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Comment by sean_patel | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why everyone is downvoting this. Care to explain, down-voters?

> I told them that people in my life would let me know if anything occurred that I needed to know.

This is so true. I told my girlfriend the same thing after she got mad that I quit news and said "Oh, you'll need to know important local news (stabbings, crime in San Francisco, protests for traffic etc).

That 1 time where someone 4 blocks from my home got run over by some dummy doing facebook live in her car while driving, the convenient store guy in my block asked me "Hey, did you hear about that so and so got run over." I said no, but you just told me. :)

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Here are a few reasons

* It puts the burden of collecting and summarizing relevant news on others

* You are at the mercy of the grapevine effect, which only gets worse as more and more people take up this solution so your news takes more hops before you receive it

* And, most importantly, your sources are also not getting their news first hand; their sources the very same crappy news outlets that you yourself rejected.

Not really though. If it's important, you have the option to do a dive and read up on something. At least for me, it's not about not paying attention. It's about not being force fed. The world can be an awful place especially when viewed through the lens of sensationalism. It's just not healthy for my household to be constantly connected to that. So what I do is try to pay attention on a meta level and only delve for details on my term. It requires intellectual honesty but in the end is healthier and more informative.

If there's only one source of news that feeds into the grapevine effect then you only need to tune into the grapevine.

There are like five journalistic camps that feed into my grapevine, and they all report the same stories, and spin five different opinions on the same daily topics. Thus, the grapevine provides the same complete set, five times, redundantly.

All of the stories from these camps are useless. The stories are not, in fact relevant, and so I do not care how slowly they appear at my feet. I usually just step over them anyway and go about my business.

Going one step further, I think 99% of the facts are irrelevant. It's the COVERAGE of the facts that matters. The presidential debates were a perfect example. WHAT was said was of absolutely no consequence. HOW it was said was equally inconsequential. What was important was all the chatter ABOUT what was said, and how it was said. The handful of media conglomerates TELL the vast majority of the population how to feel and what to think about what happened, and THAT'S the only important part to understand.

How does knowing that a train derailed and 300 people died, or that someone got stabbed, change your behavior in any way, shape or form? This may seem callous, but in my country the average person watches 3h of TV every day. That's 3 hours they could spend on a side-job, on a hobby, improving professional skills, getting fit, spending more time with their kids. Who cares that someone got stabbed? Most people care to "improve the world" (however dyfunctionally and pathologically) when they can't even be bothered to take care of themselves (75% of people in US are overweight) or to be good parents (1/3 of families in UK don't eat together at the dinner table, or even have a dinner table).

Not following the news is a perfectly rational choice. You'll be less stressed, much happier, less distracted therefore have better self-knowledge and a better capacity to self-actualize, and you can spend more time with your kids (who really need it).

In life, there aren't the uninformed and the informed. There are the uninformed and the misinformed.

You are addressing a point my comment didn't address. I didn't say that someone needs to know that stuff. My point was that relying on your social network to let you know about important news doesn't increase the quality of the news you do receive.

So you're relying on others (who are watching the news that you don't want to get contaminated with) to tell you the news? How is that any better than just listening to it yourself? It sounds remarkably worse to me: telephone, but with real events.

> I don't get why everyone is downvoting this. Care to explain, down-voters?

Please don't change the subject to downvotes. The HN guidelines already contain two admonitions against this and I'd like not to add a third.

But what if I really want to know. There is no explanation.

I managed to get answer from one of such downvoters: "I don't know, but it looks contradictory to general knowledge, so I downvoted you".

I hope, it will help.

If you have high IQ but lazy at explaining of basic things for regular Joe, regular Joe will downvote you, because he cannot follow you nor discuss with you.

At work, to check is my explanation is simple enough, I play a challenging game while thinking (I use sopwith, my IQ is about 140): if I'm able to think and play at same time, then my brain has some power to spare, so it is simple enough for people with IQ about 120. If not, then they will not be able to follow me. I use that technique for almost decade. Works well at work, when I have time to explain, e.g. in comments to tickets, emails, and so on.

That's a burden we all must bear, for the sake of not degrading the site. At least we all bear it equally.

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