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Comment by aklemm | Hacker News Reader

A lot of news stories in the past year have given me definitive direction in terms of how to spend my time politically. How to vote, which meetings to go to (redistricting, canvassing, etc.) More generally, I think they’ve all contributed to my mental models of the world.

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I wouldn't consider those to be matters affecting your life, career or business. They're really just interacting the news, like a hobby. Without the news, you wouldn't be interested in those things, and as a bonus, you wouldn't have the common (ie fairly useless) yet distorted mental models of the world that it gives people.

I have a more concrete example. Around the year 2000 I finished a computer science degree and was doing postgraduate in another subject. But it was getting boring and I decided to quit. My professor asked what I'd do next. I told him the plan I'd had all along - fall back on my CS degree and get a job as a programmer. What I didn't know, because I didn't read the news, was that the dot com crash had just happened and you couldn't get a job as a programmer. So I didn't, and spent a year or two unemployed.

Doesn't your example show how disadvantaged you were because you didn't keep up with the news? It surely affected your livelihood.

I guess OP doesn't need the news to figure out political candidates' positions.. or does s/he, since most political websites are just lies and empty promises. Choosing between e.g. the pro-environment or pro-coal candidate will surely have an effect on our lives in 20 years' time. Or one who wants to deploy a police state and harass all non-whites, or all "hippie weed smoker" types, etc..

He gave one example of where following news that directly affects your livelihood is useful. This is one of the reasons I’m on HN. The incessant NYTimes, Guardian and medium.com brain rot really do push me away though.

Well I'll give a counter example. After the dot com crash and the offshoring hype, I was discouraged from getting a job in programming and so I didn't until much, much later. And if you look at the number of CS grads by year you'll note there was a significant dip in number of grads after the dot com crash and it took more than a decade for the numbers to recover.

The fact that the news might be necessary to obtain such info strikes me as a bug not a feature. We shouldn't need media(tion) between would-be politicians and citizenry. Perhaps quaint and impractical now, but I wish we still lived in an era where politicians literally went from town to town and yelled their pitches directly to citizens in the town square.

I don't see the harm in just reading what politicians promise. My city recently had a local election. Each candidate got to write a paragraph about themselves. I read them all looking for a few key points that I felt were important, and came up with a shortlist. Then excluded a few because of less important things until I had enough candidates (6) to vote for. Pretty easy. No news required. I purposely tried to ignore their advertisements in the street that were uniformly saying "Vote for me because no reason but look at my face!"

> I wouldn't consider those to be matters affecting your life, career or business. They're really just interacting the news, like a hobby.

Knowing enough to vote sensibly is a duty of a citizen. It has a direct impact on everybody’s life in a more or less diffuse way, and for many people it is a matter of life and death. You’re right though that the direct benefit to an individual’s life is on average not significant, in most cases the time could be more profitably spent on developing yourself or those around you. Although that assumes that everyone else does their duty and maintains a reasonable political environment for those opting out to live in. It’s a tragedy of the commons, individuals acting purely in their interests will over time destroy the common space, unless we impose on ourselves and others a duty to maintain it.

If your aim is to vote responsibly, then the news is a poor place to get information to help you decide. Not just because of the obvious political biases, but choice of stories they lead you to believe are important. Sex scandals, he-said-she-saids, or some crime that gets all the attention for weeks while numerous other similar crimes are ignored. A lot of really unimportant gossip magazine type stories that have little to do with reality other than being cherry-picked from it. The news does a poor job of reporting honestly on dry boring information that has significant impact. Instead, it picks stories that it presents as important but in fact are chosen because they're engaging. An obvious example is the over-reporting of terrorism compared to car accidents. People vote on terrorism because the TV told them it's important and didn't say much about something boring like bad marriages or poor risk evaluation skills that silently ruin people's lives on a massive scale.

You can use Wikipedia instead. Look up wars, statistics about crime, cost of living, a law that you've been affected by, or whatever is important to you, as decided by you, not pushed into your head by the news. There are enough people voting according to what the TV told them is important that you're not really making things better by adding yourself to their ranks.

Alternatively, instead of passively ingesting information in the hopes that it will be useful to you, as soon as you decided you wanted to get a programming job you could have done a quick google search to learn about the state of the industry.

I believe that improving your ability to think critically and find information quickly when you need it will benefit you infinitely more than spending that time on watching the news.

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