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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> Yet somehow this story make it to the front page of an international computer news web site.

what's news-worthy isn't the same as what's high impact.

Car crashes kill so many people every day, yet you barely hear about it. The most you'd hear about is a high speed chase or a high way pile up. Because it's rare and interesting.

So definitely examine what you read, but also learn about recency bias and such to prevent being "tricked" into thinking the wrong thing about the true state of the world.

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One of the only things that stuck with me from my statistics course at university was when the professor explained newsworthiness is (or at least should be) essentially a statistical function - the less expected an outcome is the more newsworthy it is. I think it’s fair to say citizens dying of a brain eating microbe is fairly unexpected and therefore newsworthy.

Which is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) similar to many approaches in ML training. We train our ability to predict the future (i.e. consequences of actions) by consuming information about things we would have mispredicted (so called novel events, or news).

The danger is that if we only consume newsworthy events, we lose sense of the baseline and start only predicting outliers everywhere. We need to consume statistics or everyday stories from a diverse group of people in addition to news.

I'd have thought in this context "newsworthiness" is perhaps more related to whether it is possible to craft an eye catching headline from a story.

It is, precisely for the reason GP gave. The eye-catching headlines are usually ones that tell you something that's unexpected. Sometimes because the event is unexpected, other times because the headline is massaged until the point it sounds as if the event is something unexpected.

But what are we defining newsworthy as? Your professor’s formula sounds like the formula for 24/7 news and clickbait. Shouldn’t something that is actually newsworthy be something that is highly impactful for a large amount of people?

The media news is not primarily intended to inform, it's primarily intended to make money, albeit through publishing stories that are 'new'.

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