Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

I stopped watching TV and reading news 5+ years ago. I don't have cable, Netflix subscription or anything like that. Most interestingly, I worked for The Huffington Post for 6 years. During this whole period, I probably read maybe 4-5 articles in total. For me, such attitude results to care about things that concern me or my family only. Sometimes people tell me the latest crazy news, like the airplane crash. Of course, most of the time they are surprised of my unawareness. I believe, there are pros and cons to this behavior. I'm less stressed for sure. I remember someone once told me that I live in my own world where there are no wars and everything is great. I personally consider it as a good thing. As for the cons, – I'm less awared of the latest world news and when my colleagues discuss yet another tragedy, I'm the worst interlocutor. But, that gives me a chance to ask questions. People like questions. At that point, it always helps to view any situation from the side, more objectively I would say.

I do read a lot of Hacker News, paper(!) books and a little bit of reddit.

Do you vote in elections and the like? If so, how do you choose a candidate/party to vote for?

I never voted in my life. I live in US for 4 years now, but not allowed to vote _yet_. I do not believe in the voting system. In my opinion, people's choice for one or another candidate/party is directly dependent on this candidate's marketing efforts. It doesn't make any sense, since one can be a "bad" guy by nature, but then good marketing does the trick and afterwards people vote for him/her. Some sort of a karma/rating system would probably work better, i.e. you are not allowed to run your campaign, until you collect 500 points. This approach would require candidates to merit the campaign first and require them to be "good" guys during their entire career.

Hasn't Trump turned this completely upside down?

He used his experience in media/showbiz to exploit the media to give him free PR all the time, whereas the other politicians had to 'work for it'.

It's like the Kardashians, they actively make an effort to be in the news for something, to maintain top of mind awareness...of their degeneracy.

He also said things that were plain interesting and outrageous to hear and see. Similar to slowing down for a train crash. No secret about that and really anyone could have quite easily reverse engineered and done the same. His big skill is more having, for lack of a better way to put it, 'balls' as well as no problem with the blowback or downside of his actions. That is the secret sauce with Trump. In a nutshell the other candidates, by comparison, were boring.

i think trump's win had a lot less to do with trump himself than other factors.

It's impossible to prove a contra positive so we'll never know if it was Comey, or the Russians or what that put him over the top. But, Trump did get himself within striking distance. So, I give him credit(?) for the birther movement, and Mexican rapists, and no puppet. Because those are the things that energized his base to the point where he could win with a little help from his friends.

>I do not believe in the voting system. In my opinion, people's choice for one or another candidate/party is directly dependent on this candidate's marketing efforts.

It's easy to say that when you know your President will kill you for being too involved in politics, as happens in Russia.

Wow, everybody is super sensitive about women in tech, but it's ok to make comments like this? Talk about multicultural respect.

Or maybe I am reading it wrong? Anyway, please be careful with this tone, it's very bad (as Italian, I know very well since 80% of the people I meet ask me "hey, what's up with mafia?").

How often do people change who the vote for based on news?

People make their decisions about voting and stick to them. 99.99% of the news that could change their vote is then rationalized away.

Is there any evidence to think that paying attention to news improves voting decisions? Indeed, how do you even grade things like presidents to know if you made the right decision in retrospect?

Even the concept of "improved voting decision" is all but impossible to evaluate. But on the other hand, studies have shown that people vote according to things like the state of the economy, I'd be interested to know how someone evaluated that (or if they care) without ever seeing/reading any news about it. Presumably just by looking at their own experience only.

The economist had an interesting write up of this past election. The found the single biggest determinant for how a county would vote was how sick that county was.

I can't even see how that would be correlated with the news.

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