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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all of the aforementioned problems plus being re-reported poorly), or not at all, and operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world. They aren't going to "read three books on a topic" (from the article), they're just going to remain oblivious. And that's far worse, in my opinion.

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Some of the arguments here remind me of the puritanical strains of religions. For eg: I am against Wahhabi Islam.

They're just like other Muslims but they take percepts that are valid in Islam and run with them to the ridiculous extreme.

Same goes for cutting down on Social media or regulating your consumption of news. There is nothing to be gained by turning into a puritan. It makes you feel good about yourself for a while but you're just cutting yourself off from vast dimensions of human experience.

Its possible to read HN once a day just to keep up instead of refreshing it every few hours.

Its possible to stop visiting twitter every hour and perhaps use it a few times a week.

Its possible to restrict your reading to good long form articles in NYT or WaPo or The Economist.

If we started completely cutting out anything and everything that had a remotely negative influence the logical conclusion is that we end up turning into Puritan Wahhabis who don't drink alcohol , ruthlessly suppress sexuality and generally lead colourless lives.

EDIT:

Downvoters , I'd appreciate if you gave your reasons.

I agree to a certain extent on your point about puritans. However I know people that recognized they have a tendency to overdo news or social media as soon as they get a bit of it.

That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse created a habit that is hard to control.

For which the only solution seems to be to go cold turkey in that case. As it seems much harder to reduce usage than to stop it entirely. So I guess it's a matter of what stage you identify yourself in, in this news and social media detox.

That is true of sex,alcohol or food or anything else.

You could go on a "fast" , ie avoid it for a while to break a destructive dependency but avoiding entirely ?

No thanks.

For some people, those things take over their lives in a horribly destructive way. Not everyone has the disposition to have "just a bit" of these things and no more. If you've got an addiction to something that's sucking the life out of you, avoiding it entirely makes a lot of sense to me.

Not a downvoter-the opposite in face.

From a rational, logical, and chemistry point of view, one cannot have a balanced view or understanding without positives and negatives.

The only thing that makes it work is critical thinking; or at least rational thinking, though rational thinking is easy enough to manipulate by any sophist. Recognizing the forms leads to recognizing the art of sophistry as it occurs. However, emotion is even easier to manipulate and inflame, ridding one of the possibilities of rational thought.

I think that you are getting downvoted for implying that an extreme position is the only alternative. I don't think that is necessary at all.

Its not that you have to ignore all news sources because of the possibility of bias (or easy, emotion filled "emotional truth" nuggets that fill so much of the discourse), but that you should be aware of these issues and react accordingly. Take time to reanalyze whether the narrative being pushed really makes sense. Compare it to other sources and validate the findings.

Don't just throw out everyone and only trust "NYT" or "WaPo" or "Fox News".

Well ... there's a flip side to this.

The people I know who are absolute news hounds end up knowing all the talking points of the talking heads, but don't actually think for themselves. I'm on the board of a small prep school and one of the most important things we do is teach critical thinking. This includes analyzing statements from a historical perspective, recognizing that the speaker probably has an agenda and memorization of the logical fallacies.

In the '80s I was a big fan of Rush Limbaugh ... he was entertaining and for the most part, did talk about current events. I felt informed. In '92 when Clinton was elected, his monologue quickly became hateful and negative. My mood was dramatically worse and I became hateful too. Funny since the Clinton years were coincident with a huge boon in my businesses. And then I found myself repeating his talking points without even thinking about it.

Finally I realized that I didn't actually believe much of it ... and when I looked at the vitriol the other side was spouting I didn't believe it either. I think it's pretty important to know the facts of what's happened in the world but you can't do that through news.

Now I completely ignore the news channels and generally skim through headlines. Some headlines are factual while others are purposely skewed to the writer's biases. It's easier to tell that someone has an agenda from the headline and I even occasionally read the first paragraph. I don't miss the period of my life where I was under the influence of the news channels, and I spend the time I've recouped in my community ... I find it easier and more useful to know the pulse of the area where I live.

The conclusion being:

You need a balance. Neither extreme works.

It's a rather universal principle.

You hit the nail on the head. There is real wisdom in your last sentence, and it's something I've come to know recently.

In the end, it is unlikely that all of us will have an impact that goes beyond our local community. What is the point of endlessly fretting over things far removed from us, and far out of our control? We can't all be heroes, and we can't all be a guiding light for the world, so what can we do?

We can be a force for good in our local community! I think it's the healthiest mindset to have, even if you do want to stay informed about world events.

I disagree.

In my experience, the people who actively don't follow any news at all are fully aware of their blindside. They just don't care (or have judged, quite reasonably, that they have more immediate personal concerns)

The worst people are those who are glued to the TV or net, closely watching things as if the future of the world depended on whether they knew politician X was fired right now or five minutes from now. They attach far too much drama and emotional involvement in matters which they have no control over. In addition, they're just as much in a bubble as the ones not engaged at all. The tragedy is that they don't realize it.

If you're in a discussion with somebody who doesn't follow the news, as long as they are reasonable, you can cover common ground fairly quickly, then get to whatever your point/question is. If you're in a discussion with somebody who is glued to the news, you can spend hours teasing out their bias and failing to reach any kind of common ground at all. That's because news promotes rhetoric instead of the dialectic. People are being taught to argue like lawyers over whatever beliefs they have because they spend hours invested in a medium that shows them lawyers arguing about events. They teach themselves how to have a closed mind.

Nope. I'll take a non-news consumer with an open mind over a msm news consumer any day of the week. Life is too short to program yourself to be so hard-headed and impervious to change.

I agree.

But I think someone's opinion on this will differ depending on where they fit on the political spectrum.

Right-wing thinks MSM has liberal bias - would rather people avoid it.

Left-wing wants people to consume more MSM - vice-versa.

Most of the people I know who intensely dislike the Mainstream Media (MSM, for anyone confused by the acronym) are either left-leaning or liberal-leaning.

(The two are not remotely the same.)

As a side note, I know precisely zero people who I would describe as "moderate" on the left-right spectrum who are at all enthusiastic about the state of 2016's news media. Of all political groups, I'd say that they're the most likely to be critical of the mainstream media.

I haven't intentionally ingested the "news" in any considerable manner in at least 10 years, probably more. That's by design; I just don't place a premium on it. Time, energy, and attention are all limited resources and I've decided that mine are best utilized in other ways. To the best of my knowledge, I can't say that my life has been negatively impacted at all by this decision. Sure, I'm left out of some cocktail party discussions, but those aren't very attractive to me in the first place.

A guy like me turns the "news" on and at best it feels like an advertisement wrapped in a reality show. At worst, it feels like a bunch of young children yelling at each other on a playground. There's an infinite amount of noise out there and it's my job to control the tuner and volume buttons.

All that said, I presume the real problem comes into play here when the ill-informed make decisions based on their position without acknowledging the situation.

>A guy like me turns the "news" on and at best it feels like an advertisement wrapped in a reality show. At worst, it feels like a bunch of young children yelling at each other on a playground.

TV news is the "at worst", but your description of "at best" sums up how I feel about all news better than I could have.

There is something distinctly off-putting about the sheer volume of advertising in news publications. It gives me this subtle sense that to be a "proper citizen" I must: read news; buy things.

I read on Quora from a senior editor at the Economist that the reason they charge the same rate for digital and print subscriptions is that because it's harder to ignore or block the full-page advertisements in the print, they are worth more to the advertiser, and therefore offset the cost of printing and delivering weekly subscriptions.

Isn't it a little weird that we place so much trust in our sources of information which, in turn, (almost) entirely rely on advertising revenue?

I agree. Ignoring bad news for the sake of feeling a bit better surely isn't a sign of being adult and mature.

However, I also believe that TV news and constant news checking are unnecessary and can make you depressed. You can easily get a wrong perception of mankind in general and the stupidity of other people by consuming too much news. This happened to me recently with news about Trump and the composition of his new government, for example. I genuinely got depressed from this. So I've limited my exposure a bit. It's not as if I won't find out who's in the new government anyway, and I don't need to hear about obviously stupid tweets, deliberate ignorance of facts and involuntary attempts to lead the world to WW3 every day. (What makes me depressed is ignorance, especially deliberate ignorance, not other other political views, and I'm sure I speak for many people in saying so.)

I've also found out that newspapers and their websites are much better than TV channels and their websites, so I'm now surfing to the Washington Post from time to time to keep me informed. Since I'm not living in an English-speaking country, subscribing to a good English international newspaper in paper form is a bit too expensive for me, but I've also found out that the International New York Tribune (formerly International Herald Tribune) is a great printed source for the weekend, and it's available at every international newsstand in the world. It's informative but not so long that you spend a whole afternoon on it. My girlfriend loves it and buys it all the time.

As for a bias of news, sorry I can't confirm that at all. Every news source is and always has been politically biased in one way or another, but in my experience the only people who complain about this are those who are unable to distinguish news from opinion and are heavily biased themselves.

News companies all have owners and management. I think it is important to be informed about who the owners of newspapers are, and what their political views are, because ultimately the owner will hire and fire the Chief Editor who sets the tone for the paper. It is also important to know what the Chief Editor's political views are too.

Its important to ask yourself why you trust a certain news outlet.

I disagree with you (a lot, actually). You can never trust just one news outlet alone, but only ever several news outlets+reputed press agencies. That doesn't mean that you need to compulsively check all of them constantly, though, and that was my whole point. If there is some real news to share, all newspapers will quickly jump on it anyway, which a quick comparison will easily confirm.

You can read any reputable well-established newspaper in the world whose language you understand and be well-informed enough for anything except for making particular business decisions. It doesn't matter at all whether the newspaper is right wing and conservative or liberal and progressive. That's because they report the same daily news which is based on the same reality, and any newspaper worth reading clearly distinguishes between opinion and news. I've compared many newspapers during my lifetime, and the only differences between them in the news sections is in the selection (what goes to front, what's on page 3) and some bias in the presentation, and neither small differences in the selection nor any bias in the presentation is of much relevance to any adult with a brain of his own.

The tone of the paper is vastly irrelevant for its news contents, it only influences whether you personally like editorials and invited opinions or not, and these are not news, of course.

That may or may not be true in the US. It's very much not true in the UK.

The far-right crazy papers, specifically the Mail and the Express, are notorious for leading with spurious non-stories and for making up post-factual "journalism" when it suits them.

You'll get a very distorted view of the world if you rely on them for accurate news reporting.

Non-political stories - major accidents, earthquakes, and so on - are more likely to be reported in a consistent way across all the outlets. But anything with even the faintest hint of a political angle - which includes a lot of news - will be mangled by each outlet's political slant.

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I didn't have yellow press (aka "boulevard journalism) in mind, though, to which I would definitely count Dailymail, Express or the German Bild. They tick differently and I wouldn't recommend any of them as a source of any information.

Try TheHill.com and AllSides.com. I find AllSides.com useful for presenting the same story from multiple sides and biases. The Hill aims to be apolitical and center biased, and does a fair job.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either site, and I do not endorse either site. My opinions are my own.

There are a limited amount of things in the wide-world you should be informed about. I care about climate change because that is something that will affect me and my lifestyle in the long run. So I prepare for that and plan ahead. Knowing the state of Italy's economy, whether it is flood, drought of earthquakes killing people in Asia, and if California is still becoming a desert spotted by game-of-life like wildfires, does not benefit me at all.

What does benefit me is what is going on in my local (as in town/municipality) government and community. Living in a European capital, even that is too much. I just don't follow those news either. I do follow cultural events, bird rescue fundraisers, local IT meetups, farmers' markets.

You see, you may be saying I am spectacularly ill-informed by some third-party information that is even less trustworthy than the so called "official channels", however, you probably live in the same sort of informational bubble. You argue with people on Facebook, you read your left or right wing media outlets, you are getting biased google search result and go with those. Maybe you are aware that others are affected by these cultural glass-walls, but not you, since you are aware of these issues. Well, you are probably just another brick in the wall. Sorry, no ad hominem here whatsoever. I simply wish to raise your awareness that

1. On average, you are not better than the average,

2. What you think really matters is probably not what really matters to me.

3. What do you care if some people are oblivious? Chances are, you know nothing about nutrition and go with the usual recommendations, just to end up being fat, diabetic or a cancer patient. What do _I_ care about that, though?

I'll be here, reading books on programming, organic farming, evolutionary biology and micro-brewing fruit wines. Oh yes, and dinosaurs, because dinosaurs and paleontology are real fucking entertaining and interesting to me. You do your thing. But don't force your "informed" standards on other people.

>operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world.

What sort of practical utility do you gain from being "informed" by "the news"? Could you give an example or two of how being informed by the news made you operate differently in your day to day life?

Good question (apart from the scare quotes!).

I run a software consultancy based in the UK. I work with a variety of subcontractors, most of whom are based in Europe. The outcome of Brexit might potentially have a significant impact on my way of working with Europeans; I don't think it will, but keeping abreast of that (developing) situation is fairly important to me.

I'm going to Venice on Wednesday. If there had been riots following the outcome of the constitutional referendum, I wouldn't be going to Venice on Wednesday.

Weren't the newspaper polls misinforming regarding the Brexit result? Perhaps their interest in Brexit is contrary to yours.

And haven't news organizations been known to exaggerate/mischaracterize small peaceful protests as large scale riots? I would think simply looking up "Venice riots" on YouTube and filtering for the last week or month would provide you the information you'd need rather than watching a talking head read a teleprompter while the same short video clip plays on repeat.

Well, I suppose if you believe that the news is all inherently false, biased, and generally uninformative, then it probably isn't going to be a good choice for you.

(Incidentally, the Brexit polls were somewhat wrong, but they were not conducted by the newspapers.)

But presumably you wouldn't even know to search YouTube for "Venice riots" if you hadn't been consuming any news?

I vote with an informed mind of what's going on in my community.

I'm a fan of extremely selective news following - having tested, it makes me much happier and has very little negative effect - but it comes with an important corollary: if you're going to avoid a topic, it's very important to also understand that means you don't know much about it.

I make rather a point of saying "I don't know much about that" when the topic of current affairs that I'm not following come up.

Then again, that's partially because when I do want to know about something, I tend to deep-dive on it (https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit). And it's largely because many of my friends are spectacularly highly informed on anything they're likely to comment on, and so any time I do slip and attempt to sound informed on something I'm not, I have about a 50% chance of sounding like a complete idiot.

So this may be much easier to do in my social circle.

Peer review feedback loops do tend to make one carefully consider what one says, however if the peers are too homogeneous, you may not get challenged on many things outside the bubble of their collective belief system. Heterogeneous peer systems, that is diversity, are more likely to keep you honest.

Has being well-informed about the news ever helped you in any way? Beyond, say, traffic and weather? National/international news, especially, since that's usually what people seem to care about for some reason? If it has, has it helped you enough to be worth the time and mental effort expended on it over the years?

I guess I can see how being unusually well informed in news relevant to a very specific economic sector might help one make a good investment choice or something, especially if you get that information before most others do, somehow. But general news? I think it's very unusual for that to improve one's life in any real way, especially compared to the time it takes. Knowing in detail the daily developments of e.g. the war in Syria or Trump's cabinet picks is of little more personal use than knowing who's backstabbing whom on Days of Our Lives. It's entertainment or a fairly low-value hobby, even when the reporting's well-done.

Eh, depends what's important to you.

Do you want to know about awful stuff people are doing to each other across the planet or spend an extra half hour on your pet woodwork project?

Choose the project most of the time and you'll likely be happier, though less informed. Why is it so important to be constantly reminded how awful humanity is every few minutes?

It doesn't have to be every few minutes. A few times per month would be enough.

I'm going to disagree with you. I live in a country where the local politics always floods the news. There is always a corruption charge against the president or some other politician. I find it very repetitive. Nothing is new.

I'm a technology enthusiast, so I would rather read articles on that.

I also feel much happier when not informed about the politics about my country.

I think this is inevitable. Even the effect of mass media going against so-called "fake news" won't have the effect they desire: In my estimation people will stop trusting and hence following all of it. It pays off, for as you and I have both gathered from the comments it is obvious that people do feel their lives improve once they "tune out". Since 2010 or so, this applies to me as well.

Besides, I don't know for how long mass media has existed in its entirety, but TV only existed for maybe 60 years. Before that we managed just fine without it and I think we'll manage just fine in the future as well. We'll find other ways to connect with matters we care about, which is the basis of news anyway.

When things such as what we need to spend our time on become obligatory, and enforced by social pressure, people will feel entrapped sooner or later. That's what's happening now. The media keeps dividing us into so many categories, and then passes judgment on all of us. To them, no one can escape, no one is free, no one is good - it's the only thing that sells. We're all stampeded on by editorials and pounded on by inducing guilt and forcing ads. Conflict is a cash cow.

Personally I think that the importance of news is terribly overrated - I've yet to hear of any reason for why it should be important that resonates with me. As I've said, I've tuned out for many years.

One thing to add: the only source I loyally follow is the No Agenda Show (http://www.noagendashow.com - a podcast which I help out technically, fully pro bono) because they are the only source of media that has no advertisers to keep happy, they get 100% of their income via donations, and they don't even digest the news as much as analyse where the news comes from, and what the interests and hidden agendas are of those that bring it. The show is interesting, fun, informative and thought provoking, so worth mentioning in its own right.

That being said — as it, despite my intentions, might be considered a plug because I am a volunteer with them (i.e. I am not benefitting from more listeners, though do get a kick out of seeing the numbers increase), it feels more appropriate to detach this bit from my parent response.

Sounds interesting, this is the kind of thing I have been looking for.

It took me all of a few minutes of listening to that podcast to realize that they're peddling conspiracy theories and consider themselves to occupy a similar space as Alex Jones' Infowars.

We didn't manage just fine before TV. We had two incredibly destructive World Wars, both following a much longer but even more violent history of colonial imperialism and domestic revolution.

In the UK we didn't get voting rights for all males until 1918, and voting rights for women until 1928. The US didn't get votes for women until 1920.

Before then, news had very limited popular political influence.

With the internet, we're increasingly seeing automated and industrialised fake "news" generation used for political leverage at the expense of impartial reporting of objective fact.

Yeah...this is how you have an even less-informed electorate. I follow the news because seeing what goes on helps shape my political views and decide how to vote. Not just for the president either. And not just to vote, I want to know if my congressman is doing something shady or damaging so I can make my voice heard with a phone call or email. Just saying "all news is bullshit" is horribly lazy.

> with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world.

For most of the things we do, we don't need to weigh in the geopolitical consequences in the other side of the world. Common sense works most of the time. The news media are in continuous war with common sense.

This is modulated by the fact that most people don't arrive at their opinions through critical thinking (I think it's overwhelmingly clear that humans are fundamentally irrational and not fundamentally rational).

So based on that, you could make a strong case that following the news will in the vast majority of cases turn an uninformed, dogmatic Democrat into an informed, eloquent Democrat, and same for Republicans, and therefore won't affect their vote. (Again, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not in all cases).

Then there's the issue of media quality. Is CNN high quality journalism? How much time did they devote to Yemen, then? (on the TV channel, that is) Is Trump eating KFC with a fork more important? The media blames Trump for this, but their ratings-obsession is their own responsibility.

The issue of Trump's phone call to Taiwan is a great example.

On CNN, you get pundit hysterics about Trump's "incompetence".

On Stratfor, you get an insanely good article[0] that goes in-depth on the historical context behind the US-Taiwan "non-relationship", the reasons why Trump "highly" likely planned the phone call carefully, why the Taiwan issue is a red-line issue for China, and why this play on Trump's part could signal a shift to put China back in their place. As Stratfor says: "In the Track II talks between U.S. and Chinese figures, it isn't uncommon for the [Chinese] to berate their American counterparts while the former offer declarations of cooperation and critiques of their own government's policies", so this Trump move may bring much-needed leverage back to the US.

This is just an example of very high-quality vs trash media coverage. Avoiding the mainstream press and seeking specialized press seems like a basic requirement if you want to be informed.

There are 2 "problems":

- People that stay in their bubble and only follow biased news (which includes mainstream news, which has a mediocrity bias. Most people are in this category)

- People that choose to follow almost no news, because there's no person al benefit (after all, if following the news doesn't directly earn you more money, you're wasting your time. This category includes probably quite a few people on HN, but few nationally)

The former cannot be "solved" without censorship. The latter is what very few people talk about, and it does not want to be solved.

We all want to live in a society where most people are informed, except the personal ROI of it is substantially negative. The smart choice is to be underinformed, if you value your time. The people claiming "we all have a societal duty to stay informed" never bring this up, and never offer a resolution to this dilemma. Kantian ethics (what I do is moral if and only if the world would still be fine if everyone did the same as me) disregards the fact that nobody wants to be the sucker.

[0]: https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/taiwan-trump-and-telephone-h...

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