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So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.

Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.

As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.

It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?

Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. It doesn't necessarily have to be impartial too, when done properly you can gain media literacy and benefit of having a reach to the discussions.

The problem with the news lately is mostly about the way they make their money. Simply because they keep the lights on by displaying as much content as possible, they design and curate the content for improving the metrics they can objectively measure(like revenue and view counts). The second kind of problem is that sometimes they don't look in making money, but influence you and that kind of news may seem a little bit of higher quality. However, due to the sinister motives, it's actually even worse.

Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too. If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.

> It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?

Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.

Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.

Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.

If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.

Information relevant to oneself, ie to the life and management of one's local and larger communities, are what will ultimately make the difference between a well-informed and enlightened citizenry able to make collective choices that result in positive outcomes, and people that base their choices on flimsy information and passing emotion.

News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.

What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.

Don't be naive. The citizenry doesn't make any significant choices. Western democracy is a sham. There are elections, yes, but voters are subject to large-scale manipulation, mainly through mass education and mass media. Not so much to determine who they cast their vote for, as to ensure compliance with the system itself, and its very limited set of choices. The range of acceptable opinions, and the matching political choices, are determined by the real rulers - presumably the billionaire class. Significant dissent on real issues is quickly crushed.

This is an overly cynical take. Ultimately all of the power in the US resides with the voters. Yes they are susceptible to manipulation, however they have the tools to resist the manipulation if they so choose.

It's a fallacy to think that because one person can't single-handedly change the world that change is impossible or that people in aggregate have no power. It is this fallacy that is at the center of trained helplessness.

It is the idea that if people want cleaner streets, they are incapable of sweeping them. If they want more supportive communities, they can't walk out their door and help someone.

To paraphrase, western democracies have problems, but the other systems are worse. If one accepts that democracy remains our best bet, the question becomes how to make democracy function better. This isn't just a question of what system of government, vote, decision, etc, but also of how well informed the citizenry is, and to what extent they feel empowered to be politically active. Billionaires do have an outsized power to influence in general, and in the US in particular (super PACs, etc), but other powers can act effectively against them (justice, press, NGOs and other forms of organized civic actions..). Switzerland has very frequent votes on a wide array of issues, giving citizens constant opportunities to act on the way their country / district / city operates.

At the local level a single voter can have a huge impact because there is very little participation at the smaller scale. A citizen that engages with their local rep or councilmember can effectively advocate for tangible improvements to their own life and their neighbors, and those actions (improving a public park, helping families get their children to pre-K, coaching a youth sports team, starting up an activities program for seniors etc) can provide far more genuine impact than any amount of "global" politics.

If you want the cynical angle, you can put time and money into a local politician and do way more manipulation to enrich yourself than anything large-scale.

But it really doesn't take much to stay up to speed. I'm with kashuntstva; I stopped actively consuming the news a year or two back, and I find I'm not tangibly less informed than the people I know who leave CNN turned on all day. I somehow seem to absorb everything that actually matters from the atmosphere. The only thing I really miss out on is the sensationalism, the overanalysis from people who've made a career of running their mouths, and the inaccuracies and wild speculation that inevitably comes from reporters trapped in a 24 hour hamster wheel being under constant pressure to hurry up and tell the story before they've even had a chance to piece it together.

I've been sticking to reading https://text.npr.org/ and my local PBS/NPR-affiliate's local news coverage. Yes, both are biased and lean towards the liberal end of the news spectrum, but neither seems to push modern news shock and awe tactics nearly as evidently and I feel like I'm aware enough of what's going on locally and in the world to have decent conversations in social settings.

One nice thing about not fully comprehending what's going on in the news is that in social situations you can ask others lots of questions about current events and the people you're talking to will feel very proud that they can explain things to someone else. It's a good ice breaker, at least until it gets to be all political...

>yes both are biased

I’ve never understood why we need to make these caveats. “Objective” or “just the facts” news has never existed. It’s impossible. I’m not knocking you, I just think it’s silly you should even feel pressure to publicly acknowledge something so patently obvious, yet we both know that if you didn’t the chance is high that the first comment you’d get is a complaint about your “biased” media outlets. As if any other kind exists lol

If you don't say this, someone somewhere on the internet will accuse you of thinking your news source is perfectly unbiased, even if you never said such a thing. It's a useful caveat just to try and defuse that kind of low signal argumentation.

Yeah that’s what I said lol

Understanding that unbiased reporting is a farce requires some understanding of media literacy and in my experience most people do not have that literacy nor a desire to learn about it. So the caveat is unfortunately necessary.

I agree, I’m just venting how annoying it is that it’s even required.

Yes and no. If you are set in life, know what you want and need, are able to get it, lie in stable place, fuck news, more harm than good to you, no matter how much rationale you put on it. Focus rather on learning some new skill instead if you can't just enjoy life as it comes, which is a great skill but many self-made successful people lack it completely.

If you in some unstable place, you want to move someplace else, change significant things in life, then it makes more sense to follow news, albeit it would help to curate them. But its a dopamine drug, I see otherwise very smart folks to fall prey to this completely helplessly. They even buy things like smart watches to know instantly there is some notification in phone. Of course all of these folks have higher levels of anxiety, they were there before smartwatches but those are definitely making things worse. And cycle repeats and goes deeper. For them I do hope seamless AR/VR is a thing of distant future, they will have hard time not making it into some cyberpunk version of addict.

>Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon.

I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case.

> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.

I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name).

I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.

It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future.

Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context.

For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.

It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it.

If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source.

For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight

I think one could argue that perhaps keeping up with news in order to understand news is too much work but that's an entirely different issue.

But then the question you should be asking is, is this the best way to understand what is going on in the world? I would strongly say it isn't. If you can wait 2-3 weeks you can catch up on events much quicker by reading the relevant wikipedia entry.

> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.

So much FOMO. I subscribed to and read a once-a-week article which summarizes the world events that week. Focus of the article is important catasthropes to avoid, kind of. That's enough for me.

> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.

The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.

> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.

You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.

I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.

I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.

The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.

The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.

It's even worse than this. When it's news about foreign territory then the media is even blatantly lying. They distort facts to make them conform to biases and to give a negative slant. Part of this is to maximize clicks, bad sensational news sells better. Part of this is bias inherent in the journalism circle. And because it's foreign territory, readers never find out they are being lied to.

re making money: the alternative to ad-revenue-through-clickbait is paywalls. Consumers have largely chosen the former.

Some have suggested that a subscription model to multiple papers (e.g. Spotify for news) would be appealing, and it might, but that doesn't immediately solve the problem of the form and content of the news. Longform article sources or retrospectives are probably the current best way to consume news.

> So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.

> Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.

Honestly, I chafe a little bit at expecting the news to be "actionable" by a regular person, because I think there's some general value to being informed about your environment (especially in a democracy). However so much of modern news is neither, it's more akin to feelings-based political advertising. It's so bad that it's obvious even on the news pages of prestige outlines like the New York Times. I subscribe to their app, but I have to do a fair bit of eye rolling as I'm searching for informative things, and they're just making it harder. They've been pushing their "Opinion" section even more heavily: in the last few months they moved it up to the 2nd section after "Most Popular, knocking World News down to 3rd (or more accurately 3rd/4th since they've also stuck "Games" of all things in the 2nd slot).

One sad casualty of modern times is the weekly news magazine. The slower pace and longer deadlines meant they were much better at keeping a regular person informed without all the noise of daily updates. They were also more accurate than daily news, since they weren't as rushed they could do better fact checking and research.

Nowadays I’ve eschewed most media sources beyond three primary ones: BBC World News channel, Foreign Policy magazine, and Wikipedia current events portal [1]

The BBC channel only produces a few hours of news a day but manages to cover everything from the Titan sub to French protests to Israel’s anti-terrorism action in Jenin to Bolsonaro’s ban. They’re pretty much the only news source that reliably covers Latam, Africa, and the Middle East. They’ve got a rather predictable bias and a half hour a day is enough to get a broad view of what’s happening.

FP is great for deeper analysis from the perspective of the neoliberal establishment and its primary competitors. However to stay informed the only thing I feel I really need is the Wikipedia current events portal. Past days are updated as information comes in so I can go back when I have time and grab any headlines that I missed. It’s actually surprising how few eventful events actually happen in the world when you get rid of all the ragebait.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

> Honestly, I chafe a little bit at expecting the news to be "actionable" by a regular person, because I think there's some general value to being informed about your environment (especially in a democracy).

What democracy? The News is kind of like so-called democracy: something that every serious person needs to do but that has very little impact on anything. The most exaggerated example is the US presidential election which in fact has a very, very long media coverage (News) up until the election itself. And what does a person who can vote get back from that? They only have two parties that they can vote for if they don’t want to “waste” their vote, and the nomination is filled with a mix of serious candidates and people who want to boost their careers (Buttigieg) and then eventually the party itself circle the wagons and boosts one anointed candidate (that was the case for the Dems but I’m not sure about the Reps since I didn’t pay much attention).

One counter-example though to the News not being actionable was Covid. I felt that a lot of the news about Covid was actionable. And it was useful to know what people/experts thought about the current threat-level day-to-day.

> One sad casualty of modern times is the weekly news magazine. The slower pace and longer deadlines meant they were much better at keeping a regular person informed without all the noise of daily updates. They were also more accurate than daily news, since they weren't as rushed they could do better fact checking and research.

The Economist is still going strong. It's my primary news source for exactly these reasons

For the last few years I vary rarely followed the national news, I'm certainly happier for it. When I do, I have noticed a decline in mood.

On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume.

There is so much truth to "ignorance is bliss".

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> So little of the news is actionable

I think the news affects people's behaviors more than we realize. Although it tends to be around NOT doing something. Smoky air...don't go outside. Flight delays... don't fly anytime soon. Food shortages...think of a substitute. Submersible news...don't go in submersibles, beware of overconfident charismatic people, etc.

> I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.

Taking a break also makes it easier for me to identify those that are steeped in the rhetoric of the day. It's educational and a little unnerving.

> So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.

A hyper-focus on the national news also makes people feel like they're being a good citizen, while they completely ignore the things that actually make them a good citizen. I see it here all the time. People spend hours a week - often hours a day - following news about politicians they've already made their mind up about, or even politicians from other jurisdictions they'll never have a chance to vote for or against. Yet they spend almost no attention on local leaders, and keep voting back in the same group of people with poor track records who ignore constituents.

It's not a simple difference of opinion about these people - I've had numerous conversations with the people around, and the vast majority of people don't know many of their local elected officials, and those they do know the name of they couldn't tell you anything about. Yet they could quickly tell you all the outrageous things a governor in another state did.

Most national news is like junk food, where people feel like they're satiating themselves but they aren't getting any of the news they actually need.

Choose quality over quantity and don't waste much time even on the quality news outlets, just enough to keep you in the loop with what happens in the world.

Quality means doesn't use clickbait, doesn't try to build outrage, doesn't try to present all kinds of horrors and very rare events like being trivial happening daily, doesn't try to shock.

Sounds like a unicorn. I'm only slightly jesting. I know of some sources that probably qualify, but I seldom check them, or they require a subscription.

News is the machine that manufactures opinion. If you don't read the news you will still be subject to mainline opinion and its policy consequences. It's probably more accurate, if no less unhappy, to read the news as primarily propaganda (for specific political interests or for ideological consensus building). You can, of course, "daff the world aside, And bid it pass" but the news is history in the sense that whoever wins the news cycle, wins the commanding heights of the historical record. Think of reading the news as like the spectators taking a picnic to watch 19th century battles, but today, it's a war for peoples' minds.

> Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.

Makes me wonder if there's a market for news that's only based on events that happened 3-6 months ago, so that we have some conclusiveness and perhaps something actionable or relevance to what happened.

If my Russian friends ignored the news as much as you did, at least some of them would be feeding worms right now. Most left the country when the news made it obvious that a mobilization order is to be declared — it was confirmed a couple of days thereafter.

I think that's the kind of news you cannot ignore, except if you avoid human contact and don't use any social media.

Do people ever call you privileged? A common response I see to experiments like yours is that "it must be nice to be able to not care".

>” Do people ever call you privileged? A common response I see to experiments like yours is that "it must be nice to be able to not care".”

I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.

I’ve seen the word “activists” used in this manner to describe a certain type of person, who in my mind hardly qualifies as an activist. At most they are a person who follows the day to day of our political theater, but I doubt they could point to a single policy or proposal they actually advocated for in any political forum.

Coding behavior this way is misleading and counterproductive. Activism is a generally respectable activity, it entails actually showing up and giving your time towards something you care about, not just lecturing people about watching cable news.

Twenty years ago such people would have been (disparagingly) referred to as “keyboard warriors” by “boots on the ground” activists. I haven’t come across the “keyboard warriors” term in a long time – most likely because the online “activists” vastly outnumber the activists who don’t confine their political activity to the online sphere.

I get your point, but isn't this kind of a no true scotsman thing? Social media has a lot of people thinking that they are activists because they have a hashtag in their twitter name or post black squares on instagram. What would you call those people? They call themselves activists, or they at least call those activities activism.

If I had written the comment you replied to, I would have put the word in quotes. Some people use the term "slacktivist", but I think terms like that are silly. And to be clear, I'm with you - when I think of an activist, I think of someone collecting signatures door-to-door, or organizing an irl event, etc. I think of someone actually trying to accomplish something rather than just signaling virtue. But I also think that if enough people use a word a certain way, that's what the word means, and a lot of people seem to think that "just lecturing people" counts as activism.

> They call themselves activists

My assumption is that parent comment was applying that label well beyond the group that labels themselves as such. Social media activism can still be activism. I’m not looking to gatekeep.

Given the context of this forum, people really love to throw this and other similar terms around in a way that reads as a pejorative. Basically, “people with a specific type of politics that I don’t like and who annoy me”. Ex. Elons “I support the current thing” tweet.

> I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.

Exactly. There's almost nothing in the daily news that someone must have "privilege" not to care about. They have some articles about social issues that might fit that description, but that's a totally different thing than the news itself.

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I understand that impulse.

One thing I've observed, though, is that "the news" generally isn't how I get information about what fun, brave, new world people would like to make for us.

"The news", qua the comercially-produced mass media doings of the day, generally has never talked about issues important to me and mine and when they do it's largely Fox punditry or it's reaction.

I get a lot of information about the things I care about via various instagram folks and then following up by cursory searches to gt the larger picture.

But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.

> But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.

Oh certainly. There was a survey a while ago (which I can't find) that found that reading UK rightwing press was correlated with being less informed about issues than simply not reading news at all - i.e. readers would underperform random guessing on multiple choice questions.

I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.

Exactly. It's like when people complain about minimum wage. As a software developer, this will likely never impact me. Same thing with issues like abortion or gay rights. As a straight male, I gain nothing from getting bogged down in pointless arguments over those side-shows. Russian invading Ukraine? Why is that something I need to know about? I live in American, not Ukraine.

People like me just don't need to worry about these types of issues, so what do I gain by reading news about things like that?

One possibility would be if you had a girlfriend or wife, the new anti-abortion laws would fairly directly impact you as well by limiting your family planning options depending on where you live.

If your wife happens to be pregnant, there are also states you might choose to avoid because she might need medical care if she miscarries late term, and doctors in those states might choose not to save her life for fear that the authorities might try to prosecute them for the loss of the baby.

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I have a hard time following that logic. To me, the opposite seems true. It's a privilege to habitually consume media that has no direct bearing on one's day-to-day life.

They're trying to make their problem yours. If they can't stop caring about pointless things, it's their problem, not yours.

Or hypothetically they think it's very much not pointless. I imagine most of us would have some current events that we think is not only worth listening to, but acting on. Which isn't an argument to watch news/etc, as it may be exceptionally rare. Just that i imagine we could all say quite similar things.

To me, if anything, it really goes to show up important "yelling with appropriate volume" is. So many of those "with a cause" as is being discussed here are pretty widely ignored, as it seems they're always yelling. I can't tell what is meaningful from them when it's almost always of equal volume, fear, etc.

The mind can be self controlled. Everyone has a choice to consume or be unconsumed. Privilege to consume is easier to control than privilege to not consume. Limits can be placed on consumption. Limiting the choice not to consume is harder to limit. Imagine a scenario involving a protest within a prison population where the prisoners hunger strike. Force feeding with sedation and a pipe is the only choice in a total control environment. The choice to not consume is less privilege than the choice to over consume.

In terms of logical analysis, the statements present a mixture of subjective claims, hypothetical scenarios, and value judgments. Some of the statements are opinion-based and lack objective evidence or logical proofs. Additionally, the argumentation is not entirely coherent, as there are shifts in the discussion from personal control over consumption to the scenario of a prison hunger strike.

Overall, the logic within this statement is subjective and reliant on hypothetical scenarios and personal judgments, making it difficult to evaluate the validity of the argument objectively.

In programming the permissions required not to consume are less than permissions required to consume. This is where the dissonance begins regarding the meme of a programmer.

A program can exist with near zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot.

In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourself.

Let's analyze the logic of the given statement:

1. In programming, the permissions required not to consume are less than permissions required to consume. This statement asserts that in programming, there are fewer permissions or privileges needed to restrict or avoid consumption compared to the permissions required for actual consumption. It suggests that it is easier to control or limit consumption in the context of programming.

2. This is where the dissonance begins regarding the meme of a programmer. This statement introduces the concept of dissonance regarding the meme (a cultural symbol or idea) of a programmer. It implies that there is a contradiction or inconsistency when it comes to the behavior or perception of programmers in relation to consumption.

3. A program can exist with near-zero consumption (a few neurons). A human cannot. This statement compares the ability of a program and a human to exist with minimal consumption. It suggests that a program can operate with very low resource usage (represented as a few neurons) while a human cannot function without some level of consumption.

4. In short, every breath we take is a vote to participate in something greater than ourselves. This statement makes a broader philosophical point. It suggests that every act of breathing or consumption signifies a participation in something larger or more significant than oneself. It implies that consumption is not just a personal action but has broader implications.

The logic in these statements contains a mix of objective claims and subjective philosophical assertions. The first statement is based on the premise that permissions in programming can be differentiated between consumption and non-consumption, although it lacks specific evidence or context.

The second and third statements introduce a comparison between programming and human existence, implying that programs require less consumption than humans. However, it's important to note that the analogy between programming and human biology is not straightforward, and the comparison may be oversimplified or metaphorical.

The final statement offers a philosophical perspective, suggesting that consumption, represented by every breath, carries a symbolic meaning of participation in something greater. This statement relies on subjective interpretation and personal philosophy rather than objective logic.

Overall, while the statements touch on different aspects related to consumption, programming, and human existence, the logical coherence is weakened by subjective interpretations and philosophical assertions.

Who are these comments for?

The news coming out of establishments like The New York Times is aimed at the upper-middle class. People who have enough power to “matter”. The news (at least some of it) is useful for them since it’s aimed at their interests and from their perspective.

Who’s the privileged one? Hard to say.

Ignorance is certainly bliss.

Living a naïve life of detached privilege is great fun, so long as you are surrounded by people to take care of the nasty details. Don't follow the news. Don't learn about environmental problems. Don't get angry at local businesses when they do bad things. Don't feel bad when a racist cop does something horrible. Don't vote. Don't enlist. Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. Other people will guard the door as you watch cat videos.

The real joke is that 90% of the people I meet who "don't read the news" actually do. They have just turned off realworld news, mostly politics. They still know all about Hollywood and the latest fashion trends.

The news is meaningless distraction designed to trigger an emotional response in an effort to maximise engagement.

Big events travel by word of mouth. I don’t need to actively be reading the news to find out about them.

I’ll take blissful ignorance over living in a state of permanent anxiety.

Fill your mind with ever changing news of little to no consequence and you’ll have no time left to do anything that might genuinely impact the world in a positive way.

I don’t vote either.

One can certainly consume news without entering a state of permanent anxiety. If one does, I think that suggests an independent condition rather than a problem with the news. A healthy stoicism does not demand ignorance.

Almost everyone overestimates their ability to be aware of and manage their emotions. While it's important to work on how we react to things, it's also important to be clear-eyed about our in-built fallibilities and how difficult they are to overcome, as well as just how hostile the environments we encounter are.

With a great deal of goal-directed effort, an individual could get there, but realistically getting our existing population to effectively adopt any meaningful level of reduced emotional reactiveness to these triggers would require a massive culture shift and billions of billions of hours of therapy and related activities. In other words, it's not a realistic short- or medium-term position at the population level, so it's at best only a small part of any solution.

I read the news every day without stressing out about it, and I did not have to go to therapy or whatever to be able to do so. I can't help but think that finding the news stressful is irrational. In the grand scheme of human suffering mainstream news is table stakes. Read about what life is like in North Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, or South Africa. When reading an article about US healthcare, think about what healthcare options are available to mothers in sub-Saharan Africa. When reading about the ending of Affirmative Action, remember that 70% of urban Chinese students are admitted to college, compared to only 5% of rural ones.

This isn't to say that finding the news stressful is some sort of moral failing. It's irrational, but humans are irrational. If reading the news stresses you out, then sure, don't read the news.

I think you either overestimate yourself or don't consume very much news.

It is quite bizarre to be told by multiple commenters now that I really have entered a permanent state of anxiety and that I've just overestimated myself. Are you that confident that reading news inspires such a state in everyone?

Personally I can't remember the last time I experienced anxiety reading the news - and I read an hour or two's worth daily. So I have trouble relating to those who do, but I don't insist that they must be "underestimating" themselves.

You spend up to 60 hours per month reading the news? Almost 4 days worth of waking hours dedicated to it?

Is being “well informed” on current affairs worth that much?

People have to spend their time somehow - reading news seems likely more valuable than watching sports, arguing on the internet, gambling, watching cat videos, or playing cell phone games. All those are common time sinks for people.

Seems odd to question the value of reading news, considering.

I enjoy reading.

Sure fine, whatever, but this is only possible because you rely on others to prop you up. Obviously this attitude and behavior wouldn't work at scale.

It is working at scale. Would you seriously characterize the US voting populace as "well-informed" or "well-educated"? They don't need to be because they have no real power.

And the mass-marketed "news" most of them watch is only reinforcing their ignorance.

I wouldn't call this working, civil rights aren't doing as well as they were 10 years ago (just as one example).

American society has taken multiple large steps backwards precisely because people have been convinced to vote against their own self interest.

The system is not working in our (the citizenry's) interests, no. But it's working spectacularly for the multinational corporations that just happen to finance and produce the news, though. Think that's a coincidence?

It's not working for the multinational corporations either. They're getting fined in the trillions, they're losing workers faster than they can replace them, their profits are shrinking again, and the world in which they conduct business is destabilizing.

There isn't some comfortable ruling secret society pulling any strings, it's just a lot of unpredictable people doing unpredictable things.

> It's not working for the multinational corporations either

Checks the S&P500 Lol.

> They're getting fined in the trillions

Lmao even!

> There isn't some comfortable ruling secret society pulling any strings, it's just a lot of unpredictable people doing unpredictable things.

You don't think the comfortable billionaire class are pulling strings. I'll take a hit of whatever you're smoking, please.

I genuinely feel bad for folks who think “billionaires” or any other group of people are either capable or willing to successfully coordinate in a general sense to steer global events.

I genuinely feel bad for "folks" who can't read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carlyle_Group

This is purely your political opinion not some kind of fact like Ukraine war or a recent Nuclear fusion breakthrough etc.

...yes? Does me having an opinion about the state of my society as a result of following what happens in it bother you?

Gay marriage became legal in all states in 2015.

You’re presenting emotion as fact which is precisely what a lot of the news does too.

Ah and that’s the actual problem; I didn’t do what you claim, but you can’t tell the difference between my judgement and a fact, can you? Or to be more accurate, you can tell but you think that’s because you saw through a ruse.

Reading news doesn’t have to make one anxious.

There’s also countless times when lack of knowledge makes on life far harder than it needs to be.

I doubt a mind will be changed by reading that warning. But one can try.

And collective action by informed voters would quickly solve most major issues - but most Americans becoming well informed voters is an unrealistic expectation.

> And collective action by informed voters would quickly solve most major issues - but most Americans becoming well informed voters is an unrealistic expectation.

If all Americans had my education, they would think exactly like me.

> Reading news doesn’t have to make one anxious.

I disagree, unless its news ignoring world, politics, suffering and other aspects of mankind's daily grind. Especially if you are smart enough to realize what kind of shit show the human society in 2023 still is with no change in sight. Or what kind of people do get to real power in politics. Or how great the world would actually be if top 50 folks holding power would be sane balanced moral human beings, and what kind of shitbags they are instead.

If it doesn't make you sad or pissed off at least a bit, you are already self-curating the news intensively to experience some alternate version of reality, or have some emotional intelligence issues.

Obviously there is a balance and this article/author specifically mentioned long-form articles and books as a better way to absorb, digest, retain, and comprehend information.

I think its probably more accurate to say "click-economy news" is bad for you. It's just so much of our news these days is done with newsflashes, tweets, click-bait headlines, etc that he lumps it all in to "news".

So its not so much that your bury your head in the sand, its that you get your news from quality sources, books, and in more meaningful ways.

I think we are in an interesting period in history where we are transitioning away from powerful information/text in the form of books and print media to a digital based paradigm. "Human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the kinds of categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a “medieval peasant.”" https://commforum.mit.edu/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-oral-tra...

Which is equally interesting and terrifying. (And combine that will subscriptions for all digital goods/services--and not owning anything yourself, a new digital form of serfdom.)

> Don't follow the news. Don't learn about environmental problems. Don't get angry at local businesses when they do bad things. Don't feel bad when a racist cop does something horrible. Don't vote. Don't enlist. Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. Other people will guard the door as you watch cat videos.

Or you could follow the news. And then get angry at the wrong businessmen. And get mad about people building a mosque in another state. And vote for the candidate who gets the most airtime/ads instead of the one who actually cares about you. And enlist so you can kill innocent people.

Pro tip: Highlighting others' ignorance is not wise. I don't know you, but chances are high I can list serious problems/issues in the world that you know little to nothing about. Certainly more important than the malfeasance of some random business. Yes, there are ignorant people out there. The difference between them and a person who follows the news is that the latter is merely a little less ignorant.

See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36602974

> Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you.

One would presumably need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption. So, they are likely the very people who are keeping the world from falling apart. The professional activists on the other hand...

Surveys show that vast number of people are working what they believe to be pointless jobs - and yes it makes them unhappy.

So no, people do not need to be creating value to be paid.

And of those who think their jobs aren’t pointless, still most of tasks can be pointless. My job isn’t pointless as a whole, but still about 60% is spent on stuff that should not be needed and helps no one, especially not the business. Ok technically it helps one incompetent person in the cto’s office who rose beyond their competency level feel important.

> Surveys show that vast number of people are working what they believe to be pointless jobs

Are survey conductors included in those stats?

> So no, people do not need to be creating value to be paid.

The fact that someone thinks their job is pointless done;t mean it isn't providing value to someone else.

> on stuff that should not be needed and helps no one,

Welcome to the real world where things are sub-optimal and people expend significant effort to keep things from falling apart.

> Ok technically it helps one incompetent person in the cto’s office who rose beyond their competency level feel important.

> Sounds like it is providing value to someone then?

“ >> Ok technically it helps one incompetent person in the cto’s office who rose beyond their competency level feel important.

> Sounds like it is providing value to someone then?”

That conclusion nicely shows the quality of these rebuttals. According to it, A person in the cto office making utterly pointless work is “adding value” because they feel important while the business is harmed.

And yes they make utterly pointless work as in the end it turned out they had spent weeks trying to justify what was actually a restriction imposed by an error they’d made - the wrong role assignment by their team.

The world is messy and disorganised. People are fallible and at times stupid. The people who keep things working despite this might feel that their jobs are pointless. That doesn't mean that the people paying them to do the job see it the same way.

Sure, as an omniscient, infallible being you might be frustrated at all the waste. You might rightly be angry at imbeciles like me who can't see through it. But at the end of they day this nonsense keeps things from completely falling apart.

>” That doesn't mean that the people paying them to do the job see it the same way.”

Blood letting as a medieval standard practice to cure diseases was a valuable job per these definitions.

If value is redefined as anything that anyone anywhere thinks should be done regardless of the actual effect, then sure my points are wrong when evaluated with that criteria.

Again, unfortunately the rest of aren't omniscient and infallible. And thus we must muddle through.

Okay you disagree, I get it. But refrain from unctuous condescension. I have never claimed to be infallible or omniscient so please stop painting it as if I have.

>> need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption.

Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Even Marge Simpson has a trust fund setup by her relatives. And mutual funds, family income, real estate appreciation, pensions ... I'd say that there are large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Their role in society is to consume, and occasionally vote.

> Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive".

Define very large. And isn't the fraction of people who live off passive income the more relevant measure?

> Even Marge Simpson

I'm sorry, your example is a cartoon character?

> large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work.

Again, define large.

The Simpsons were designed as the typical american family in every way. When the writers invented them having a family trust they were making a statement that such trusts are commonplace and normal in American society, at least normal enough that the audience would understand the concept. Thirty years ago very few average people would have even known the word. Things have changes since the series started.

Talk is cheap. Show me the maths. How many Americans live off trust funds?

I guess, they will come up with large enough to fill a town hall perhaps.

I think there has to be a middle ground. Once I read a foxnews article about a toddler getting shot in some sort of road rage just when I was about to sleep and his last words haunted me all night and I couldn't sleep (I have kids of similar age). I am not even a regular fox reader fwiw, but clearly there are news outlets that are putting news out there to cause certain anxiety in their audience. I have since made a rule that, avoid news articles before going to bed (and I mean from all sources).

I still read news and I can handle a lot more with a cup of coffee and clear head in the morning. But my mind is just not ready to deal with stuff at night (reminds me of song - "Why do the monsters come out at night?" )

I never really thought of it that way. I guess people who scroll Reddit and Twitter all day are actually holding society together rather than wasting their lives. Thank you for your service.

Well human lived just fine before endless weekly, daily, hourly and up to minute news came in. If bad things are happening or will happen it will reach to people in physical form that is much more actionable.

A lot of other people you mention they are not some kind self-less humanitarians. They are mostly agenda driven partisans looking to rile people and treat everything as game to win. One clear way to win is to not play their game.

Another real joke is 90% of people who write or read news are not solving any real problem. They read news and then go on spew their rants on social media and hector people in doing things where they have no business.

In general the news gives me a very superficial and sometimes factually inaccurate view of events. This is startlingly true in just about every situation where I've had first hand knowledge of the event in question.

One alternative I've heard is for people to simply research candidates and issues before they vote and ignore it at all other times. That seems reasonable at least for state and federal races where there's little ability to effect change outside of voting cycles.

Most of what makes you angry in the news is misleading at best. You are being manipulated and misinformed, not informed.

There are very few incidents I want (or need) to follow to the minute - usually local events that affect my life like maybe a hazardous chemical spill or a fire.

I don't need 24 hour news. I can get the summary every morning or evening about what happened and that's just fine.

Especially with the Russia/Ukraine war there is so much crap floating around as "news" that's 50% correct at best that you get the wrong impression if you follow too closely to the twitter/telegram rumours.

This is an interesting take. Reminds me of an ostrich burying its head in the sand and not seeing the hunter approaching. Ignorance is bliss until the world affects you.

Name the most important thing in the news from two weeks ago.

You can't. Neither can I. The difference between you and I is, I didn't waste my time or energy keeping up with utterly inane "news" that I have zero agency to react to in any meaningful way.

Here's the really ironic part: Fox news viewers are less informed than those that watch no news[0]. So not only are news viewers more depressed and angry about things they have zero influence over (see also other comments regarding "circle of influence" and "circle of concern"), they are more ignorant to boot!

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...

and this makes it even more ironic:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/19/survey-fox-...

It's funny because 99% of people who say that are white privileged upper middle class Americans, who are liberals so they think they can speak for actual disadvantaged minorities.

In reality, the demographic that cares least about news and the constant culture wars around it are usually racial minorities or immigrants. That has been corroborated multiple times by surveys and polls and studies.And growing up as a non white immigrant to a white country, it certainly fits my observation. We usually care more about day to day life and more important, immediate stuff. Even worse, they often have no say and no power in what happens in the grand scheme of things so why even care a lot?

Yet, the argument persists in the mind of "white saviors", since they think that not only people need to care about whatever they do, but that they are good and better for being terminally addicted to never ending news cycles.

Nothing can be further from the truth though, and as always actual minorities are being used for an argument that they have no part in.

Obviously having immediate needs to deal with leaves less time for news and similar. Immediate needs generally come before abstract long term plans.

Yes that's exactly my point! Some people think that being oppressed or being disprivileged means that you become a lot more affected by day to day news and hyper aware of all the new stuff around you, politically or otherwise.

But that's a deeply privileged take, from people who have a weird and idyllic view of what it means to be a minority or suffering from discrimination,etc. The opposite happens usually, which is sad but that's still reality. Being hyper politicized or hyper partisan is exactly the sign of privilege and it's funny that to see the pervasive narrative that the opposite is somehow true, and that being able to ignore news is a sign of privilege.

> They still know all about Hollywood and the latest fashion trends.

Or tech, for everybody here claiming they don't read news.

ok, Captain Planet

For me, it has now been 2.5 years since having watched any local, national or cable news.

The stuff is poison.

I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties.

It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense.

It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.

Ah so you don't count hackernews as news - an interesting choice.

You mention tv news, but I suspect online news is what most people consume, streaming killed tv news many years ago.

I think it's easy enough to "miss" this kind of news in HN. The threads often get flagged quite quickly, lead to to more comments than upvotes, which brings it to the second page, etc.

Despite the name I think only about half the posts on the site are actual news. And of those many are not current news, there are many links that are months or even years old.

I think "news" here correlates to organizations deep in the "news cycle" whereby some organization decides some goings-on of local people is a worthy national topic. HN is one or two layers removed from this; quite literally there's a crowd deciding what you see at a given moment is relative or not for consumption. This is the same effect of hearing about important events from other people and choosing to look into them further or looking into them after the topic is more settled.

The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.

> I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news

Well phew! Thankfully someone's still paying attention.

How will you know what your opinion is expected to be by society to avoid getting into trouble at work or in public?

You cannot simply say "Go current good thing! End the current bad thing!" as people will think you are being sarcastic.

Maybe part of your problem is feeling like you are required to express an opinion on things that have limited bearing on your life? You can support the people in your life without having to fabricate support for positions you don't care about.

I'm not saying this is your intent, but it is a pretty privileged and insular take.

If new events or a new policy change unfairly affects a (neighbor|friend|minority group|stranger), is it a good thing for the unaffected to plug their ears and go about life?

I don't mean to suggest following the news 24/7 is a solution to this, but I also do not see how it's healthy for every person to ignore everything that doesn't personally affect them.

You're right, that isn't my intent. I didn't say not to develop an opinion, or to learn to care about issues that affect people other than you. My aim was to communicate that you aren't required to develop and express an opinion about every single issue.

Attempting to formulate an opinion on every issue that can possibly come up is a fool's errand; carefully following the outrage cycle for the sake of expressing an opinion that falls on the "correct" side of issues you have no stakes in is even worse, as it adds empty noise to the conversation and distorts the Overton window away from the concerns of people who do have stakes in the issue.

For a while now I've tried to cultivate the habit of not trying to have opinions about everything. It's quite liberating to say: sorry, <thing> may be important, but I just don't have an opinion about it at the moment.

There is something freeing about acknowledging you don't need to have an opinion and something enlightening about knowing you shouldn't have an opinion--especially on a topic that you aren't truly informed about.

My favorite meme on the subject: "Marcus Aurelius has already released you from the obligation to have a take":

> 52. You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.

I often find that saying "I am not up to date with the literature on this" helps.

Usually if you don't track the news you don't have opinions on the news. If somehow you develop an opinion it's pretty easy not to express it.

"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business"

I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions.

e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share.

Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).

Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.

> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort.

You can get pretty far just by talking to people.

> there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort

Well you are partially right but also I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't think politics is an area where I can really effect change and I have so much going on with my life that I am also unwilling to expend the effort.

And that's fine, it's a choice you can make (we do not put the duty of being an informed and engaged citizen on the body politic), but it doesn't make what you said true. Just true for you. It's not at all uncommon for engaged people to leave significant dents in metropolitan local politics by picking up a phone or by showing up.

I find discouraging others from fully engaging in the civic process much more disappointing than choosing not to fully engage oneself, to be honest.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)

> you have a few options a few times a year.

You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.

Being aware of current bills proposed and being voted on (at local, state, and federal levels) lets you contact your representatives and voice your opinion; lets you impact which bills are passed.

This kind of action does have an effect, and the effect is significant when many people do it.

Much like how participation matters during elections.

I think it is important and in fact moral to spend some more time understanding politics, but still don't think news is a good way to do it. Reading a few books and discussing topics With Friends will do far more than sifting through countless shallow news stories.

Especially, according to actual US politicians, people who cosplay as hardcore hardline party line people are easy to negotiate with when the cameras are off.

What you get in the news is a performance, either carefully crafted or off the cuff crazy.

The only way to "shape a perception of government" is to check how your representatives actually voted for different issues. Talk is talk, votes are fact.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

Election day is the least significant day in politics. It is merely the hiring process, and who you hire doesn't matter all that much (within reason). Your actual job as the employer starts after you have selected an employee. The onus is on you to direct and guide the employee you selected. If you don't know what is needed for your organization on an ongoing basis, how can you serve as their boss?

Or, of course, you can pray that you chose a mind reader and ignoring them will lead to satisfactory results. However, I think all employers will tell you that if you disappear into the night and leave employees to their own devices, you won't be impressed with the results.

> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

Being the boss in general leaves you pretty impotent, frankly. This is as true in government as it is in enterprise. Employees aren't robots. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep the workers aligned on the vision, and against competing leadership interests.

But it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, the wealthy among us who feel they don't have time to be the boss directly will hire other parties (a.k.a. lobbyists) to guide the workers for them. If the employees cannot be tamed, that practice would not take place. Of course, like everything in life, if you are not so well off you're going to have to do the work yourself.

Nobody ever said that democracy was easy. There is good reason why some people in the world stand by other political systems – because they don't want to put in the hard, hard work of democracy. But if democracy is the system you and your fellow neighbours have chosen, it is the one you have to accept, hard work and all.

Additionally, the news does not present fact-centered, honest information about your government.

It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.

It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.

Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.

I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.

And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.

One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out. Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top. The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

> One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out.

The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.

'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.

> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

> The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)

> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!

As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.

It's funny sometimes seeing what people reveal about themselves unintentionally when they rail against something; if the news is all of those bad things for you, then you're not working very hard to understand it.

"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.

No its not whats happening around me. Its shocking things people who want me to look at ads choose to show me from all over the world

That's news media, not news. The media reports the news, in ways you may dislike, but the actual content they're sharing with you is rooted in literal events that took place.

Well fine, you win the argument over semantics. Everyone here is referring to news media using the term news. Now that we've come to this understanding that what we mean by news is news media then my point stands.

No, they aren’t. They’re discussing whether or not knowing things is worth it, which is completely different.

Your point doesn’t make sense once you realize there’s a difference between news and news media.

The problem is, the original article itself doesn’t really differentiate. It DOES call out longer form pieces like books or magazines as better alternatives (suggesting the article is primarily referring to news media) but also implies not jumping on the latest story and waiting for those that outlast the news cycle (which would suggest the article is also about “knowing things” in so much as we don’t need to know all things immediately all the time).

I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.

But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.

I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.

News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.

If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.

At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.

Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.

One question; who introduces bias into reporting?

Potentially anyone involved in the making of the report.

Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.

What phrase, if you had to choose one, would you describe the group of people who do this work? The work, as you clearly explain here, is how bias gets introduced?

Maybe, perhaps, news media?

Learning for the first time what the issues are (or who the people are) to be voted on day-of is a great way to get manipulated.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

Because you leave yourself more susceptible to recency bias, and the prevailing media narrative on election day rather than continually evaluating the actions politicians take in real-time with proper context, evaluating the raw facts for yourself.

On the finance point, the market has probably absorbed any news a nanosecond after it hits the wire. I don't think that understanding that AI was going to finally take off gave anyone alpha to invest into NVidia.

No, the market is surprisingly slow with this. Sure, there are some professional traders that react very quickly. But it appears that there are masses of investors that get to learn the news very late, or only react when they hear from other people who heard the news before them.

Some striking examples: look at the stock prices of pharma companies after Covid broke out. Sure they went up, but it took a full year(!) before most of them finally reached their peeks. Or look at shares of weapon manufacturers after the Ukraine invasion. Same story, share prices went up but it took months.

Er, individual stock trading is gambling, not investing.

Every investment is a gamble.

A gamble vs. gambling; English is weird, the former means a general risk/reward bet, whereas the latter means to take undue risk for entertainment purposes.

Buying individual stocks is the act of taking unknown risk for entertainment purposes.

> Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).

Sorry to be that jerk, but:

If you need to follow the sports/entertainment news to engage in small talk when coworkers discuss these issues, it just means you don't know how to do small talk.

I said I like to be accommodating. I personally would rather little to no interaction unless it's pertinent to work at hand.

> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind.

And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.

A lot of us have seen the rage machine polarize someone into partisan insanity. I like to think I'm resistant to this, but I've seen it happen to people who are probably smarter than me. I'd say it's more common with the elderly, but I'm not really sure that's true—there are plenty of Tankies and retvrn crazies in their twenties.

News in its current form is clearly an infohazard. It may be useful to have an awareness of what's going on in the world, but if you find yourself thinking "the other side" are all evil or stupid, you're headed down the same path as so many others who have let the culture war detach them from reality. Take a break. Reassess.

Arguing on the Internet is addicting. Anger is addicting. Turn it off and go have fun with your friends, or build something. If you want to stay aware of what's going on, reading a summary on Wikipedia will give you better information than watching an endless cycle of "look at this bad/stupid person!" videos on Twitter or Facebook.

Honestly, if you just read Wikipedia summaries (or other "calm" summaries) you'll end up better informed than the people who criticize you for burying your head in the sand. Don't let them bully you into joining their anger dopamine frenzy.

You can try to avoid bias and “infohazards” but you’ll be unable to completely eliminate them. Better to live with the tools to disarm the hazard than spend your life hiding from anything “exciting”.

The intent is not to hide from them or completely eliminate them, but to notice when you're being affected and seeking out more and more. Recognizing their effects and reduce exposure when you notice them taking over is one of the main tools.

Learning how to freely take in the content without being meaningfully effected is another of the main tools.

Ideally yes, but this is roughly the same as saying "advertising doesn't influence me". Seems like everyone believes this about themselves, but I'm doubtful that many of them are right.

It gets smart people all the time. Good "epistemic hygiene" can go a long way, but recognize that people pretty much always have a blind spot around their own cognitive vulnerabilities, and that includes oneself. Recognize the signs and watch for them in yourself, especially if you're actively seeking exposure.

None of what you wrote here leads to the advice that one should, as a matter of regular course, hide from or disengage in understanding what is going on around them, however.

Yeah, I very specifically did not advocate for disengaging from understanding what's going on. I recommended ways in which you can stay informed about what's going on while avoiding the downsides.

I'm not endorsing the specific recommendations of the article. I only endorse what I myself stated above.

You may have avoided it in your reply to me, but the comment I replied to of yours clearly suggests people disengage from understanding what is going on around them, rather than learn how to extract value from unreliable sources.

I'm not sure precisely what you're referring to. I recommended reading Wikipedia for less-sensationalist summaries rather than watching videos designed to anger, and specifically said that I believe this will leave you better informed, not uninformed.

I said to disengage from the things that are designed to addict you to outrage and to instead engage with things that are designed to keep you informed. If you interpret this as "disengage from understanding what is going on around them", well, sorry, but the last paragraph of my original comment is talking about you.

There’s not actually a way to stay engaged while also disengaging with content that upsets you, so no, do not go hang out with friends or build things when you get upset.

Learn how to get less upset.

> Honestly, if you just read Wikipedia summaries

A good portion of the country will reject info you get from Wikipedia. We're all moving to a post-truth world.

Another approach is to accept news as it is: entertainment.

The same way we're not looking at documentaries on Amazon frogs and arguing if watching them led to any improvements in our daily life, we shouldn't expect random news to be actionable or useful.

Sure there is local and national info that is beneficial, but those can be earned in way more efficient ways on other media (for instance offical accounts on Twitter were my go-to for my local council's announcements and govs policy updates, and they also posted it on their respective PR pages).

Actually I really wish we 100% stopped alluding as news and journalists as a primary source of information: press conferences and somewhat official interviews should always have a directly accessible feed of the whole thing, uncut, and distributed by the entity opening the event. Having to go through second hand reporting and selected tidbits to understand what was happening there is just nonsense.

I've tried making this point to my father, with little success. He is someone who very clearly struggles with anxiety, and has an incredibly unhealthy news consumption habit -- its news on the radio on the way to work, lots of newspaper reading at work (he runs his own small business), followed by constant cable news in the evening. He can't turn it off. As best I can tell, he struggles to consume longer form (especially written content), and I don't know that he'd be able to tell me the name of the last book he's read. He's an incredibly intelligent man, but I can't help but feel he's doing himself a huge disservice with his habit. But, alas, I am always met with "but I need to be informed" retort, despite my many objections to it. Anyone experience something similar with their parents and have any advice?

Stop trying. It's entertainment. He probably tried to get you to stop playing video games (or whatever you liked wasting time on) with little success.

Go about it indirectly: Keep your eye out for hobbies you can suggest. If he gets interested in something new, he'll have to make tradeoffs with his time. If turning off news = being bored (in his mind), it's not so appealing. But if he's excited about... woodworking, dancing, painting, piano, horror films... he'll automatically be pulled away from news.

My advice is:

1) Keep at it, don't give up. Make your arguments in small doses over and over again until eventually the information assimilates.

2) Look for something he can replace the habits with and facilitate those activities for him.

The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

> The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.

And who said data can't be biased, anyway? It most often is

To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias.

The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data.

A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.

The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).

Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.

Plug for the Boring Report, which uses AI to strip sensationalism from news articles and present succinct, informative summaries: https://www.boringreport.org/

I am not affiliated with them.

This is the future of the internet, huh? AI re-writing the web to personalize it for users.

I would second this. Their app/website helped wean me off the emotional manipulation by news media I didn't even know I was addicted to. I would recommend people try it out.

I'm reminded of Stephen Covey's Circle of Concern (everything you give you attention to) and the Circle of Influence (inside the CoC, everything you could have an effect on).

He says effective people focus their energy on their Circle of Influence. Many people waste their time giving their attention to things they can't reasonably control, e.g. other people reactions, the news, national sports.

I often point people to "I Hate the News"[0], a 2006 blog post from Aaron Swartz.

> It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.

[0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Whenever I think that newspapers may not be worth supporting, I think back on all the times that reporters have broken important stories of corruption in religious, political, and business sectors that have revealed the real harm that have come to so many victims. The eventual justice that can come from breaking those stories offer good reasons to support the news, even if some stories in between are duds.

Time scales will make you realize how most of current news are really allergic reactions.

Every week there's a new hot topic, lots of questions asked, lots of worries.. and then lots of nothing.

- greece dying

- srilanka dying

- venezuela collapsing

- argentina wiped

- lebanon

- syria

.. it goes on and on

you listen to it, think a lot, and a month later you forgot, busy thinking about the new alert. A year down the road you read about whatever country and realize all that was just noise.

I feel like almost every international news story can probably be traced back to some corporate interest: somebody is profiting based on the public being aware of/believing that news story.

All those places seem far off and distant to a lot of people… just “noise”.

In all of those cases those things dismissed as noise were the sounds of millions of peoples lives being torn apart.

But yes far away and distant - oh unless one’s relatives were fleeing their soon to be bombed homes like my Syrian American coworker.

To be able to ignore those events is only for the lucky - but can (for now) doesn’t mean should. Even the lucky should not ignore them. Also I say “for now”, because in most cases the far off events quickly influence local events - many of those are directly effecting American border communities, and also national politics through a nationalistic platform by a party.

greece is not far from me, it's not necessarily distance, to me it's just news medias that are just shallow amplifiers (sensationalism)

What might strike a balance for most is a weekly summary of most important news from around the world + daily local news. For this I use the section called “The World this week” in The Economist through their rss(https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml) and for local news I’ve subscribed to a popular local newspaper physical copy that I read in the morning with a cup of tea. If I feel like digging deeper into a news piece from either of the two, I’ll just google it to read long form articles on it.

See also, "The case against news (2011)" by Bryan Caplan, https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.h....

Also, this should be marked as 2013.

Reading the news is certainly not good for your productivity.

Similarly, being politically active is on average a waste of your time if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings.

But if every able citizen follows the logic of those two facts, the country will be much worse off.

Yes, I agree, its better to free-ride off the citizen-participation of other, more naive citizens than to invest your own time in improving society. But at a certain point, when everyone becomes a free-rider, the political class becomes predatory and you get a dysfunctional state. Riots. Shortages. Pollution. Failing healthcare. Invasion. Corruption. Each time the form is different but the source is citizen apathy.

In other words, if you ignore the news long enough, the news will come and knock on your door.

> The news will come and knock at your door

I would argue that for the vast amount of things that happen in the world, this is a good thing. Just about the right level of care and concern.

It is usually too late to save your house and your savings when this happens. As experienced by my ancestors who had to flee their homeland and move to America. This is why I am not politically apathetic in America. Things happen very slowly and then very quickly in a governmental collapse. By then, your savings are confiscated or inflated away before you can take action. Travel can become prohibitively expensive or forbidden. It becomes very difficult to get your family and resources out. Usually you leave penniless and arrive on foreign shores as a destitute refugee no matter what your status and expectations were in your former life and country. Engineers become taxi drivers. Scientists become house cleaners. Then you rebuild and you teach your kids that you should always prepare for the worst case and never take civil society for granted.

This article is from 2013 and I can say, 10 years after the article was originally launched situation got even worse...

Sure, but if there are injustices and abuses against humanity that happen, one should be aware--we can't afford to pretend that bad things don't happen.

Why is that the only other option? Why can't we just acknowledge that bad things happen without having to know the details of every bad thing?

And is that awareness creating any useful action?

Yes, and recent examples show it: - News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens. - News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine. - another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.

Are you suggesting that protests in e.g. Iraq against a book burning in Sweden are useful actions? That violent rioting in e.g. Marseille is a useful action against police misconduct in Paris? I don't see many links between awareness of the details of something that happens far away from me and the usefulness of my actions.

There are plenty of injustices happening locally against which you can take meaningful action.

It's quite unlikely that these local injustices appear in the news that you consume: local news are on life support, and everything else has a scope that massively surpassed your locality, whatever that might be.

That's an issue which can be solved. Consume more location appropriate news. Social media (ironically, when considering what kind of media is bad for you) can also provide decent local news information.

Maybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.

[dead]

I used to read the news first thing in the morning when I woke up. Lately, I started to have zero motivation to do anything. And overall I felt a bit depressed the whole day. So I made a commitment a couple of days ago to stop reading any news before mid-day. Can't yet say how much it is helping, but overall I feel better and I'm more productive.

Question is really whether news has ever been good for you. I think it probably has — and you can basically recreate that environment by checking a major newspaper of your choice between once a day and once a week.

There’s a balance between being completely uninformed about what’s happening in the world vs. refreshing twitter every 30 seconds.

The news has been making me feel increasingly sad over the last few months, and coincidentally last night I decided to do something about it.

I deleted news apps from my devices, deleted news site bookmarks frm Firefox, and used LeechBlock to block the news sites that I'm likely to visit. Also blocked Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. I almost never watch broadcast tv so that doesn't need any special measures.

I still get a "morning briefing" email from the Guardian, which I probably stay subscribed to, but I won't (can't) click any links. I hope to establish a routine for scanning and then deleting it. If not I'll unsubscribe.

I'm considering a subscription to a dead tree weekly news summary like the Guardian Weekly - but I'd like to wait a few months first.

Half-way through Day One I feel pretty good and noticeably less distracted. I'm interested to see how this goes.

My mother, I love her, but all of her worldview is based off of the news. No social life, no hobbies, no books, no real experience.

It’s amazing, but understandable, how she perceives risk. Cars get in crashes. Flights are always delayed. Big cities are dangerous.

The news has done its job keeping her engaged but she is no better for it

I miss the old Google News that would let you customize which topics float to the top and deemphasize most other noise with the exception of major headlines.

Then an update a few years ago made the algorithm much more recommendation and ads and controversy/engagement driven, and my beloved collection of science, nature, local, and tech news turned into nothing more than a constant stream of culture wars, international sports, and celebrity gossip. I stopped paying attention after that.

I would gladly pay for a service that curates news about the topics I care about, and nothing more. I especially don't want to know what of of braindead vitriol the talking heads are shouting at each other this week. Just give me the boring wire service stuff and leave out the sensationalist blogspam headlines, please...

Because the news tends to focus on negative events, one of the things you probably do in the morning is read about the most distressing occurrences that took place worldwide in the past 24 hours. This can give you the impression that the world is a sad and dangerous place, but it's actually a problem of limited sampling.

Although this phenomenon is not new—the saying "if it bleeds, it leads" has been around as long as newspapers have existed—there is a new aspect to it due to the constant exposure we have today. Instead of simply reading the morning paper or watching the news in the evening, many people now compulsively check for the latest atrocities every few minutes. They also receive forwarded articles from well-meaning friends, which further incentivizes sensationalist media to produce an endless stream of emotionally and mentally toxic content.

The media tends to exaggerate minor flaws and inefficiencies in our otherwise remarkable modern civilization, presenting them as existential disasters and oppressive systems. Even the relatively minor inconveniences of life in the 21st century are portrayed as hardships comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor combined.

Consequently, some of the most privileged and safest individuals in human history are led to perceive themselves constantly as threatened victims engaged in a desperate battle against an oppressive regime. They literally fear for their lives while walking the streets, despite the fact that, by any rational historical standard, we live in a nearly utopian society. :)

If I concede the fact that I enjoy knowing what's going on around me, does that make it less bad for me?

This article (and these comments) seem to be focusing on some kind of "value", but to me the knowledge is the end, not the means.

Knowing stuff is cool, y'all.

What about Netflix, did they do a study on that one? How is binging on say "The Last of Us", which is also disturbing and almost life-like, from say binging on Covid articles trying to understand the real-life phenomenon and where the hell it was taking us at the time.

* I agree that binging on anything is unhealthy and tabloid news about "what the man in the falling car felt" (their example) are stupid, but first, not all news are tabloid-style news, second, other entertainment options sometimes turn out not too much better.

I gave up reading the news about six months ago and decided to focus on acts of service instead. Within three weeks, my outlook on the world turned much more positive and my depression vanished.

When it comes to "fake news" the bad part is the "news" and not the "fake". That is, quite a bit of "news", such as Fox News' handwringing about caravans approaching the U.S.-Mexico border is primarily relevant for the emotional effect it has. By faking it you can get a certain emotional effect more reliably and without the cost and hazard of really reporting, but the emotional effect is the same.

I'm trying to understand your point. What is fake about those caravans? Those are real people as far as I know, who are going to have a real impact on others and by others. If such a caravan was passing through your town or coming to your town, wouldn't it be odd if nobody reported on it?

It's the sense of crisis associated with it and the continuous drumbeat about it.

My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children.

Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration"

Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is

https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be...

but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National.

---

Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.

Beginning from the end of your comment, I don't think that hate or anger is wrong. It is a human emotion as valid as any other, and closely related to empathy. You are angry at the villain because you feel sympathy with the victim. There is a reason we are born with the capacity of these emotions and that they never go away. The same goes for all mammals. Only reptiles lack emotions and will always keep their cool. With that said, hate and anger are very unpleasant emotions, and it clashes completely with the idea of watching or reading the news to wind down in the evening or night.

The above is meant about news that makes you angry or makes you hate because they are reporting on something horrible that has happened: Wars, crime, corruption. Not news that makes people angry just by the style.

I don't watch televised news, because it is pure poison on all channels. Even if you didn't understand the language the anchor was talking, you feel bad just from the hatred and disgust of the presenters directed at their viewers. It is psychological war and it is completely on purpose. If somebody entered your house and talked to your face in the same manner as the news anchors, you'd think it was an escaped psychopath or punch the person in the face. But people tune in every night to watch these freaks, or even worse - leave them on all day.

But back to text news and articles, if you strip out all emotion and just stick to the facts you end up with basically a bunch of Excel spreadsheets for your reporting. This much money was spent on that, so many soldiers died in that offensive, that many years in prison was given to the murderer. What about interviews? Pretty much all politicians, business owners, and other influential people are so well media trained now that interviews have little value. They have endless phrases of lies that sound good to answer any question. This is where the journalist instead will have to inform the reader what's going on and that means inserting some of his or her own views and opinions. And it's good if it's done in a transparent way. It is completely ridiculous how print media today are snaking and slithering around with their words to convince their public that somebody is a bad guy or good guy, instead of just stating their opinion and getting over with it.

With all this, I think any respectable media should report on things such as immigrant caravans and immigrant fleets. It's a huge difference between that and the individual immigration that is more common. When masses of people (mostly men) arrive in this way, it is more akin to an invading army, especially when gang members and terrorists mix among the crowds, and especially when they proudly wave the banners and chant the slogans of the nations they are supposedly escaping from. Another aspect is the human trafficking involved with this kind of mass migration. Where is the investigation into the human trafficking lords when their ships sink, killing hundreds? Where is the responsibility of the human trafficker when they've helped a murderer over the border? All in all a huge deal everything and nothing to be hidden from reporting.

I would slightly disagree. Unfiltered news is bad for you. You can not have a plan or a set of plans for all things approaching you. But if you have plans and projects, some of the news is just no longer news, but actually project relevant events. And those can not be missed. So filter out what you must handle, but to have nothing at all that is raining on you, that sounds to idyllic to be true.

I often think the test of the usefulness of consuming news is whether you can explain it to someone else in any more detail than a soundbite. If you can only regurgitate the headline, you don't really understand it yourself and can't have a conversation about it - what was the point?

Sometimes having an opinion about a news story masquerades as understanding it, but this is quickly exposed.

On that link I get a giant banner on top of the story that says:

  Support the Guardian

  Fund independent journalism with $5 per month

  Support us

The author is careful to carve out an exception for "independent journalism" rather than news but, ironically, in a newspaper.

I can confirm. I stopped reading news, especially politics, during covid hysteria and my mental helath rise up.

Anecdotal evidence: Having news filtered by my friends gives me better perspective to actual manipulation narrative. Some trends are completely out of real problems that people have. Eventually you can see, how distraction through news works.

This article from 95' on the news is excellent:

https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth

> It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.

The most relevant pieces of news to me are weather reports, those emergency alerts I get on my phone (mostly weather-related), and week-old stories. The first two are immediately useful and actionable. The last one involves topics that have clearer information and staying power.

Previous discussions 2013

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244

What's "news"? I mean they're right, but all "content" generated in the name of "engagement" is bad for your mental health. If it's labeled as news or friend/influencer updates, it's the same.

The irony that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out is not lost on me.

The main point of this article has been pointed out before and is hardly novel or original. The earliest I know of is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, but unlikely to be the first.

If anything, the only ironic thing about this is that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out to you.

Read books not articles. It's actually a finance tip, but is true for news.

This can be applied with social media.

This past year I deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. I can honestly say, it has improved my overall mental health, and I now find myself learning more computer things with my time.

Certain types of news are more like cultural/societal events and stories that are worth following just to have some topic to bring up with other people. Stuff like a submarine implosion, or a 9/11, or an OJ Simpson trial. These are unique once in a lifetime events that give you some social currency.

Repetitive news like mass shootings or political BS is just noise, and quickly loses its novelty overtime. What results is you just gradually feel worse and more cynical over time without learning anything new or interesting.

Maybe people shouldn't be happily ignorant. Maybe people should become upset and perhaps then they will work towards change.

You're not the consumer of news. You are being consumed by the FUD. It's part of the business model to get you hooked.

Does checking Rotten Tomatoes and reading an article on how the Marvel Multiverse has gone downhill, count as news?

Back in the 1980s there was a TV channel in Los Angeles that had a "News" programs that would start off with all the murders, rapes, car crashes, etc. in LA, then they had all of those in the State of California, then they went on to all the tragedies in the U.S., and then they went on to entire world.

I'd get some food on the way home from work and sit and eat it while watching the "News" At the end of those three 1/2 hour programs I felt like shit.

After a few months of that I finally realized consuming all that horrific news was causing me to be pretty severely depressed. What led to that was a horrific deadly car crash in Africa that they showed at the end of their "World News".

I realized that my own life was going pretty well and I needed to keep that in mind and be thankful. So I quit consuming all that tragedy everyday.

A few years later "Fox Entertainment Group" bought that TV station and in the years after they transitioned from "horrific news" to "political news" that is focused on "outrage".

We can see now how that's very addictive for some folks. Their current outrage of the day is "Trans" folks and they will keep promoting that as long as their viewers tune in. After a bit they'll move on to a new "outrage of the day".

A good example of that is "Bumpstocks". FOX News and their viewers screamed about their right to have those for a few months, and then FOX News moved on to a new "outrage". A few months later Trump banned bumpstocks and I didn't see a single peep of outrage from Trump supporters or FOX News. I made a point to ask some of those on Facebook about that and they all said the same thing, "I don't care".

Truth is, just like that deadly car crash in Africa, trans folks have no affect on me or anyone who's not "trans" at all. And FOX News will move on to a new "outrage of the day" and their viewers will forget about Trans folks as soon as their given a new "outrage of the day" to be mad and scream about.

They are addicted to "outrage" and FOX News (and others) supply it. But if you turn that bullshit off and count your blessings you'll detox and be a lot happier.

I used to see it as a choice between being uninformed and informed. Now I see it as uninformed and misinformed and I'll take the former.

Michael Crichton nailed it with Gell Mann Amnesia[0]. I see it all over the place on topics I know well such as coverage of companies I worked at or political topics I was very well informed about.

Sometimes it feels innocent - a reporter too "dumb" to get the nuance and thus missing the point, sometimes it feels deliberate - eg consistently chopping off context to create an emotional charge. Either way, I saw that the news would lead me to the wrong conclusion if I didn't already know better - and then obviously that it must be leading me to wrong conclusions on topics where I don't know. Which is most.

[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

These articles always miss the difference between “the news” as a concept and “the organizations providing the news.”

If you keep eating at bad restaurants, does that mean food in general is bad? No. It means you need to find better restaurants or cook at home.

Curation is bad, news is neutral.

(2013)

It's not the news that's bad. It's that power incentivises people to become sociopaths.

I think it's more of a selection bias. In most structures, it's more beneficial have emotional detachment as emotion in most cases can be exploited to adds constraints to your decision space.

It's not that power holds a carrot and says, to hold me you must be a sociopath, it's that competition for power selects those lacking emotion.

I'm no anthropologist but I suspect since humans evolved from small groups, emotions developed because group work was beneficial. As humanity evolved rapidly into larger societies, it's not clear that emotion in these group sizes are so beneficial for survival.

At some point survival from the size of the group becomes nearly guaranteed and competing more within the group becomes a better survival strategy from an independent standpoint. These days you're far less likely to starve to death or be eaten by say a bear or lion because you live in large societies with all sorts of services and just basic proximity scares other predators away. Now the dynamic is about succeeding within the bounds of that system itself. Detaching from others and focusing on yourself tends to give you better success in that environment. Specific cases exist where you should work as a team but if you can do this without emotion and identify all these cases on a highly transactional basis, you can better optimize your own success.

Frankly I think it's kind of sad because, well, I have emotion and don't like to think of the world like a sociopath but... if you want to compete, you need to more and more.

That's not true. Unchecked power allows people to become sociopaths, and the more power is accumulated in a small group, the harder it is to check. It's not an automatic process, despite what those in power want you to believe.

The only check on power that can work as intended are higher values, such as honour, generosity and justness. Written laws and regulations are a failure for ordering society. Our modern nations have hundreds of thousands of laws, which nobody can know by heart. So we have this weird situation where it supposedly is okay for rulers to abuse their power since they're not breaking any laws or regulations. Or where there's always an impeachment process going on against a ruler, for some obscure law that makes sense to nobody.

There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever.

Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.

Didn't I just read a piece of news?

I was about to suggest it was an option piece, which is IMO worse, as news has to attempt to be reasonable while opinions just masquerade with the same reputability.

But then I scrolled to the bottom, and realised it's even worse than an option piece, it's a long-form advert:

> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

The guardian does that type of advertising of books etc all the time and it annoys me greatly.

They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top

Could you explain exactly what is wrong with it? If the article stands on it's own, why shouldn't it be published if it's part of a book?

Well for one, the article reads like a summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, a book published in 1985.

This indicates that the book advertised by this article doesn't add anything original, novel or interesting to the world.

With a headline like that, I expect an article citing various sources and experts, not a book summary. As it stands it's mostly an opinion piece. They have a separate section for opinion and they use a different background colour (a light orange). I don't want to invest in an article then see it cut short with an advert for the rest of the meat in the book.

It’s quite amusing that these days the Guardian is one the most outrage-baity outlets out there, especially its Opinion Pieces. Complete doom and gloom.

I've noticed a concerning amount of post-truth BS around here. Don't trust journalists, don't trust your government or institutions, the news is bad, do your own research, etc.

Yuck!

[flagged]

Yea, and those so called "scientists" and their crank "germ theory". It's a double edged sword.

Well, yes sensationalised news, full of emotional baggage is bad for mental wellbeing. However, I think completely opting out of news is a rather extreme choice. Having some information what is happening in your country, and in the world is good to feel a level of connectedness to it. Then there are practical reasons. Not knowing the news you might miss a major tax change, or an opportunity for some state benefit you might be entitled to (a low interest loan for first homeowners, a subsidy for an electric car or a PV setup). Then there are elections. How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? (this only applies to places where new parties pop up and dissapear every voting cycle, in places with more static selection of political forces this is less of a concern).

> How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news?

Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway.

I find it hard to resist glancing at aggregate news headlines, despite most of it being of no use to me or deliberately misleading. I find I don't have much of an emotional reaction to it, but maybe that's skepticism at work.

>Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway.

This is very much country depended I guess. Here in Poland if you only tuned in right before an election you'd miss a huge amount of crucial context.

> How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news?

You do know that in most countries, how representatives vote is public? See https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes for example.

For me, I used to read or watch the news because I wanted to be informed and maybe learn some things to better understand the world we live in.

After some time you start noticing the patterns: the short-termism, the over-seriousness and repetitiveness of it all coupled with usually shallow explanations and poor understanding of what happens. You can also notice how it slowly but surely starts to shape and distort your mind if you consume to much of it. And I always lamented this sad state of affairs.

I know that some people involved in the news production have an agenda to push but what I failed to realize for a long time was that most people consume the news as a form of entertainment. Then they can say they know about this or that and maybe have an opinion about it but that's it.

It's especially sad considering the huge influence of the media in politics but that's another story.

So yeah, I still want to be informed, educated and further my understanding of the world but the news aren't so useful for that. They could be. But they're not.