I've been trying an experiment for the last year or two. I have an app that collects commentary, tech and science stories from across the web. (Recently I added news, but that was a mistake)
I find I stay just as informed reading commentary, where I'm purposefully being manipulated, as I do reading news. In fact the news is better, as various authors advance various personal theories they've been working on for weeks or months, using the current events as fodder. Reading a couple of these from different viewpoints provides wonderful context -- and context is the one thing critically missing from most "breaking news" reporting. The only difference is about a 12-hour delay. Trust me, the world does not depend on whether I know something that quickly. Twitter peeps will annoy me if something truly incredible happens.
I'm also finding that branding, whether by news outlet, author, or social signaling, is a terrible indicator of quality. As I continue to flush out the app, my belief is that a better indicator is statistical clustering around personality types, but that's still a year or two away.
But one thing is for sure: I've been much happier since I gave up all forms of news consumption. News is based on emotional manipulation. It's always a crisis, there's always an argument, and there's always some terrible danger you've been unaware of. That stuff will rot your mind. It's always been bad; it's just gotten worse over the last few decades as the news cycle has shortened.
I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'd quite like something that collects commentary about the state of countries around the word, but I'm lacking decent sources, especially for outside of the west. Have you found any particularly enlightening sources of such things you'd care to share?
Foreign commentary can be a hoot! If you thought the western media was bad, you should get out more :)
Here's a secret ninja media consumption tip: http://watchingamerica.com It takes commentary from around the world and translates it into English. Quite informative. I wish we had far more services like it.
What does 'rot your mind' mean in this context? I agree, and intuitively feel there's value in avoiding short term distractions, but what's going on there? Is it just opportunity cost, spending time watching TV instead of thinking and learning so you miss out on the mental benefits? Or do certain types/durations of distraction make you less able to do complex mental tasks when you go back to them?
I think what happens is that we start viewing the world in overly-simplified political narratives, say left versus right, that can fit inside a typical news story. So if there's a shooting, it's a gun control story, and we have the same old assholes on TV saying the same old things. We become conditioned to think of everything in the world in cartoonish terms. Media outlets are only too happy to fill the space with people arguing. And it's always the same arguing. Arguing has become a commodity for consumption.
This makes the reporting itself really bad, since the only context the reporter needs to fit the event into is some off-the-shelf political bullshit, and it makes the outlets try to drive up viewership by having presenters who more and more have these recurring populist rages. Every night on TV there's somebody getting mad about something. So the reporters dig up enough to fuel the machine -- usually fed by the political parties, PACs, or other interested groups -- and the pundits and reactionaries do the dance. The viewer is left constantly seesawing from topic to topic. Are HMOs out to kill people? Will a child molester living five miles take my kid? There's no context to any of this because nobody gets paid to provide context. They get paid to make viewers frightened and angry, which drives up ratings.
That's unsustainable, in my opinion.
In printed media, without the branding or signaling, authors are required to provide a thesis and support it with an argument. The reader can choose to engage or not. There's no "if it bleeds, it leads" nonsense. I can read great commentary that I disagree with -- and not feel angry or somehow moved to outrage. Or I can read commentary I agree with that's a piece of junk. I'm no longer taking sides. Instead, I can separate my consumption of events from my characterization of the reporting itself. That's the critical piece that's missing for most news consumers.
I think this is a great observation that has really only become possible from the internet: the ability to consume viewpoints from others outside of your small social circle has been increased massively. Sites like HN, reddit, dig, slashdot, etc have enabled that dialog on top of the usual one sided article.
Think back to when news was mostly distributed via TV or newspapers. Where could you get alternative views? Neighbors, churches? These folks won't likely come from as diverse backgrounds as folks you might find in an online forum. They will have grown up most likely in the same town you are in, raised in a similar fashion.
These days, I might read twenty different viewpoints of NSA wiretapping, from twenty different countries perspectives. It definitely provides the reader with a much richer experience, making the original article less valuable (except as a catalyst for the discussion obviously).
I've got a fiver that says your "twenty different viewpoints" are just twenty differently phrased reiterations of how Godawful bad it is that the NSA should do what the NSA does. Nothing personal -- but I strongly doubt that the ability to obtain, consider, and benefit by perspectives other than one's own, correlates meaningfully with the frequency with which anyone actually does so.
Yeah but the internet has also made it easier to filter out news you don't like. Back in the day, your local newspaper had to appeal to a general audience, and contained editorials from people with many perspectives. Now a days, you can chose to only consume news you agree with. If you're a conservative, you can read Drudge Report and Fox News Online without ever having to encounter a liberal viewpoint (except as the target of mockery). Liberals can get all their news from Daily Koz and MSNBC.com in the same fashion.
You have piqued my curiosity, your app sounds really interesting! Can you share more details about it? What sources do you aggregate from, how do you filter your stories (manually / statistically)? Actually i've been wanting to build something similar too!
I grew also up without a television. That was no deliberate choice, my parents are orthodox christians. I was very creative in that period and I kinda miss that now :)
I did. No TV thru high school, minimal later, culminating in full-slate cable service, then dumped it all for nothing more than an occasional DVD. Have no idea how any TV-watchers get anything done, as I'm working (home chores included) flat-out 18 hours a day and feel I can barely keep up with life.
For anyone who isn't ready to completely turn off the news spigot, consider switching to a weekly (or monthly) source of news.
I get all of my (non-HN) news from The Economist's audio edition. It's released weekly and they have a section right at the start about big things happening in business/politics around the world in the last week. It's no more than a couple minutes to scan, and 10-20 in normal speed audio.
The rest of the articles are at least one step back (since they summarize a week of what's happened). Many others are looking at some larger event or trend, sometimes with a recent event/anecdote as a lead in.
I like the audio edition in particular since I can put it on while I'm doing chores or commuting and I'll pick up bits and pieces even if I'm not fully paying attention. I can also have only the sections I care about included, which lets me skip the ones I really don't care about.
Yes. Audio Edition is a word-for-word reading of the print edition. Economist Radio looks like it has the random other audio things they do (there's also a podcast on iTunes with those sorts of things)
Read the economist a lot while I was studying for my undergrad. Never felt more informed, and have never found a more balanced presentation of things, imho.
Nowadays I read the guardian website and watch RT sometimes. But I think I'll go back to the economist soon.
I also love the Economist audio edition. I listen to it during my commute, and mostly get through it each week. It kept me sane on a horrible commute with my previous job.
They have a separate digital subscription, if you just want the website and audio edition. It is included in a print subscription as well. You can buy a single week, if you want to try it out.
Highly recommended if you want to ignore the advice of the OP.
Sorry, it changed since I last looked. They used to offer a regular subscription with both digital and print, or a cheaper digital only. As you say, now they offer the regular option with both, or a cheaper option with either digital or print.
That section is really great. If you would read nothing else at all, and just add one thing, that would be the first thing to add. What I miss is something similar on a more local level. Both local-local, but also for my country. I even thought of doing a start-up at this (produce a one page PDF weekly to complement this spread).
News media, such as The Economist, is also VERY different from what they talk about in the article:
>The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking.
Most of the news stories aren't really what I would call news anyway. The type of news that is apparently bad for me, is the same type of news that embodies everything that is wrong with most news media. The topics of you evening news broadcast is about as relevant as the sports scores.
Maybe instead of following web-native properties and cable news with 24/7 coverage, newspaper editors wish we all could go back to a daily digest (and a weekly recap with more soft news) of yesterday's events.
Strictly speaking it's not "the newspaper" saying this, but an op-ed contributor:
> 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
Newspapers don't necessarily agree with the views they publish – though presumably they found this an interesting piece regardless.
I know a lot of people don't like the doom & gloom of news. But it's needed. I recently discussed with someone who doesn't consume news about the NSA revelations. They were shocked. They said "why didn't anyone tell me?"
Instead of blocking things out and being happy with our ignorance, we need to change how news is done. If you whine about something, change it. The Guardian can certainly make an attempt to change the dynamic.
I change cable news by not watching it. When nobody watches their propaganda tabloid trash anymore they will cease to exist and something better will replace them.
We have yet to come up with a better alternative because we consume & we want it all for free. We cry about journalism yet we don't want to fund any. When good journalism is done, no one or very few people read it.
The key to changing news will be finding a way to monetize online content. Without this, all we will get is link-baiting and stories that are sensational to get people to come to a website.
> I know a lot of people don't like the doom & gloom of news. But it's needed. I recently discussed with someone who doesn't consume news about the NSA revelations. They were shocked. They said "why didn't anyone tell me?"
So I've been following the NSA news closely. But I'm not American! What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me? I can't influence the US government in any way. The most I got out of it was that I should move to non-US based service providers if possible - but this was clear when the first revelations hit. Did I really need to spend (I'm guessing) 10+ hours reading articles about the NSA's revelations?
I could see a case for following local news - where local might mean relevant to your industry or to your community. The more local the news, the more actionable the information. Nightly newscasts rarely focus on this though - they're basically entertainment, real reality television.
What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me?
Encrypt your data better, perhaps. But that's kind of besides the point - are you suggesting that there is no point knowing about things you have no control over?
Are you suggesting there is some point? That there's real value, to oneself or to anyone else, in repeatedly dismaying oneself over things which one does not have, and cannot obtain, the power to affect?
I suppose I just can't imagine being content at being ignorant of the world. By that principle surely it's also worthless to learn about world history?
It's probably hard to have a general rule about something like that. My take away from the article was that much of the current news that we consume isn't particularly useful to us--it doesn't improve the way we think or act, it just makes us sad and afraid.
Like, say, watching a report about a kidnapped child. Or reading about the trial of a serial killer.
Not in the slightest; the mistake there would lie not in studying the dead past, but rather in taking it personally enough to experience dismay. Taking sides in the past is pointless; one studies the past to take sides in the present.
I also want to pick on the fallacy I find in your equation of largely ignoring journalism and being ignorant of the world. Having in early life studied journalism without reference to history, and then later studied history without reference to journalism, I found the former to leave me bewildered in a morass of facts with no useful means of assembling from them a coherent picture of the world, and the latter to furnish me with the cognitive mechanisms necessary to derive a coherent, if of course not perfectly accurate, model, into which to fit the facts I derive from review of what I am forced to conclude is the rather slapdash and careless journalistic profession.
No you don't need to read 10+ hours of news about the same story unless there's new information and it has an effect on you. I didn't make that point so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.
I used to work in television news. I agree with you that some of it is just entertainment. The problem is that's what people want. Not everyone. But a good portion who never speak out about the news don't mind the entertainment part.
There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.
> No you don't need to read 10+ hours of news about the same story unless there's new information and it has an effect on you. I didn't make that point so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
The NSA story keeps coming back around as new information is revealed. The initial revelation was in May of this year and information is still tricking out. Following the news means taking in at least this much information on the NSA scandal.
> There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.
The only means we have to protect ourselves is encryption (where possible) and keeping things offline. Ok - done (after the initial revelations, as noted). As a non-american I have no influence on the American political process so the other two are out.
> There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.
I agree completely, but news isn't education. Most of the information in daily news has a very short shelf-life (e.g. current events) so it's not even an accurate representation of the world after a few months. Science reporting in news media is notably terrible - big headlines around single studies and results that turn out to not amount to much later. This is in-fact the opposite of education, it's information pollution because you're learning things that turn out not to be true.
I have not consumed 10+ hours of information about the NSA revelations and I feel I have a solid understanding of the situation.
When we read something like the NSA reports, we don't just think of what we can do right now to protect ourselves, but about how we change policies for the future. We look into what we need to develop. We look at how to protect ourselves without sacrificing privacy.
News is education. If you consume news about Kim & Kanye I would agree with you and call it information pollution. Good journalism is educating us. There's plenty of good journalism out there. Whether we want to read it and support it is another thing.
Another non-USian here. Most information is always unactionable. In fact, that's a more general principle: most of anything is trash. So, expect to waste some time for getting the usefull bits.
Some of what I got as actionable info:
1 - Don't trust services. That's different from "avoid services", and very different from "avoid US services". Some times you can use non-trusted services, other times you can't.
2 - The US is messing with standard crypto. I'm avoiding eliptical crypto while I understand it's history better. I increased some RSA keys, sometimes over the old 2k bits "maximum amount anybody would ever need". I got some ideas for what to do when you don't trust your crypto algos, but I didn't need to use them.
3 - Don't trust closed source software. I already knew that one as an abstract thing (just like #1), but it was reveled that it's a completely real thing. (Also, now I have facts I can throw at somebody.)
4 - Don't trust your LAN or your hardware. Yeah, the first part is good practice - but easy to ignore. The remaining means that one must evaluate all his data worth, and prepare if needed. Ok, not really an action, unless you have data that isn't worthless.
The Guardian is the dynamic. Either it's working out well enough to suit them, or the institution has grown too sclerotic with age to behave other than how it does.
I'm willing to wager many people who do consume news don't know about the NSA revelations, or don't care, because they're too busy reading about the tragic vehicular manslaughter of an attractive teenage white girl who lives 1000 miles away, or about this one weird old trick for increasing productivity at the office, or about the 10 new indie releases you should be listening to right now.
Junk news can cause as much ignorance as no-news. And we have to concede that most of the news we read is junk, especially what you find on Hacker News.
But I agree that a self-imposed news fast is silly. If we didn't get news, we'd be blind to the NSA's betrayal, among other things. So lets keep consuming news. But we need to consume far less news. Far better news. A small amount of high-quality reporting, as opposed to the usual firehose of bullshit.
I agree we need to consume better news. Instead of clicking on the link-bait headlines, take some time and read that long-form article that took months or years to research. If we tell the media that's what we want, that's what we will get. They need/want to make a profit.
Interesting article, but it doesn't seem very balanced as it only focuses only on the negative. Also, it is an excerpt from a dude's book which he is trying to convince you to buy for £7.99.
As it mentions at the bottom of the article, this is a shortened version of an article Rolf Dobelli wrote in 2010 called "Avoid News" ( http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... ). The first one was longer under the immediate challenge that people too mired in news would probably not finish it, so it's interesting to me that he shortened this prose specifically to post it on a news site.
Whether news is bad for you or not probably depends more than a little on what the source is. I don't watch television—for years our TV was in a box in a closet, brought out mostly just for watching the Olympics. But I do look at Google News and try to train it to give me mostly long-form suggestions about science and world issues from diverse sources with professional reporting and editing. That helps.
The claim that giving up reading news will make you happier is a medical claim in the article that is not backed up by reliable medical sources,[1] so I call baloney on that. The newspaper opinion writer here (promoting his new book with excerpts from the book) doesn't report the issue the way a competent reporter would report it, but just makes a bunch of broad general statements with no nuance. In other words, the medical claims about happier human life in the article are just like the made-up opinions we can all easily find on the Internet, and the article stands as an example of how we can find blatantly misleading "information" inside or outside the professional news media. I have no reason to suppose that the full-length book is a medically reliable source (the publisher of the book is identified at the end of the article).
Anecdote alert: I'm a curious person and I like to learn, and so one of the reasons I come here to Hacker NEWS is to find out new facts about the external world that I didn't know before, including facts about current events ("news" in the narrow sense). My personal experience—which, to be sure, may differ from yours—is that I am a happier and more productive person when I know, from good sources, what is going on all over the world and the broader context of expanding human knowledge. But I'm sure you can find an opinion column somewhere based on a popular book with a different opinion from mine.
AFTER EDIT: Good catch! Another participant here on HN noticed that the author of the article kindly submitted here has credibly been accused of plagiarism by more than one published author who works harder than he does. I upvoted that comment for what it added to our understanding of the article's background.
Google News is most definitely trainable. NO WAY would I visit Reddit for news (I was an early adopter of Reddit, and with Hacker News in my portfolio of news sources already, I don't see enough value-add in trying Reddit again.)
It has gotten harder to train Google news due to the big uptick in the 300 word reprint practice that is playing out in media recently. Even if you manually block all the major outlets, so many sites reprint their stories that I still end up with Miley Cyrus news in my feed.
You've entirely missed the point. News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable. Ie bitcoin articles focus on the speculative aspect and not that it's a more useful, less friction method of payment. Business shows focus on day to day movement instead of broad sweeping trends that are game changers.
News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable.
I think you've missed the point of my comment, which is that I actively disregard sources that have that defect, and look for sources that tell me about verified, actionable information. (I have been wondering about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my comment, and if this is what people think I am saying, that I like the sensational, they are badly misreading my comment.)
I think there's some misunderstanding over the meaning of the word "news" here. The author of the article uses the word "news" when referring to "sensational, bite sized news articles" (because it makes for a better headline). He doesn't think all journalism is bad. The article concludes with this thought:
"Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too."
You and the author seem to mostly agree in that respect.
If that is the case, then I used a bad example, but I really don't think I did.
Off topic, but...
I recently bought a days usage from put.io with bitcoin. They got their money instantly, I don't have to worry about a hacker getting my credit card info or using more bitcoins in my wallet than I gave. I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.
That's why you have multiple wallets, which you can create with a click of a button. It's effortless to create as many wallets as required for you to feel safe.
It is just sooo much easier to get credit card information though. You literally give all of it to everyone any time you use it.
I don't really know why credit cards don't have a public/private key situation but they don't, so people are just stealing them constantly or applying for them with a bunch of stolen personal information and then running up your credit in ways that are pretty difficult to detect.
A lot of the fraud that is occurring today is because the systems we are using to transmit wealth digitally are inherently very insecure.
When the government wishes to make your life miserable and you have a credit card, they can call your credit card company and get your account frozen for reasons.
When the government wishes to make your life miserable and you have a bitcoin wallet, they have to do a lot more work if they want those funds.
And I like your example of a use of bitcoin apart from speculation. The sensationalist articles love bitcoin because it is new, but also because a few people have become rich and poor from speculating on it and its future is uncertain, which leaves lots of room in the stories for "raising concerns".
But as tokenadult pointed out, we can avoid those articles and the sources that tend to deliver them.
News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable.
That's actually what frustrates me most about this article. For people who do plan to continue following news (likely including most readers of the article), the article isn't very actionable.
I would love to see a few smart people work together, look through the author's points, and outline a few ways to mitigate the legitimate problems summarized in each point. The article might be useful for other people who haven't considered these points before, but in its current state of merely spreading awareness, it's not very useful for me.
Why would you expect there to be medical evidence that speaks to being happier after giving up reading news?
I don't think you are entitled to expect that. Medical studies don't tend to focus on the happiness of healthy people. Even if they did, I would be surprised if a good study giving us data on happiness on reading news already exist at a scale that would represent the range of population behaviour.
I don't disagree with you wanting good scientific evidence - that's commendable.
I disagree with calling baloney on a sensible hypothesis ('reading news as a typical Westerner does is detrimental to overall happiness for most people') just because that scientific evidence does not yet exist and this opinion piece does not yet provide it.
Bias alert: I'm pretty sure I read to much news, and am solidifying this meme in my mind to try to improve that.
Which also ignores that point that not all candy is bad for you, and even candy that's not necessarily good for you in quantity might be perfectly fine in moderation.
Chocolate, for example, decreases the risk of stroke, is good for your skin, improves vision, stimulates brain activity, etc. How much of and how often you eat it affects whether it's still beneficial compared to its negative effects, which include high cholesterol, diabetes, weight gain, etc.
Someone eating candy isn't necessarily doing something bad, despite the stigma. Equally, they are not doing something necessarily good.
"News" is nothing more than a report of events potentially affecting our lives: if a particular report is intelligent, trustworthy, and helpful to our understanding of what we need to do to better our lives, it is something to be valued and even on occasion treasured; if, in contrast, it is nothing more than what amounts to a reporter's trick for grabbing attention or an attempt to pass off what amounts to drivel as something that somehow should command our time, we have good reason to shun and even resent it. We do need to care about things beyond ourselves but who wants to endure the institutional barrage of worthless or semi-worthless reports that can impose upon us throughout a given day if we allow it in this age of instant and ubiquitous communication? I wouldn't go so far as to say "please turn it all off" because then you do lose the ability to get a minimum exposure each day as needed to stay meaningfully informed as a person and as a citizen but I would say "give me one giant filter" to be able to control and limit the flow. Who can realistically profit from a daily surfeit of junk-bond-quality reporting and especially about things such as a sensational car wreck (or whatever) having little or no affect on our lives? Since that is what "news" mostly is these days, it is best to apply that one great filter available to us all - that is, personal self-control. That is what I love most about your comment: it reminds us clearly that it is within our power to use such self-control and to thereby focus on quality while filtering what is junk.
The article itself is somewhat dubious, as you note. Important note for those who would commend their views to others: scatter-gun assertions made in support of a point can leave one doubting how great is the author's grip on the topic at hand; if you have something to say, think it through and develop your points well before assuming that others will want to hear what you have to say. Not really well written at all.
A "giant filter" over google news still does not cut at the root. I think the problem is the perverse use of this medium (i.e. computer-web system). It is a medium that is not sufficiently understood by most, or perhaps any person yet. From reading (Englebart, et al) it seems this medium would be best used as a tool for collaboration.
Unfortunately most people (including myself) don't deeply reflect on a new medium/technology, to figure how best to yield it to amplify human intelligence (or make human progress).
I argue "cutting cord" for news via TV and the web may be the best thing to do now until more is understood of its affects on humans. People don't realize that it is the medium that is the problem and there is no amount of "filter" that will help them and they suffer unnecessarily.
So? It's a summary article with the high level points easy digestible by current news addicts. It's A lot easier to get someone to read this article than Fooled by Randomness.
Thank you, I was just about to mention this book. None of this is new and I can only imagine what he would think of the today's media. He died in 2003 and even though the internet was going strong back then it has greatly surpassed that since then.
It's definitely easy to see his book as heavily influenced by Taleb, but I supposed everything would be correctly referenced to Taleb — I never actually went to check references. Despite that, the book is a great summary of thinking biases and is clearly explained.
Taleb concedes that Dobelli's work references Taleb 23 + 12 times. The examples I didn't recognize as being specifically Taleb's (and I have read all his books). These popular science examples get regurgitated over and over on websites, blogs and so on. Perhaps Taleb was the first to think of these examples, perhaps he was not.
For example the comparison between wall street investors and monkeys and the subsequent selection bias was featured in A Random Walk Down Wall Street - 1973.
So I'm not convinced there was malice involved here.
The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:
(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.
If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.
If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.
I stopped reading at Taleb's first example. I've seen very similar stories from both Richard Feynman and John Littlewood. Here's Taleb:
"I was thinking about calling my third cousin Antiochus this morning when the phone rang. Miracle! It was him on the other line; this confirms my developed sixth sense! This is a great omen except that perhaps I should wake up and take into account the number of times when I thought about calling him without his calling me; the times when he called me without my thinking about calling him; and, most significantly, the numerous occurrences of my not thinking about him, and him not trying to call me."
Feynman has several variations on this theme. Here's one:
"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays-- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck--after all, my grandmother was very old--although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon."
And another:
"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing! "
There's an extended quote in the Feynman biography "Genius" (by James Gleick) which is a closer match than both these. I don't have an easy cut-and-paste, alas, but here's a link on Google books (it's the third page link):
Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote.
Edit: I couldn't resist reading on. Taleb's article is embarassingly bad. Half his "original examples" I'd heard before from statisticians and other scientists, often years before Taleb's books. I will say this: there are a few instances in there where Dobelli should be genuinely embarassed. But Taleb should be at least equally embarassed by presenting, Wolfram-like, well-known truths as his deep original thought.
Don't you think there's a difference between isolated anecdotes and two dozen paragraphs with very similar content? Not to mention the fact that Dobelli reviewed Taleb's book, and that other authors have noticed similarities.
Also this paragraph:
Note that correspondence of content doesn't imply plagiarism. There is a book EXTREMELY similar to Fooled by Randomness called The Drunkard's Walk. Yet not a shade of plagiarism. Why? the examples and terminology were very different. Some ideas can be rediscovered by two people. And when asked, the author said: Had I known about FBR I wouldn't have written that book. An honorable man.
EDIT in reply to above edit: Note that Taleb isn't saying he's the originator of all the examples. Many are attributed in his footnotes, and he's not claming authorship of them. Many of the examples, as you say, are already in the common consciousness. Taleb is using these examples to drive other points. The only thing he is saying - in this article - is showing how Dobelli is obviously plagiarizing what he has written.
I don't think Taleb is presenting many of these as his original ideas, he's merely (in the original context - his book) using them as examples to drive his other ideas.
If you ask Taleb himself, he would say that he's only had one idea - the rest are just derivations (his or someone else's), and using already observed phenomena and anecdotes to explain it and its consequences.
The only purpose of that article is to expose Dobelli, nothing else.
As to the specific quote Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote. - isn't it possible that he has had a very similar experience?
Information overload is depressing. No, I mean it can cause depression. Mild perhaps as opposed to clinical, but you're more stressed when overloaded. My first thoughts on reading the title, however, went here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU
"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."
Funny, I think news tends to make one dumber. For instance, you get exaggerated ideas about the dangers of muggings, lightning strikes, serial killers, etc, and get distracted from things that are actually likely to harm you.
I made the decision to quit news broadcasts (TV and radio) some time ago and I don't consider myself any less informed.
Scientific research publications, local papers, special-interest blogs and good old fashioned conversation are more than enough to get the useful information.
It's extraordinarily rare that the TV/radio news ever contains any information that's directly useful to my life and I have better things to do than pan for gold whilst being subjected to varying degrees of propaganda.
I do not believe that news itself is bad for you. Reading about horrors and then doing nothing to follow-up is bad for you. But these days I do not have to do that. I am not helpless. I can see the Philippines being destroyed and donate money, donate time, talk to people I know who are from there or who are there now. This is true of any event. We are ruined by inaction, not by information.
I can consume any and all news and have it be beneficial to me. Not because I now know facts, but because I can understand each of the stories as a glimpse into the lives and processes of other people in all disciplines and all walks of life. In doing so I can create equality where, in my own mind at the least, it may not have already existed.
The biggest problem with news is that it's about newness and rarity. Whereas what we actually need to know is mostly not new. Eg, "man eaten by alligator" is a billion times less important than "decades of data say you will likely get heart disease."
Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.
My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:
Not News
- A car accident across town
- A single crime in another state
- Celebrities
- Scandals
- Daily stock market fluctuations
News
- A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me
- Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city
- Economic trends and their underlying causes
Your post reminds me of "The Truth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_(novel)) by Terry Pratchett, in which the characters invent newspapers and deal with these issues. Hilarity ensues.
> Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.
Totally agree. OTOH many e-newspapers have unlimited capacity of producing news like "man eaten by alligator", "bus crash in Bolivia" etc., every hour, updating their homepage and moving all the articles down the list (including the important ones). Here the newness is taken to its extremes. Some solution is the "most read" list, however it also often consists of the sensationalist stories.
A good e-newspaper which updates just once a day would be a great thing.
I recommend reading weekly magazines for exactly this reason. The longer time to publish also affords better perspective than the 24 second, Twitter-fueled, cable/internet news cycle.
News papers are either horrible - I cannot describe just how vile much of the UK news press industry is. The decent newspapers have tiny distribution figures. The Guardian, for example, has a circulation of under 300,000 people. Obviously, more people read it, but still, that's a tiny figure.
UK news allows the agenda[1] to be set by spin doctors. We frequently has stories about how a politician "will announce" something - the speech has been released by publicists before it has been given, allowing the speaker to set the tone of the coverage.
I don't know why that's allowed or why they do it. It's incredibly frustrating.
And there's very narrow window of what is or isn't news. A blond white girl goes missing? We'll have wall to wall coverage of it for weeks. A non white person, or a boy, goes missing? Not so much. Compare, for example, the Soham coverage (two white girls killed by a caretaker at their school) with Adam Morrell, a boy who was brutally tortured and killed.
For years I read about agents that would go out and find news items that would be interesting to me. It still hasn't happened. I would pay money for something that works for me:
1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm interested in news items about mental health, even if it's poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a stigmatising way.
2) Suggest items that I might be interested in based on my reading history, and what I am or am not interested in.
3) Provide suggested items to break me out of my bubble. This can be things about what I'm interested in with an opposing viewpoint to my regular sources; or it can be things that I haven't previously shown interest in.
[1] I don't know if "news agenda" is a peculiarly UK term.
Not to dump on UK, but I also find the UK newspapers to be very mean spirited. US tabloids gawk at celebrities, but UK tabloids are out to get them. I would not want to be famous in the UK.
I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press).
The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.
TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).
I agree, wholeheartedly. I would also like to add this about what is going on in the UK:
There is no local news. Remember in the olden days when there were local papers that people did actually pay for? I delivered them as a child and I did find them rather dull at the time. However, looking back, you could have small ads and sports news that would reach a target audience of locals. There were also syndicated articles, e.g. new car reviews, that were okay to read. If something actually happened in town, e.g. a book signing, a gig or even a jumble sale then it would be in there. Things the council wanted to tell you were in there. Then there were letters, probably one of the more interesting pages.
The problem nowadays in the UK is not just national/global news it is also with the local news. We have the Internet and those local papers have moved online, however, it is not working.
As for the relationship the press have with the politicians, the press need access or else they cannot write anything. So they have to do as they are told to get that access.
Most of what passes for news in UK papers is stuff cribbed from the news wires. This means that it is a very easy system to game - get your story on the news wire and it will make it to print. Meanwhile, you try and get some investigative journalism of your own creation into the papers - impossible!
> 1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm
> interested in news items about mental health, even if it's
> poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a
> stigmatising way.
I have set this up for myself for other topics with a wide range of rss feeds plus some filtering through yahoo pipes. It's pretty simple to do. IIRC there are also some commercial services that offer rss feed filtering.
Excellent point. I've been debating with my gf a lot lately about the diff. b/t "information" and "observations." I find many articles are simply observations... like molecules in bloodstream, they float around, but only rarely combine into anything worthwhile, as compared to controlled chemical reactions in which ideas and structures combine meaningfully.
Nobody sees that this is just an advertisement for the essay?
Why would a news outlet suggest that news is bad for you. Thanks to hacker news, the article will get thousands of extra reads and the guardian is raking in the cash!!!
I generally avoid personalization of the internet but there should be a service that informs the individual.
It should be a kind of alarm system with editable preferences like topics of interest also location based warnings with ranking of information importance consisted of social component plus importance rating given from information provider.
However, these days news are bad all over the world so not reading them will truly make you happy. :)
Yup. But like cigarette advertisers and spammers who intentionally misspell so only uncritical people pay attention, most mainstream news sources have so effectively created the atmosphere of _learned_helplessness_, they can tell people in bold letters straight to their faces, "this is bad for you" and people still pay for it.
If knowing the reality of what happens in the world leads to fear and aggression then perhaps we should be angry and afraid? We can't just shut reality out if we don't like the emotional state it puts us in.
If there's something one may usefully do, and which one would not have otherwise recognized, about whatever it is that's producing those emotions, then sure, you've got a point. But I don't think what's under discussion here would be such a universally recognized experience, were that the case. And if you're already doing whatever you can, or if there's nothing you can do, then why keep abusing yourself with constant exposure?
The reality of what happens is all around me - I observe it directly. What is on mass media is information that other people want to promote to further their own agenda. Whether it is for ratings, to get us to buy their product or to further political aims it does not matter (we all have our own motivations) but it is clearly NOT reality. The fact that you confuse the two is sad and frightening.
There are parts of reality that you can't possibly witness directly because you are located at a single geographic point. For example, someone suffering on the other side of the world because they've been gassed by a dictator or a terrorist group, or wrongly imprisoned, or they are dying of some easily curable disease. You would usually only ever hear of such a thing through the news media, and yet it is real
Things are not all one way or the other. The media is very imperfect, but it is not worthless.
The mainstream media is a tool for controlling us. As a random example, a tragic school shooting happens, and the media will be chock-full of people demanding more gun control, with maybe a couple of voices of moderation in between.
It only takes a moment's thought to realize that guns don't actually kill people - people do, so why are they whipping people into a gun control frenzy? I believe there was something about a militia in the Constitution..
The issue is the news is usually out of context. Last week a video of a BASE jumper smashing into a cliff got a lot of airplay. The same week 100 jumpers were jumping 4 times a day without incident in the same area. There were some obvious takeaways from the incident and causes. The news always reports as har, har isn't that nuts?
They do the same with war reporting and airplane crashes. See the knockout game reports for further reports of garbage.
238 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI find I stay just as informed reading commentary, where I'm purposefully being manipulated, as I do reading news. In fact the news is better, as various authors advance various personal theories they've been working on for weeks or months, using the current events as fodder. Reading a couple of these from different viewpoints provides wonderful context -- and context is the one thing critically missing from most "breaking news" reporting. The only difference is about a 12-hour delay. Trust me, the world does not depend on whether I know something that quickly. Twitter peeps will annoy me if something truly incredible happens.
I'm also finding that branding, whether by news outlet, author, or social signaling, is a terrible indicator of quality. As I continue to flush out the app, my belief is that a better indicator is statistical clustering around personality types, but that's still a year or two away.
But one thing is for sure: I've been much happier since I gave up all forms of news consumption. News is based on emotional manipulation. It's always a crisis, there's always an argument, and there's always some terrible danger you've been unaware of. That stuff will rot your mind. It's always been bad; it's just gotten worse over the last few decades as the news cycle has shortened.
Here's a secret ninja media consumption tip: http://watchingamerica.com It takes commentary from around the world and translates it into English. Quite informative. I wish we had far more services like it.
This makes the reporting itself really bad, since the only context the reporter needs to fit the event into is some off-the-shelf political bullshit, and it makes the outlets try to drive up viewership by having presenters who more and more have these recurring populist rages. Every night on TV there's somebody getting mad about something. So the reporters dig up enough to fuel the machine -- usually fed by the political parties, PACs, or other interested groups -- and the pundits and reactionaries do the dance. The viewer is left constantly seesawing from topic to topic. Are HMOs out to kill people? Will a child molester living five miles take my kid? There's no context to any of this because nobody gets paid to provide context. They get paid to make viewers frightened and angry, which drives up ratings.
That's unsustainable, in my opinion.
In printed media, without the branding or signaling, authors are required to provide a thesis and support it with an argument. The reader can choose to engage or not. There's no "if it bleeds, it leads" nonsense. I can read great commentary that I disagree with -- and not feel angry or somehow moved to outrage. Or I can read commentary I agree with that's a piece of junk. I'm no longer taking sides. Instead, I can separate my consumption of events from my characterization of the reporting itself. That's the critical piece that's missing for most news consumers.
Just guesswork on my part, though.
Think back to when news was mostly distributed via TV or newspapers. Where could you get alternative views? Neighbors, churches? These folks won't likely come from as diverse backgrounds as folks you might find in an online forum. They will have grown up most likely in the same town you are in, raised in a similar fashion. These days, I might read twenty different viewpoints of NSA wiretapping, from twenty different countries perspectives. It definitely provides the reader with a much richer experience, making the original article less valuable (except as a catalyst for the discussion obviously).
I grew up without a television - deliberate choice. My friends couldn't believe how much cool stuff I could get done because of this.
Note: I gave up my television in 2000, and I am a bit smug about it.
I get all of my (non-HN) news from The Economist's audio edition. It's released weekly and they have a section right at the start about big things happening in business/politics around the world in the last week. It's no more than a couple minutes to scan, and 10-20 in normal speed audio.
The rest of the articles are at least one step back (since they summarize a week of what's happened). Many others are looking at some larger event or trend, sometimes with a recent event/anecdote as a lead in.
I like the audio edition in particular since I can put it on while I'm doing chores or commuting and I'll pick up bits and pieces even if I'm not fully paying attention. I can also have only the sections I care about included, which lets me skip the ones I really don't care about.
Soundcloud link: http://l.economist.com/204894&t=v1g49i1qmlsq6a25ld8r6j8u40
If you just want to read The World This Week it's available online for free: http://www.economist.com/printedition/
Here's a direct link: https://soundcloud.com/theeconomist
Scroll down to "recent" and you'll see that many, but not all, of them have a download button.
Love the fact that they put it on soundcloud since I already use it
Nowadays I read the guardian website and watch RT sometimes. But I think I'll go back to the economist soon.
They have a separate digital subscription, if you just want the website and audio edition. It is included in a print subscription as well. You can buy a single week, if you want to try it out.
Highly recommended if you want to ignore the advice of the OP.
>The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking.
Most of the news stories aren't really what I would call news anyway. The type of news that is apparently bad for me, is the same type of news that embodies everything that is wrong with most news media. The topics of you evening news broadcast is about as relevant as the sports scores.
I know I do, sometimes.
> 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
Newspapers don't necessarily agree with the views they publish – though presumably they found this an interesting piece regardless.
I know a lot of people don't like the doom & gloom of news. But it's needed. I recently discussed with someone who doesn't consume news about the NSA revelations. They were shocked. They said "why didn't anyone tell me?"
Instead of blocking things out and being happy with our ignorance, we need to change how news is done. If you whine about something, change it. The Guardian can certainly make an attempt to change the dynamic.
We have yet to come up with a better alternative because we consume & we want it all for free. We cry about journalism yet we don't want to fund any. When good journalism is done, no one or very few people read it.
The key to changing news will be finding a way to monetize online content. Without this, all we will get is link-baiting and stories that are sensational to get people to come to a website.
So I've been following the NSA news closely. But I'm not American! What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me? I can't influence the US government in any way. The most I got out of it was that I should move to non-US based service providers if possible - but this was clear when the first revelations hit. Did I really need to spend (I'm guessing) 10+ hours reading articles about the NSA's revelations?
I could see a case for following local news - where local might mean relevant to your industry or to your community. The more local the news, the more actionable the information. Nightly newscasts rarely focus on this though - they're basically entertainment, real reality television.
Encrypt your data better, perhaps. But that's kind of besides the point - are you suggesting that there is no point knowing about things you have no control over?
Like, say, watching a report about a kidnapped child. Or reading about the trial of a serial killer.
I also want to pick on the fallacy I find in your equation of largely ignoring journalism and being ignorant of the world. Having in early life studied journalism without reference to history, and then later studied history without reference to journalism, I found the former to leave me bewildered in a morass of facts with no useful means of assembling from them a coherent picture of the world, and the latter to furnish me with the cognitive mechanisms necessary to derive a coherent, if of course not perfectly accurate, model, into which to fit the facts I derive from review of what I am forced to conclude is the rather slapdash and careless journalistic profession.
There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.
I used to work in television news. I agree with you that some of it is just entertainment. The problem is that's what people want. Not everyone. But a good portion who never speak out about the news don't mind the entertainment part.
There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.
The NSA story keeps coming back around as new information is revealed. The initial revelation was in May of this year and information is still tricking out. Following the news means taking in at least this much information on the NSA scandal.
> There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.
The only means we have to protect ourselves is encryption (where possible) and keeping things offline. Ok - done (after the initial revelations, as noted). As a non-american I have no influence on the American political process so the other two are out.
> There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.
I agree completely, but news isn't education. Most of the information in daily news has a very short shelf-life (e.g. current events) so it's not even an accurate representation of the world after a few months. Science reporting in news media is notably terrible - big headlines around single studies and results that turn out to not amount to much later. This is in-fact the opposite of education, it's information pollution because you're learning things that turn out not to be true.
When we read something like the NSA reports, we don't just think of what we can do right now to protect ourselves, but about how we change policies for the future. We look into what we need to develop. We look at how to protect ourselves without sacrificing privacy.
News is education. If you consume news about Kim & Kanye I would agree with you and call it information pollution. Good journalism is educating us. There's plenty of good journalism out there. Whether we want to read it and support it is another thing.
Some of what I got as actionable info: 1 - Don't trust services. That's different from "avoid services", and very different from "avoid US services". Some times you can use non-trusted services, other times you can't. 2 - The US is messing with standard crypto. I'm avoiding eliptical crypto while I understand it's history better. I increased some RSA keys, sometimes over the old 2k bits "maximum amount anybody would ever need". I got some ideas for what to do when you don't trust your crypto algos, but I didn't need to use them. 3 - Don't trust closed source software. I already knew that one as an abstract thing (just like #1), but it was reveled that it's a completely real thing. (Also, now I have facts I can throw at somebody.) 4 - Don't trust your LAN or your hardware. Yeah, the first part is good practice - but easy to ignore. The remaining means that one must evaluate all his data worth, and prepare if needed. Ok, not really an action, unless you have data that isn't worthless.
Junk news can cause as much ignorance as no-news. And we have to concede that most of the news we read is junk, especially what you find on Hacker News.
But I agree that a self-imposed news fast is silly. If we didn't get news, we'd be blind to the NSA's betrayal, among other things. So lets keep consuming news. But we need to consume far less news. Far better news. A small amount of high-quality reporting, as opposed to the usual firehose of bullshit.
The claim that giving up reading news will make you happier is a medical claim in the article that is not backed up by reliable medical sources,[1] so I call baloney on that. The newspaper opinion writer here (promoting his new book with excerpts from the book) doesn't report the issue the way a competent reporter would report it, but just makes a bunch of broad general statements with no nuance. In other words, the medical claims about happier human life in the article are just like the made-up opinions we can all easily find on the Internet, and the article stands as an example of how we can find blatantly misleading "information" inside or outside the professional news media. I have no reason to suppose that the full-length book is a medically reliable source (the publisher of the book is identified at the end of the article).
Anecdote alert: I'm a curious person and I like to learn, and so one of the reasons I come here to Hacker NEWS is to find out new facts about the external world that I didn't know before, including facts about current events ("news" in the narrow sense). My personal experience—which, to be sure, may differ from yours—is that I am a happier and more productive person when I know, from good sources, what is going on all over the world and the broader context of expanding human knowledge. But I'm sure you can find an opinion column somewhere based on a popular book with a different opinion from mine.
AFTER EDIT: Good catch! Another participant here on HN noticed that the author of the article kindly submitted here has credibly been accused of plagiarism by more than one published author who works harder than he does. I upvoted that comment for what it added to our understanding of the article's background.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MEDRS
Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?
+1?
Or how do I say: "this was a really bad article"?
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
The medium is partly the problem.
I think you've missed the point of my comment, which is that I actively disregard sources that have that defect, and look for sources that tell me about verified, actionable information. (I have been wondering about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my comment, and if this is what people think I am saying, that I like the sensational, they are badly misreading my comment.)
"Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too."
You and the author seem to mostly agree in that respect.
... what if bitcoin, currently, _is_ only about the speculative aspect, and is not actually more useful with less friction?
Off topic, but... I recently bought a days usage from put.io with bitcoin. They got their money instantly, I don't have to worry about a hacker getting my credit card info or using more bitcoins in my wallet than I gave. I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.
You are wrong here. You did exactly that (a bitcoin transaction is that), just in a way you are not used to.
When a hacker gets your bitcoin wallet, they can empty out your entire account.
I don't really know why credit cards don't have a public/private key situation but they don't, so people are just stealing them constantly or applying for them with a bunch of stolen personal information and then running up your credit in ways that are pretty difficult to detect.
A lot of the fraud that is occurring today is because the systems we are using to transmit wealth digitally are inherently very insecure.
When the government wishes to make your life miserable and you have a bitcoin wallet, they have to do a lot more work if they want those funds.
And I like your example of a use of bitcoin apart from speculation. The sensationalist articles love bitcoin because it is new, but also because a few people have become rich and poor from speculating on it and its future is uncertain, which leaves lots of room in the stories for "raising concerns".
But as tokenadult pointed out, we can avoid those articles and the sources that tend to deliver them.
I actually believe this renewed news spam (brought by ourselves through the internet) probably makes us all dumber as a whole, over time.
News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable.
That's actually what frustrates me most about this article. For people who do plan to continue following news (likely including most readers of the article), the article isn't very actionable.
I would love to see a few smart people work together, look through the author's points, and outline a few ways to mitigate the legitimate problems summarized in each point. The article might be useful for other people who haven't considered these points before, but in its current state of merely spreading awareness, it's not very useful for me.
I don't think you are entitled to expect that. Medical studies don't tend to focus on the happiness of healthy people. Even if they did, I would be surprised if a good study giving us data on happiness on reading news already exist at a scale that would represent the range of population behaviour.
I don't disagree with you wanting good scientific evidence - that's commendable.
I disagree with calling baloney on a sensible hypothesis ('reading news as a typical Westerner does is detrimental to overall happiness for most people') just because that scientific evidence does not yet exist and this opinion piece does not yet provide it.
Bias alert: I'm pretty sure I read to much news, and am solidifying this meme in my mind to try to improve that.
Chocolate, for example, decreases the risk of stroke, is good for your skin, improves vision, stimulates brain activity, etc. How much of and how often you eat it affects whether it's still beneficial compared to its negative effects, which include high cholesterol, diabetes, weight gain, etc.
Someone eating candy isn't necessarily doing something bad, despite the stigma. Equally, they are not doing something necessarily good.
"News" is nothing more than a report of events potentially affecting our lives: if a particular report is intelligent, trustworthy, and helpful to our understanding of what we need to do to better our lives, it is something to be valued and even on occasion treasured; if, in contrast, it is nothing more than what amounts to a reporter's trick for grabbing attention or an attempt to pass off what amounts to drivel as something that somehow should command our time, we have good reason to shun and even resent it. We do need to care about things beyond ourselves but who wants to endure the institutional barrage of worthless or semi-worthless reports that can impose upon us throughout a given day if we allow it in this age of instant and ubiquitous communication? I wouldn't go so far as to say "please turn it all off" because then you do lose the ability to get a minimum exposure each day as needed to stay meaningfully informed as a person and as a citizen but I would say "give me one giant filter" to be able to control and limit the flow. Who can realistically profit from a daily surfeit of junk-bond-quality reporting and especially about things such as a sensational car wreck (or whatever) having little or no affect on our lives? Since that is what "news" mostly is these days, it is best to apply that one great filter available to us all - that is, personal self-control. That is what I love most about your comment: it reminds us clearly that it is within our power to use such self-control and to thereby focus on quality while filtering what is junk.
The article itself is somewhat dubious, as you note. Important note for those who would commend their views to others: scatter-gun assertions made in support of a point can leave one doubting how great is the author's grip on the topic at hand; if you have something to say, think it through and develop your points well before assuming that others will want to hear what you have to say. Not really well written at all.
Unfortunately most people (including myself) don't deeply reflect on a new medium/technology, to figure how best to yield it to amplify human intelligence (or make human progress).
I argue "cutting cord" for news via TV and the web may be the best thing to do now until more is understood of its affects on humans. People don't realize that it is the medium that is the problem and there is no amount of "filter" that will help them and they suffer unnecessarily.
My man Rolf became a journalist, worked his way up to the Guardian, and wrote a story about how busted up news is.
I look forward to the similar press release from Jony Ive telling us to stop using those blasted iPads.
http://fooledbyrandomness.com/dobelli.htm
http://blog.chabris.com/2013/09/similarities-between-rolf-do...
EDIT: For another take on not reading the news, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
It's definitely easy to see his book as heavily influenced by Taleb, but I supposed everything would be correctly referenced to Taleb — I never actually went to check references. Despite that, the book is a great summary of thinking biases and is clearly explained.
For example the comparison between wall street investors and monkeys and the subsequent selection bias was featured in A Random Walk Down Wall Street - 1973.
So I'm not convinced there was malice involved here.
The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:
(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.
If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.
If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.
If the elected actors interfere with the news you read, you also stop being a responsible citizen. We simply never had a chance.
"I was thinking about calling my third cousin Antiochus this morning when the phone rang. Miracle! It was him on the other line; this confirms my developed sixth sense! This is a great omen except that perhaps I should wake up and take into account the number of times when I thought about calling him without his calling me; the times when he called me without my thinking about calling him; and, most significantly, the numerous occurrences of my not thinking about him, and him not trying to call me."
Feynman has several variations on this theme. Here's one:
"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays-- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck--after all, my grandmother was very old--although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon."
And another:
"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing! "
There's an extended quote in the Feynman biography "Genius" (by James Gleick) which is a closer match than both these. I don't have an easy cut-and-paste, alas, but here's a link on Google books (it's the third page link):
http://books.google.ca/books?id=j42RD66g72oC&printsec=frontc...
Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote.
Edit: I couldn't resist reading on. Taleb's article is embarassingly bad. Half his "original examples" I'd heard before from statisticians and other scientists, often years before Taleb's books. I will say this: there are a few instances in there where Dobelli should be genuinely embarassed. But Taleb should be at least equally embarassed by presenting, Wolfram-like, well-known truths as his deep original thought.
Also this paragraph:
Note that correspondence of content doesn't imply plagiarism. There is a book EXTREMELY similar to Fooled by Randomness called The Drunkard's Walk. Yet not a shade of plagiarism. Why? the examples and terminology were very different. Some ideas can be rediscovered by two people. And when asked, the author said: Had I known about FBR I wouldn't have written that book. An honorable man.
EDIT in reply to above edit: Note that Taleb isn't saying he's the originator of all the examples. Many are attributed in his footnotes, and he's not claming authorship of them. Many of the examples, as you say, are already in the common consciousness. Taleb is using these examples to drive other points. The only thing he is saying - in this article - is showing how Dobelli is obviously plagiarizing what he has written.
But Taleb's page is also embarassing to Taleb. He's presenting many of these as his original ideas when, well, they're simply not.
If you ask Taleb himself, he would say that he's only had one idea - the rest are just derivations (his or someone else's), and using already observed phenomena and anecdotes to explain it and its consequences.
The only purpose of that article is to expose Dobelli, nothing else.
As to the specific quote Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote. - isn't it possible that he has had a very similar experience?
"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."
Scientific research publications, local papers, special-interest blogs and good old fashioned conversation are more than enough to get the useful information.
It's extraordinarily rare that the TV/radio news ever contains any information that's directly useful to my life and I have better things to do than pan for gold whilst being subjected to varying degrees of propaganda.
I can consume any and all news and have it be beneficial to me. Not because I now know facts, but because I can understand each of the stories as a glimpse into the lives and processes of other people in all disciplines and all walks of life. In doing so I can create equality where, in my own mind at the least, it may not have already existed.
Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.
My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:
Not News - A car accident across town - A single crime in another state - Celebrities - Scandals - Daily stock market fluctuations
News - A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me - Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city - Economic trends and their underlying causes
As an example, it covers the riots breaking out in Ukraine but completely skipped that Paul Walker died..
Totally agree. OTOH many e-newspapers have unlimited capacity of producing news like "man eaten by alligator", "bus crash in Bolivia" etc., every hour, updating their homepage and moving all the articles down the list (including the important ones). Here the newness is taken to its extremes. Some solution is the "most read" list, however it also often consists of the sensationalist stories.
A good e-newspaper which updates just once a day would be a great thing.
News papers are either horrible - I cannot describe just how vile much of the UK news press industry is. The decent newspapers have tiny distribution figures. The Guardian, for example, has a circulation of under 300,000 people. Obviously, more people read it, but still, that's a tiny figure.
UK news allows the agenda[1] to be set by spin doctors. We frequently has stories about how a politician "will announce" something - the speech has been released by publicists before it has been given, allowing the speaker to set the tone of the coverage.
I don't know why that's allowed or why they do it. It's incredibly frustrating.
And there's very narrow window of what is or isn't news. A blond white girl goes missing? We'll have wall to wall coverage of it for weeks. A non white person, or a boy, goes missing? Not so much. Compare, for example, the Soham coverage (two white girls killed by a caretaker at their school) with Adam Morrell, a boy who was brutally tortured and killed.
For years I read about agents that would go out and find news items that would be interesting to me. It still hasn't happened. I would pay money for something that works for me:
1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm interested in news items about mental health, even if it's poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a stigmatising way.
2) Suggest items that I might be interested in based on my reading history, and what I am or am not interested in.
3) Provide suggested items to break me out of my bubble. This can be things about what I'm interested in with an opposing viewpoint to my regular sources; or it can be things that I haven't previously shown interest in.
[1] I don't know if "news agenda" is a peculiarly UK term.
The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.
TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4#t=38
There is no local news. Remember in the olden days when there were local papers that people did actually pay for? I delivered them as a child and I did find them rather dull at the time. However, looking back, you could have small ads and sports news that would reach a target audience of locals. There were also syndicated articles, e.g. new car reviews, that were okay to read. If something actually happened in town, e.g. a book signing, a gig or even a jumble sale then it would be in there. Things the council wanted to tell you were in there. Then there were letters, probably one of the more interesting pages.
The problem nowadays in the UK is not just national/global news it is also with the local news. We have the Internet and those local papers have moved online, however, it is not working.
As for the relationship the press have with the politicians, the press need access or else they cannot write anything. So they have to do as they are told to get that access.
Most of what passes for news in UK papers is stuff cribbed from the news wires. This means that it is a very easy system to game - get your story on the news wire and it will make it to print. Meanwhile, you try and get some investigative journalism of your own creation into the papers - impossible!
Why would a news outlet suggest that news is bad for you. Thanks to hacker news, the article will get thousands of extra reads and the guardian is raking in the cash!!!
It should be a kind of alarm system with editable preferences like topics of interest also location based warnings with ranking of information importance consisted of social component plus importance rating given from information provider.
However, these days news are bad all over the world so not reading them will truly make you happy. :)
I do read a lot of tech news however and more recently have taken up reading the headlines on the local newspaper websites.
For me it's an effort to help me be more positive about life as I have struggled with negativity and sometimes intrusive thoughts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Things are not all one way or the other. The media is very imperfect, but it is not worthless.
No need to attack me.
It only takes a moment's thought to realize that guns don't actually kill people - people do, so why are they whipping people into a gun control frenzy? I believe there was something about a militia in the Constitution..
They do the same with war reporting and airplane crashes. See the knockout game reports for further reports of garbage.