Hacker News Reader

Comment by phn | Hacker News Reader

The question is, what less misleading alternative is there? Social media?

Read annual reports on crime stats and other things from your local, state, and federal governments (or equivalent). The world does not change so quickly. The rare time when news actually IS of practical importance to you (like with Flint MI water or the NC water issues) someone will probably tell you about it. Most of the news focuses on the tails of the distributions of things that happen, otherwise it wouldn't be 'news.' Thus if you use the news as a measure of what happens you are taking it from a source of things that literally almost never happen.

Books, novels, non-fiction.

Low-latency mediums are usually event-based ("Breaking News! You can't guess what just happened!").

High-latency mediums have the time to be understanding-based.

I've seen this being used by people arguing that it is why they read the papers rather than get their news online, unaware that the articles are written to the same deadlines, so they are simply getting the same information, but late.

Read news magazines that are published weekly (like The Economist) or monthly (like The Atlantic or Foreign Affairs).

Both of those are online.

I think you are confusing:

"we must get the story online within 5 minutes of it happening"

and

"Story written over a few hours/days/weeks and then published online"

Timing is an interesting component. Time certainly helps to separate fact from fiction, and important facts from not-so important facts.

However, I don't think it prevents bias, either from the authors own ideology or the status-quo at the time of writing.

EDIT: Also, access to past facts can be limited as well. History being written by the victors, etc.

Even moving from daily to weekly publications will improve the quality of the information. There's usually still a distorting focus on outlier events but they can generally afford to take the time to provide more context and wait for more facts to come in.

I think it's good to follow niche topics that you have an interest in. For general news, I think it's better to follow certain journalists who've given a good picture of where things are going over time. I'm not going to mention any names, but if you listen to a lot of people and podcasts you'll eventually find trusted people who can read the news for you and find things that have real significance. The people I listen to on political and world issues put out stuff maybe a few times a month.

Sometimes it's good to listen to their old podcasts and read their old articles and ask yourself if anything in those old podcasts and articles is still relevant. Did they recognize events changing the world or where they just focusing on clickbait B.S. The mark of crappy news is that if you read news from it a year ago absolutely none of it will matter now.

Unbiased ideologically neutral sites like Hacker News!

I'm so glad I had swallowed my coffee before reading this.

At least when you come to the comment sections, you get a whole load of competing individual perspectives, rather than the single one the original article purveys.

Most popular, pervading opinions are continually challenged, re-examined, and refined. Debates wholly grapple through the complete meaning of the issue from a wide range of perspectives without resulting to name calling, ad hominem attacks, tone policing, etc.

Within a narrow sphere, but the Hacker news audience is limited in diversity - and because of this so are the range of debates that go on here.

Generally speaking Hacker News focuses on upper middle class American issues. When we talk about the less well off its generally from the top looking down. Watch next time for the comments of the form "I'd gladly pay more taxes so XYZ wouldn't have to go through this". Few commenters ever truly see themselves personally getting into one of these situations.

In terms of politics this site is heavily westernized. Communism and the Chinese system does have some nice features (along with the bad), but its rare to see threads here explore the benefits.

None of this is necessarily bad, and I'd argue this site gives you a broader view of the world than reading traditional news. However its far from a zeitgeist of what's "really happening" in the world.

My comment was a heavy does of <sarcasm />. I wholeheartedly agree with your viewpoints though.

which is why comments in any major media are now completely polluted by professional influencers.

The ability to downvote doesn't help this.

I don't see why: if anything, I'd argue that it's just a layer of metacommentary. Just as not all articles are equally informative, not all opinions are equally informative.

The quality of the downvotes depends on the quality of the community.

Downvoting leads to groupthink in ways that upvoting does not.

It is true that upvoting leads to different kinds of groupthink.

Read history, philosophy, psychology, travel and talk to people (not "important" people, just people). That will learn you everything about the how and why human world is today.

Read science. Actual science not studies paid for by X industry/gov. That will learn you everything else.

Yes, this is hard. Probably more than one person can do. Which is why it is safe to assume you, nor anyone else who is talking at you knows what they are talking about.

"Actual science not studies paid for by X industry/gov."

What science isn't funded by either industry or government?

There is a small amount of work that is funded by private philanthropic organizations (e.g., Simon, Templeton), but these come with their own biases. In principle you could look for places that shield researches from influence by guaranteeing funding regardless of results, but this is almost nonexistent. Even tenured professors are very much driven by the carrot of research funds to buy equipment, pay underlings, or buy-out teaching responsibilities.

There's difference between funding science and funding a study that shows "whatever thing you want people to believe to sell your product". The latter is typically what gets regurgitated by news as "science" and what I referring to.

My meaning was, that you should learn science. Not just listen to what people tell you that sounds "sciency".

It's very hard to find any scientific/academic communities not penetrated by industry/gov't groupthink. Even academia is political and bought and paid for.

My theory is that slow news, like slow food, is better for you. I think the quality of weekly news magazines (like New Yorker) is superior to daily newspapers, which are themselves superior to web sites. By my theory, social media is the worst of all.

If your job does not require you to be aware of 24/7 news, weekly journals can be a good alternative.

More news sources, filtered separately by different biases, weighted by S/N ratio.

Automatically written articles drawing data from feeds. I just hope the inference engine doesn't take "likes" into account. (I'm going to be disappointed.)

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