously not necessary, a critical review of politician's claims requires that people understand what problems the politicians will be solving.
a. If something is actually important to me, I will find out about it whether I read the news or not.
b. Keeping in mind (a), any news that I don't hear about through other channels is not urgent.
c. A quick "news" piece will have almost no depth or context that could actually give the story relevance. And will very often just be outright wrong.
My conclusion from these three observations was that I should read news magazines like the new yorker, forbes, etc instead of reading the nytimes. With a goal of trying to find a reasonable mix of biases so that I don't get too closed off to different points of view.
If the story is actually important, yet I didn't hear about it from friends, it won't matter that they spent a month investigating it and writing it up before publishing it.
And strangely, facebook becomes much more useful when thought of as a news aggregator. It will of course have a tendency to produce a bubble, but I certainly found out about Aaron Swartz on facebook far before I saw it anywhere else.
I could be wrong, certainly I missed Paris Hilton's sex tape entirely.
But more seriously, there are very specific topics which I will miss by not watching the news if I have no other source of information -- particularly political action items and dangerous weather on the horizon. But both of those topics I am certain to hear about on facebook. Might vary by friend circle though, I have friends who work at NOAA as well as obama's campaign.
http://www.amazon.com/Information-Diet-Case-Conscious-Consum...
Is that an unfounded fear, and I should find ways to get rid of it?
Or is it a valid concern, but are there better ways to feel connected?
I work from home so I don't interact with a lot of people regularly.
Unfortunately, it's not really an option when I work from home.
" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "
" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "
" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "
" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "
source : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
As Eliezer writes, "If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge"[1].
To be fair though, I suppose the real "news" is subtle information and isn't likely to become a simple headline and the people able to make use of it are unlikely to detail the causation afterwards. Although, sometimes I wonder, at least in stocks, if the nonsense "news" ends up driving things more than any fundamental reasons.
1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/
And everyone editorializes, everything has to be dramatic no news organizations seem to be impartial anymore news organizations are classed as either left or right of centre and people have to choose their side.
Someone once said about watching TV news "Your central nervous system isn't meant to handle seeing death and disaster everyday".
The only US news I like is PBS. Here in Canada CBC isn't too bad but I find it drifting to the left instead of the impartial center and also it seems to also be fascinated with making everything dramatic.
I think this problem with news these days is only for the under 30 crowd since it seems nobody I know under that age reads a newspaper or watches TV news, maybe at most a one paragraph blip on a website.
It might be herd vs individual health but watching / reading the news will not make you better off.
I do think concentrating on knowledge of the world is important but I think this is separate from news.