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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With 7 billion people in the world, it's very likely that these things will happen today:
- someone will get killed in a horrible car accident
- a child will be killed in a freak accident
- someone will die from cancer, leaving much grieving behind
- someone will molest a child
- someone will lose all their money in a scam
- someone will get raped
- someone will be killed by a never-to-be-found hit-and-run drunk driver
- someone will beat a woman
- someone will be murdered
- someone will die in a disaster/fire/earthquake/storm
- an innocent bystander will be randomly shot to death
- someone's favorite team will lose
In addition, it seems like something like this (unbelievably) happens all the time:
- someone will murder many people
- someone will shake a baby until it's brain dead
- a soldier will lose vision or use of their limbs in action
- someone will post a horrible crime on youtube
- someone will tie a pet to railroad tracks
- a whole family will die in an accident
I really do feel bad about all of these things, but frankly, I just don't want to be reminded 40 times every day. <closing browser and going back to work>
Within my own social network of people I personally know or have met.
- someone got killed in a horrible car accident (friend)
- two people died from cancer, leaving much grieving behind (aunt, mother of sister's friend)
- someone lost all their money in a scam (friend)
- someone got killed by a never-to-be-found hit-and-run drunk driver (friend)
- someone will beat a woman (neighbor)
- someone got be murdered (someone i've met at a bar)
- my favorite teams lost (three of them, NFL, NBA, NCAA)
All in the last 6 months, and I don't know that many people.
I live in Ireland so while we have all of the above we also have a whole heap of 'economy' bad news. In fact this story has been running for about 5 years now. I don't listen to the news during the morning commute anymore as it kind sets you up in a bad mood for the day. I listen on the way home when I'm in a good mood because I'm going to see the kids etc so I still know what happened, but i'm not being dragged down by it.
I know how you feel. There is no point for the constant reminders. It won't help you protect yourself or others. There is nothing that can be done sadly (on an individual level) unless you are perhaps witnessing an event - but for reading of it as news, no.
- Someone will think of some shitty startup that has no added value to anyone.
- Someone will claim that technology xyz is the perfect solution to all of the web's problems
- Someone will give some wise ass advise stated in the form of 10 things I ... from ...
- Someone will discuss why he would or would not work at some big company.
- Someone will pretend to care about some minority, meanwhile insulting them and everybody else.
Most of the things on HN are reasonably relevant to my life. The upvote/downvote system actually is better than editors picking and choosing.
But we have our emotional triggers. I think they are more about our collective fears of missing out on things, or anything that flatters or threatens our identity as smart people.
* New language/practice enabled me to do Y faster/easier
* New technology X will change the Y industry
* Trend X will make you obsolete
* Stupid startup X was bought/funded for $Y dollars
* You might not be as smart as you think you are!! ZOMG OH NO. (and here's the corrective action to take)
Think about it this way - what if someone is being raped every day in the parking ramp at your office, or murdered on the street you ride your bike to work each morning? If you heard about it on the news, you could change your route to work or ride with a buddy to increase your safety.
Nobody is going to be raped in the parking ramp at your office EVERY DAY. It may happen once but statistically it'll never happen again in that location.
Someone may be murdered on the street you ride your bike to work each morning. And, unless you live in Compton its unlikely to ever happen again. And if you do live in Compton why the hell are you riding your bike to work through a war zone you moron?! :)
But lets just say these things do in fact happen. Likely, you're not going to hear about them from the news. You're going to hear about them from a friend, family member, and/or co-worker long before seeing it on the news.
The point of this article isn't that the news is bad because its news. Its that news is bad because all the media outlets focus on the wrong things (rapes, murders, etc...). Things you actually don't need the news for in order to stay informed.
Where the news can be great is keeping a populace informed of their government. Nixon was taken down by news done well. Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.
>> Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.
Equality doesn't just mean that everybody has the same wealth, regardless of how hard they work. This is superficial. It means everyone has to think the same way. That's the only way we'll ever get true equality, and we won't get that until everyone's getting the same information. Conformity, equality, obedience: these must be our core values. Fox News must be stopped.
I could also get hit by a piece of space junk falling on my head.
What is more likely, as the article points out, is that I'll read a lot of reports that distorts the actual risks of various types of events, and change my behaviour in ways that negatively affect me.
Over the years I've had hobbies that emphasize the problem in a pretty clear way. The hobbies were video games, skydiving and general aviation, and general tech all of which get some national airplay when there is an incident. You can be sure reporting on any of these is at worst down right incorrect and at best out of context with a few facts thrown in.
When reporting disaster rate of incidents per 100,000 and a break down of the root causes as a percentage isn't as sexy as showing wreckage or other dramatic video.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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.
'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.
Your talk experience works as well with football, basketball, cinema, HN, weather... Sharing a common interest with someone make talk a lot more interresting.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There's one thing apparently missing in the article (and discussion here) that for me is the most important reason not to read news - namely, they lie. All the time. And when they don't, they systematically confuse stuff, ending up in writing wrong articles anyway.
Proof? Just pretty much every article about science, technology or business submitted here on HN gets debunked in the top comment. If they can't get simple facts right in the matters of basic science or business, I seriously doubt (by induction) that anything else they write is anywhere near the truth.
Oh yes.
Even with documentaries which should usually be better researched there is so many inaccuracies on the subjects I do know something about that I'm careful to remind myself that the stories on subjects I don't know about are probably equally inaccurate.
As the footer to the article says, this is a shortened version of a much longer essay he wrote in 2010 (src PDF: http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... ) that shares a similar layout to the article. There's some subtle irony here -- the original essay asserted that heavy news consumption prevented most people from reading more than 4 pages straight, while the essay was 11 pages. I guess he realized he needed to shorten it to get the message out.
> In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."
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.
"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 would agree to the degree that "News" refers to shallow news reporting. News on TV? Undoubtedly detrimental. Long form journalism? Lots of merit. Sensational coverage of a kidnapping? Waste of your time. Coverage of the political process? Could lead you to a revelation about certain political entities.
Basically, I would not recommend completely dismissing all forms of news. News consumption can lead you to change your mind about something. If you never expose your self to new data, you will find yourself holding onto stale beliefs and opinions. There's something to be said for remaining an informed citizen.
Exactly. This article doesn't make much sense unless you read it carefully enough to understand that "news" has a very specific and limited definition in this context.
Indeed, when it described the damage done by news, it notes an inability to grasp the kinds of deep, large, and truly world-changing stories that are happening all around us, and which the shallow, fragmented, and sensationalistic sugar hits of "news" can never convey.
Generally, following these larger, deeper stories (to say nothing of participating in them) requires both a measure of focused interest, and pre-existing knowledge. A lot of the news on HN fits into this category. This is very different from the parade of horribles that is found on FOX News, CNN, in USAToday, etc.
I completely agree. I have cut nearly all ordinary news from my life. I read domain-specific news, industry news, news from various little corners of interest, and occasionally glance at the headlines just so I have some clue of what's going on in the world. But ordinary "if it bleeds it leads" news is generally one of: (1) sensationalism, (2) government propaganda, (3) corporate propaganda, (4) veiled advertising, or (5) filler.
News programming should be pronounced noise. It's mostly gossip and tragedy and crap. We stopped watching it years ago.
My parents watch the news and talk about "staying informed" and "keeping up" with things. What exactly is newsworthy? You need to know about that apartment complex that caught fire or the shootout between drug dealers?
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:
> 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 is in literature as in life: wherever you turn, you stumble at once upon the incorrigible mob of humanity, swarming in all directions, crowding and soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the number, which no man can count, of bad books, those rank weeds of literature, which draw nourishment from the corn and choke it. The time, money and attention of the public, which rightfully belong to good books and their noble aims, they take for themselves: they are written for the mere purpose of making money or procuring places. So they are not only useless; they do positive mischief. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature has no other aim than to get a few shillings out of the pockets of the public; and to this end author, publisher and reviewer are in league."
With some small changes in language, it could easily apply to today's news. There are many great quotes, but in essence he says reading is essential, but you must be discriminating about what you read, because most of it is garbage. And you must be careful not to read so much that you aren't able to process it or drown out your own independent thoughts and activities.
I had already reached these conclusions on my own long ago, but he puts it into words very well, and it is interesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Even following nominally "quality" news sources -- NPR, PBS, The New York Times, the Economist -- I've been finding the points of this article increasingly true.
Mainstream commercial news -- CNN, HuffPo, my local city paper / news site, and much of what passes for news on the Web, are virtually intolerable. Banal, lowest common denominator (erm: "greatest", but nobody would understand) content, celebrity gossip, baiting headlines, "ten reasons" pageview content. Gratuitously paginated articles. Excessively overdesigned pages with floaters, social nags, and pop-up interstitial surveys and yet more "social" pleadings. Fake-viral advertising whether "flash mobs" orchestrated by banks or Hollywood movie hype engines. Intentionally infuriating political tactics. Get off of me!
Somewhere during the past Presidential campaign I think I started to snap. Whether it was talking heads blathering about things they understood poorly, incessant focus on horse-race (and ignoring the deeper historical and policy stories), everything just started grating on me.
The lack of depth and context to much news coverage has also been apparent to me for quite some time. Particularly in the case of large developing stories, or those with a long backstory, I've found that Wikipedia is often a much better source of information. I'd first realized this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake & tsunami -- far too vast a story for any one news article to wrap its head around. TV and radio could merely repeat the basics or show the same footage repeatedly. Wikipedia could organize and contextualize the facts as they came in.
There are also the odd stories which do affect me, my life, my neighborhood, or my professional interests. They're rare, but they do happen. A benefit of today's world over, say, 20 years ago, is that when such events do occur, it's much more possible to dig in and get more than the very light spread of truth and misreporting that's inevitable in the lay press.
Not that I've stopped paying attention to the news. But I'm very conscious of when it is annoying, and there are days I'll turn it off. The day of the Newtown shootings I heard the news late in the day, and just turned it off. I knew largely how it would unfold, that it didn't affect me directly, that there was nothing I'd be able to do that day, but that listening would just sicken me.
Increasingly, rather than turn on news, I'll put on music. Often classical or jazz. And listen to that instead.
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.
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. :)
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.)
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 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:
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).
During 1999-2005 I was a news junkie. I was constantly scanning popular news sites.
In 2005 I attended the first Startup School, which is incidental but sticks in my brain of course. I took my lunch break that day and went to the Harvard Book Store. I browsed around and saw a book on positive psychology that looked interesting.
I devoured that book. One of the biggest changes I took from that book was to avoid most of the news. It was for all the reasons mentioned in this article.
I've been pretty good at sticking to this. Not perfect of course. There obviously needs to be a balance. But removing the tie to the news has made me a lot more creative and optimistic about the opportunities in my life.
We should all spend more time creating than reading about other people creating and destroying.
How exactly do you define "news" here? Right now, I'm on a news site, because it says that in the top left corner of my screen. I've seen this type of story mentioned before, and in the past the response was "the purpose of news is to give people conversational topics to talk about." On Hacker News, I'm possibly saving myself some time.
I don't have to sift through all of the content out there, the filter exists for me and that of itself is performing a lot of work. Hacker News is essentially a crowdsourced sorting mechanism done by its users. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I still decide what I'll read and what I'll pass over.
I am reading essays and articles that do a lot of the thinking for me. Sure, I may think less critically by letting someone else do that for me, but I ultimately decide whether I agree or disagree with the point being made. I'll choose the things that I really care about and I'll think harder about those, and maybe I'll contribute my own findings, which other people will find helpful.
I'm not sold that giving up news entirely is good. And how do you define the word? Google News is an aggregate collection of news articles. Am I still reading "the news" if I'm on Google News or Hacker News, or do I need to be on a direct source such as AP or CNN? Does it even matter, since the aggregators and other bloggers will refer back to them?
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.
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
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.
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'.
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.
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 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 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.)
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?
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.
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.
After reading a newspaper I didn't remember anything of what I had read. I was as well off after reading the paper as before reading it. The same with internet news sites, there's just... news, everywhere. It doesn't seem to stick, and it doesn't change my life.
If something truly important happens, the information will eventually trickle down to myself via friends and friends of friends. I can then look it up on the internet, and read more.
Depends on what you consider news and how you consume it. I tend to view conventional "news" as limited information/propaganda tool.
In the mornings/afternoons I listen to the local news broadcast for weather and traffic. These affect my daily activities, I live in a commuter region of Tornado Alley and own a house that involves outdoor maintenance.
I skim my local newspaper and local feeds, sometimes there are items that directly impact my community/household that I need to consider/deal with. (Local elections, West Nile, etc...) My spouse keeps up with the more entertaining items, so I've outsourced the fluff consumption. I use a RSS reader to stay current in my work and hobbies. It allows my to filter out the cruft in a timely manner.
If I need to be knowledgable on a political, economic or other topic, I have a wide range of resources available on the web and through the local libraries. I don't often dig deeply into the serious macro-issues, the truth is very disturbing, most people can't handle it or deny it, there's little change I can make, so I limit my "briefings" to a couple of times a year.
Knowing the "true" national/global situation and being powerless, is damn depressing. Maybe I should be a sociopath, but unfortunately I'm not wired that way.
I read the original "Avoid News part 1" (http://dobelli.com/?page_id=827) some time ago and also quit reading news. What occurred to me is that a lot of decisions people make are based or have to do with fear fed by news.
For example: fear for bad weather. Rain is just rain but reading the forecast in the papers sometimes make you wonder if you will survive the next day.
That article is either an ironic metacommentary with itself as exhibit A of what is wrong with news stories, or the edits were ironically introduced by the editor doing what he typically does. For starters, the title is hyperbolic click bait, and the hyperbole continues. "The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely." Clearly the only choices are inundation and complete isolation. I suppose moderation is one of those "non-stories" too boring to report, because it doesn't stimulate the limbic system and get clicks. One clue of intentional irony: "In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases." In the article, that sentence contains a hyperlink.
That said, I agree with 98% of the article. Like everything else, moderation, critical thinking, and self-reflection are essential.
Food for thought: perhaps the author's reaction is similar to an alcoholic who realizes their weakness. Though for many people, alcohol can be a healthy and beneficial part of their life, for some the most effective relationship to alcohol is complete abstinence.
There are some serious offenders who take the low and quick road when it comes to journalism but I have seen a swing of sorts in higher quality journalistic standards. While Fox News is considered the epitome of everything wrong with biased news, there are lot of smaller shows and websites that have a higher standard. Here in Australia while we have the likes of news.com.au (a joke and a half) we have other online news outlets in the form of Crikey! and the philanthropically funded long-form journalism website The Global Mail who put effort into their articles and don't misconstrue the facts to get more Facebook shares and readers.
Not all news is bad news. I see the likes of Facebook and Twitter are forms of news, both have their fair share of gossip and junk, but also have their share of information that we need to know; massacres, accidents, bank robberies and slaughter of innocents in countries that try and control their people and shield their actions from the rest of the world. Choose your news carefully, don't believe everything you read and always look further into things (there is more than meets the eye).
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.)
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 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.
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.
Reading news articles that are informative can be thought provoking and improve my understanding of people and the world around me. Over time, many smaller pieces of information can accrue into an understandable whole, providing context for future experiences and information. If you never end up understanding the information thrown at you, or consume garbage news, then yeah, it won't help. It's possible you need to ingest a lot of background material to really make sense of the news in a useful and non-helplessness-inducing way.
The news to me is incremental history, economics, and political science. I wouldn't watch low-content information like daily TV news, but that's not the only option.
That said, you don't have to do it all the time, because sometimes, in your topic of interest, nothing much happens for a while... The most I do on an actual daily basis is read the top three headlines on the BCC News site, just to check that nothing incredibly crazy happened. Oh, and read too much HN, but that stuff can be interesting... and I mostly read the comments...
I gave up on reading newspapers and watching TV news over a decade ago and I can't point to a single way that it's ever harmed me. My basic theory is as follows:
- I miss out on the fearmongering
- I save a tremendous amount of time
- If anything important IS happening, everyone will be talking about it, so I'll hear about it
- Even if I do miss hearing about an important issue, what does it matter? What can I actually do to prevent e.g. the fiscal cliff, or the failure of Lehman Brothers, or etc?
- When it comes time to vote, I talk with my friends who actually care about news / politics and, if use their information (plus a bit of research if needed) to decide my vote
- I read Hacker news or other sites like it because the news that geeks want to know about is far more likely to be interesting / relevant.
Aside from some occasional mild embarrassment when someone asks me an opinion on something I'm not aware of -- which can usually be deflected simply by saying something innocuous and then turning the conversation back to them -- this has worked excellently for me.
I recommend watching the EPIC 2014 video I allude to in that post; even though it's nine years old and clearly depicts an alternate history at this point, I think its core points have aged well. http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
But the Grauniad piece is, mostly, not really about how to form a better understanding of the world. It counsels ignorance: don't learn about the world because it isn't practical (doesn't help you make better decisions affecting your life), stresses you out, is enjoyable like a drug, confirms your pre-existing prejudices due to confirmation bias instead of changing your mind, makes you feel helpless, limits your creativity, and is deeply intertwingled, which "inhibits thinking". Reading the encyclopedia has these same drawbacks! But I don't believe that ignorance is bliss, that ignorance helps you think clearly, or that ignorance limits your creativity. Instead, I believe that a broad base of knowledge gives me perspective on our current problems, helps me think more clearly, and enables my creativity.
Up to a point. You can become a mindless factoid junkie from any source of factoids. Building real knowledge out of facts requires really understanding a subject; as David MacKay says in the preface to "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itila/, that means you must "creat[e] it for yourself."
I admit I'm pretty distracted by news items myself, at the moment.
(edit: changed "more or less these conclusions" to "some of these conclusions", which is a lot truer.)
But maybe they are right, maybe giving up reading the Guardian and similar news sources makes you happier. I for instance prefer fpif.org, fas.org and a random selection from news.google.com to stay up to date.
"Out of the 10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli."
I used to spend at least 2 hours a day on reading news. (Only a part of that consisted mainstream news.) At least every month I felt I read things that totally mattered towards my personal life. Maybe because I did read more scoped news and really tried to understand the issues. Papers like the Guardian are just there to make Joe Average happy and feed his average interests. It's good to not approximate yourself with Joe Average. Anyone ever wondered why Twitter got so popular as News Reader?
The article takes a primordial approach to what news is. Technology and media have long addressed this problem, and news is really free now - thanks to Blogger, Google News, Twitter and the like.
Its also an irony that most of us discover our news on a site like Hacker News, and are seconding an opinion that news has become bad.
Some ways to rethink news:
1) News should be an ambient thing. It should be around you, and relate to what you are doing, where you are, who you are, and the people you care about.
2) The good things you do today must reflect in what you receive as news tomorrow.
3) News can be seen as appealing to the producer or consumer in you. When you read something just for infotainment, its for the consumer. When you read something, and you go like - this can help me, its helping the producer. We should strive to tilt the balance of news, and make it more productive - for you.
One of the main reasons I come to Hacker News is because a) the upvoted articles tend to be of high quality and in-depth, and b) the comments section tends to have even greater depth of discussion and variation of opinion.
I think both those points make HN fall outside the article's criticism, for the most part.
I think the problem is a little more nuanced than watching news or not watching news. It has to do with what media scholars call agenda setting theory.
That is, media can't always persuade us to believe in a story, but they're very good at persuading us to think about a story. News sources like Fox, MSNBC or CNN might dwell on 3-5 leads in a day. Because they're so ubiquitous and influential, they might make you concentrate on (even debate) an issue that has little relevance to your life.
The solution is not shut out news altogether, but to consciously seek out sources of news that are relevant to your interests and your community.
It's analogous to consuming food: if you pay attention to what you're taking in and where you're getting it from, you'll feel a lot happier and healthy.
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 all comes down to a distinction that is not made in the article at all. One has a choice in engaging the news: one can be a passive consumer of whatever gets thrown at one, or one can be a thoughtful consumer who directs one's own reading/viewing of the news. None of the issues mentioned by the author apply to the latter approach.
In a highly interconnected, multicultural, technological world, it is more important than ever for the ordinary citizen (let alone the entrepreneur, thinker, or "creative type") to be aware of what is going on in the world, and on every scale (global to local). The author's recommendation would lead to a radical disengagement that would be suitable only for those aspiring to be hermits or stylites.
News isn't necessarily bad for you, and it's not a good idea to live in a bubble of cherry-picked information. However, the mainstream news is fraught with all kinds of problems so you need to be prepared to believe that what appears there is at best a partial picture of the events. The phenomena of churnalism also illustrates that it's easy to believe that what looks like impartial information is actually just crudely re-arranged press releases from particular companies who likely have a vested interest in the content and framing of the story.
So don't switch off the news entirely, lest you fall into a state of general ignorance about wider events, but be prepared to interpret it critically.
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.
Seems like the article is true for "bad" news -- e.g. Daily newspapers, cable news, and nightly news (which I have gone without for over ten years). Most of the criticisms of news in the article do not apply to the news sources I consume, although perhaps they shouldn't be called news so as to avoid confusion.
My favorite is the New Yorker, which frequently breaks major stories despite being (or because it is) a weekly with long lead times. Similarly, The Daily Show usually does a better job of providing context than "serious" news broadcasts.
I've never watched Hannity so I really can't make an informed reply. There's no question that the Daily Show has a Liberal point of view, but there's a difference between having a point of view and intellectual dishonesty. Humor is a trap in portraying the truth because the funny thing may not be the true thing, but it's less of a trap than the Cable news cycle.
Generalizing title is generalizing. The title actually proves the point it's trying to make: that news often skew towards less details, dramatized, click-bait-y. Of course news are bad for you as most of the information is not directly important to your immediate life and usually the information is presented in a very toxic way which creates a certain mood and actually, an addiction to the certain "SMH" behaviour.
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 remember reading (can't recall the source right now) that a study conducted over multiple newspapers over a period of time revealed that 95% of news carry a negative tone.
Add this to the fact that most news channels focus on trivia more than important issues and I have a perfect reason to not dive into news.
I still sneak a peek at any interesting story that shows up on my twitter stream though.
National vs. local news is an important distinction here that many of these "The key to happiness is ignoring the news" posts miss.
The breathless CNN story about the latest missing white woman might not be relevant to your life, but your local newspaper's stories about property taxes, parking fees, local entertainment events and people in your community most certainly are.
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).
That really depends on what kind of news we are reading, and when we are reading, sometimes skimming and scanning is a good way to save time if you are just to comprehend the main theme of the news, or decide whether you will continue to read. But, obviously, over-read the news will kill your brains like chronic diseases.
I don't have TV at home and don't read any news online, except maybe once a month while procrastinating. I rarely find anything that really concerns me there and if I do I usually skip right to the comments for the broader range of opinions or search the internet for more information.
I believed so for years and haven't intentionally tried to read or watch news for almost more than 10 years; and I like it that way. Instead, I focus on tech updates especially related to the field I'm involved with. And feel, even sitting idle will do less harm, hypothetically.
News is useful for exactly one reason: to have something to chat about. Don't underestimate that. You may have no interest in NK, Beckham, sports, the stock market or other stuff that frequents the news, but having something to talk about with people around you is important.
“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
Edit: I don't mean this to be rude. I am just trying to point out that discussion of news items usually IME is nothing more than idle gossip. While possibly beneficial in social bonding, it can also have potential negative effects on the mind.
I stopped using Google Reader recently; this has had the side effect of making me read much less news and, thus, being less buzzed to write a scathing or snarky comment/reply.
I browse a few news sites once or twice a day, read the 1 or 2 news that look relevant to me, and that's it.
I haven't been reading or watching the news for years, now, and it's had a huge positive effect on my life.
But it's also made me, I think, somewhat more sensitive and aware of how other similar things affect me. Which is why I've started to cut down on Twitter, and Hacker News.
The article makes some bold affirmations, which I'm not sure are covered by actual research (they may be). That being said, having stopped watching TV in the last years had made me better spend my spare time (e.g. studying or working on personal projects).
Bad news is even worse! Seriously though, Kahneman in his last book described very good experiments that show bad news having a much deeper effect on ones psyche than good ones. This obviously extend to social sites, like facebook etc..
This writer should have qualified "news" as general consumer news. Professional/trade news, tech news, science news, health news, environmental news — all of these have a direct and sometimes meaningful impact on our lives.
What about culling the news to those stories that you exactly need or want, such as heath, medicine, art, a favorite sport, the weather, and/or business. Perhaps that can lead to a more productive and creative life?
"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..
I completely agree with the premise... but does anybody else find it ironic that an article explaining why you shouldn't read the news is published on a news website owned by a major newspaper?
yes. but wait, I developed an [android application](https://github.com/joelewis/emotionreader/bin/emotionBBC.apk) that categorizes news by emotions, so why not just try to ignore the anger, sadness and fear sections of the app and read the rest?
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.
The world is a dangerous place. There is no way around it: it's always been this way. Whether it is a North Korea crisis, something burning in the Middle East, or our national debt, the news can bring you to the reality of danger, of war, of looming financial crisis.
Sure, by not reading it, you can retrieve yourself to a happy place in San Carlos or Palo Alto, but the danger still irks there, and it is not going away...
That's right, jQueryIsAwesome, jQuery is awesome in Palo Alto.
And you can do nothing about North Korea. And you don't care about North Korea, because the only thing you care about is Palo Alto, its organic restaurants, its girls, and, of course, jQuery.
But NK isn't going away. And you, American kids, can stick your heads in Palo Alto sand, and assume that all is good, and by not knowing what's out there, you will make yourself happier.
Sites like these mitigate some of the problems with news but they make others worse. A good comment thread can provide a lot of valuable background and context, for example. On the other hand, the bias towards unimportant but attention-grabbing stories is not especially improved by making editorial decisions with a literal popularity contest.
Me too. But it would be nice if news aggregator sites let you opt out of if it bleeds it leads (given the responses here, there's a market). It's certainly within the limits of the filters they use already for personalization bubbles.
I wrote a script for my local newspaper to spider links from their front page and display the city next to the "read more" links, so I knew if a catastrophe was local or national. If it's national then the wtf improbability goes down and it should be less interesting.
RTFA. Or don't, and simply understand this: "the news", as referred to in the OP, is actually a subset of news in general, in the same way that fast food is a subset of food in general.
The point is what while most people can easily distinguish between fast-food and proper food, many people aren't nearly so discerning when it comes to their information diets.
Not sure if I'm that pessimistic. Check the actual ratings. Google for it, I am glancing at "Live + Same Day Cable News Daily Ratings for Thursday, April 11, 2013" In a country of 400 million people, "1,133 thousands" aka about a million watched fox news. There is the hidden assumption that the million who watch are true believers as opposed to out for a laugh or just filling time or curious what the opposition thinks. But for the sake of argument I'll assume any TV tuned into fox news is a true believer. That means 1.1 million people cannot distinguish between the information diet equivalent of fast food and proper food, but roughly four hundred million can distinguish. Lets assume there are around 10 or so other networks pushing meaningless mind candy. Making it a problem around the two percent range.
Its a narrowcasting thing. Could you make a news station that appeals broadly to maybe 25% of the population, which would be about a hundred times as many as watch fox news? Yes, but from a narrowcasting perspective they've convinced themselves that having 1% of the fans but having them be absolutely rabid fans is "better" for advertising sales or whatever.
The same thinking is killing mass media in general. For example saturday night live appeals intensely to about 2 million hard core fans. The other 398 million in the population will not watch it for free. Does "Survivor" define the american cultural obsession with reality TV? Maybe, but it doesn't define american culture because only 9.38 million bothered to watch last week for free... the other 390 million are uninterested.
I'd say yes, but I'm not entirely sure. I ditched TV, apart from TV news, then the TV altogether, then mainstream news on the net. I moved to digg, I moved off digg. For the last two years I read hacker news, and occasional newspaper I can get my hands on (I'm not buying them though, I firmly believe that not funding your addiction is the first step to limiting or even shedding your addiction).
I read hacker news for almost two years now. The problem is that I can't dismiss hacker news as easily as I did with all the other news sources because I strongly suspect I'm learning some valuable things here. Sure, 90% is just amusement, 9% has some conversational value but I'm afraid 1% is actually enriching for me and I'm afraid where could I get this if I ditch HN.
Best (sort-of) news addiction I had so far was being addicted to stackoverflow. Helping strangers with their problems as fast as I can was really good for me. Unfortunately I got the job, then I lost the job. That messed my mind somehow and now stackoverflow seems like too much work.
Heroin is supposed to make you happy, if that's the goal. Being an ignorant member of society is a recipe for personal and societal disaster.
How many people have taken the time to define news? Not in terms of what makes one thing more interesting than others, but at the simplest level: what is news?
You can't ask for more substance until you define what the substance you are after is. Once you've defined it, you will see solutions where you haven't before.
After that, ask yourself if the information sources you've historically related to as news media are in fact news sources or public relations sources.
More third-party aggregators and readers are only going to disappoint the market because they don't do anything about the underlying news problems.
News used to be bad for me when I was a young kid in my teens. It used to depress me. Now that I'm in my thirties I've become desensitized and pretty much nothing bothers me. News is only bad for you if you let it affect you.
great "article" shilling for his own book. news is bad for you.
everything is bad for you. every single thing will kill you in the long term. should write a book about that.
is it important to know about current events in politics? what the sequester is and how it impacts a US citizen? who won the venezulean elections? latest financial news out of europe?
well, it depends on the person. do you have an interest in the world around you? do you feel that a cultured individual should not be fully ignorant what's happening around him?
and then, the business perspective, this is HN after all - shouldn't you know what's affecting your target group or maybe investors? being able to talk with someone you meet from India about something that is going on in his/her country proves you care about what's going on outside of your little tech bubble.
is it necessary to know who won the US masters? No, you will survive without. but it provides context if you meet someone who cares about golf.
"I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie" is not the same as "stop consuming the news altogether, it's bad for you". It's a horribly fallacious argument.
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.