No news is good news | Hacker News Reader

No news is good news

thomasjbevan.substack.com

209 pointsvitabenes154 comments

I have been a very strong adherent of this philosophy for over 30 years.

There’s an adage, “there’s nothing as worthless as yesterday’s news”. Which led me to wonder, “was it even worth knowing yesterday?”

I realized the solution was a low pass filter.

I first switched to a seven-page newspaper (CSM) delivered through the mail. I realised the editors had to figure out whether it would still be interesting by the time it arrived and important enough to take up space in the paper.

I soon switched to a weekly newspaper (The Economist) and monthlies. I haven’t looked back. The nice thing about a paper like the economist is remained relatively small (few pages) so had to make the same class of decision as the CSM, rather than expand the paper.

I also have an RSS list of trade journals and such that I skim once a week, reading the odd title that looks interesting. Most of the time it’s only a handful of articles.

As for the high frequency stuff and stuff outside my bubble: I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.

What Ukraine situation? :)

It was just a bad joke! :'(

...maybe it was that bad and it deserves all the downvotes, but given the context of the previous comment, I didn't think it was so awful...

What's interesting about this is you picked:

1. Extremely high quality publications. 2. In a controlled manner.

That's not "no news" at all, it's a healthy relationship to quality news.

Good point. I interpret “nothing as worthless” to mean “extremely low worth, but not necessarily nil” and indeed instead of “worth” I could say “worth in aggregate”

Clearly there things worth knowing and not all of them were by Aristotle, Bach, Newton or Wittgenstein:-). The low pass filter screens put the froth; the selection of sources, the dross.

Not that I even read every article in The Economist, but I do read about things I wouldn’t notice or bother to were I reading from the firehose.

Side point: great thing about HN is that someone can say “here’s a clarification or contradiction in what you said” and have it often not be hairsplitting, so can spark a conversation rather than shut one down.

How does HN fit in this picture?

That’s a great question! I do scan titles from an RSS feed more often than one might expect but ignore what I think of as “froth”. More example while a “show HN” might be like catnip to me, in reality I skip most of them (sorry, brave show-ers, you guys are great).

I’m not much of a social media conversationalist but I do find the discourse level of HN in the topics that interest me typically high enough that I often learn from it, thus it’s worth it and fun to participate.

(Discourse quality is bimodal but that’s true at a cocktail party too, even one full of nerds)

Similar to you, I keep my news limited to the local Sunday paper, HN, and word of mouth. Unlike you, I’ve found that Ukraine seems to be all anyone wants to talk about lately.

> I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation.

Speaking of "weekly" discussions, the Ukraine situation has been brought up in my weekly Church prayers since it started.

Generally speaking, if it a current event that the Priests make 2 or 3 "intentions" for (in the Catholic mass, the prayers that occur after the Homily but before the preparations), its an incredible event. In many situations, the words are vague so that it applies to as broadly as possible (ex: there usually is something about wars and disasters), but Ukraine specifically is brought up in those prayers in my experience.

Which makes sense, the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades.

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Generally speaking, the intentions are specific to the parish community (pray for X who died last week) and local. Sometimes, a "sister parish" from another side of the world get their intentions emailed to our Church (ex: a hurricane that affects Haiti will be brought up, because our "sister-Parish" is in Haiti, so their "local" issues are brought up in our prayers as well. My current Parish doesn't have a sister-parish, but my last one had one in Haiti). For a global event to be brought up in specific terms (more so than just "prayer to end wars". But a specific "prayer to help the people of Ukraine") is pretty rare.

I am greatly in support of Ukraine and the destruction of the invaders, but

> the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades

Could this really be true?

> Could this really be true?

In the years following the Second World War, a timeframe that could be construed as ‘many decades’, I’d call it true.

Unless your reading of the referent is ‘all humans everywhere’ in which case, it’s probably debatable. Either way, it’s bad.

Seems unlikely given wars that are going on now, like Yemen, or resource wars like Congo, or genocide like Burma, Rwanda, Cambodia…

Humans’ abilities to make others suffer continually amazes and horrifies me.

This gets at what I was talking about. I think people in other regions have also suffered greatly. This is not to detract from the suffering of the Ukrainians, but is just to clarify the facts.

I think that this is larger and more intensive than the Yemen war - it seems that already in this month the combatants in Ukraine have had as much or more casualties than all the years of Yemen war; Yemen has had 15000 civilians directly killed by war but I think Mariupol alone will see that much when the fighting ends and bodies are dug out of the rubble, if we look at displaced persons, Wikipedia states that Yemen has displaced 4 million but this conflict has already displaced 10 million, etc.

The last weeks in Ukraine have seen more damage than Yemen-like conflicts had on their worse year, the Russian invasion firepower is simply on a different scale than what Yemen or Houthi forces could muster. The intensity of this war, as a mass full scale industrial land war, actually is unusually large.

> Could this really be true?

The shear amount of large-scale artillery barrages going on is large enough to be picked up by NASA's FIRMS satellite. And there seems to be many Twitter threads where people collect information from that FIRMS / Forest Fire satellite to document the artillery strikes in realtime.

Not even in the earlier wars of Russian aggression (Second Chechen War or Georgia War) seem to have this level of artillery.

That being said: a fair amount of it is Ukrainians counter-artillery striking Russians and fighting back (which Chechnya and Georgia were largely unable to do effectively). So perhaps your point is that Ukraine isn't a one-sided massacre and has mounted at least some effective means of defense?

Ukraine would be suffering more if Russia managed to get within Artillery Strike of Kyiv for example, but the Ukrainian forces have stalled out that advance... largely keeping Kyiv safe from destruction (well... to a greater degree than we've seen so far anyway). Mariupol on the other hand isn't as lucky, and widespread artillery is clearly being used upon that city.

With humanitarian corridors closed, its clear that Mariupol is being sieged, Leningrad style, and there's widespread reports of starvation to death. There's also reports of many civilians being transferred to Russian camps. Then there are also the famous "hospital strikes" and "theater strikes" have have killed hundreds alone.

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But I guess you're right. Things could be worse for some other cities / areas who were unable to fight back against their oppressors. Most of the genocide events of the past decades are pretty horrible as well.

But there needs to be something to be said about the huge, large-scale use of artillery that really hasn't been seen since WW2-era mass combat.

Countries don't suffer or experience pain, people (and other living things) do.

The notion that individual suffering can be added up for some total of inhumanity is somewhat dubious, as are comparisons of individual deaths: is it the number of casualties that matters, does it suffering experienced before death factor in, and does it make a difference if it was caused intentionally and without good cause, accidentally, naturally, etc.?

But yeah, it's rather gruesome. Syria is very similar, for some reason.

I think it's context specific.

Suffering caused by armed conflict, in Europe? Probably. (I'm from Sarajevo and I think we are a close second if not the first.)

Mass suffering by any cause anywhere? Between the Tsunamis and diseases and earthquakes and awful civil wars and genocides, sadly, I think the competition is quite stiff :(

There is also the pandemic that killed around 1 in 400 worldwide and is still causing around 15'000 deaths per day.

Usually elder people (average 78y) with other comorbidities. Yes, we are mortal.

I'm more concerned that a lot of friends in our parish called for war and justify censorship or strict sanctions. I guess this are not Christian values.

Sure, we should help. But not only Ukrainian's but all people that are damaged by war. We should also pray for our enemies.

> I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.

Could be your own bubble. Most everyone in my circle has brought it up. Many of us brought it up because we know people who are from Ukraine or have lived there extensively. I live and work in SV. Lots of Ukrainians work and live here.

So how exactly did you find out about the war and when?

Probably the economist, though it might have been mentioned on HN

You don’t consider HN as daily changing news?

Read my other comments in this thread about HN, but I mainly do a title skim, and a topic that’s an outlier but appears on the front page might cause me to look. Also I do comment and follow up.

I heard about about the war build up in the Economist weeks/months before it hit most Australian news media (ABC/SMH).

I much preferred the print CSM to their online version. With the print I knew what to read front to back. With their web version it seems less organized. Stories remain for a week or longer as new ones crop up. It’s hard to know where to focus.

The economist model is much better. A dedicate weekly edition you can read front to back with daily articles posted outside of that.

In the olden days when coal fires in open fireplaces were part of daily life, old newspapers were used to build up the base of the fire. You would scrunch up sheets of newspaper, pack them into the hearth, then add some kindling on top, then add a modest amount of coal, preferably dry coal.

With a single match you would then set light to the scrunched up newspaper, which would set light to the wood, which would get the coal started. Once the coal was glowing you could add more coal and the fire would be truly lit.

To speed up the process you could hold up a sheet or two of broadsheet newspaper over the fireplace, so air would be sucked in at the bottom to hold the flat sheets tight over the fireplace opening, making the fire roar. This was like 'turbo mode'.

This whole process was time consuming and you would generally be using newspapers that were a few days old. Frequently this 'news' had some real gems in it. Removed from the original context by a few days, the news articles often had details that were not important at the time, but, with hindsight, made them somewhat curious.

Because you might be holding this news up around the fireplace for a few minutes with it lit up by a roaring fire, you were sort of obligated to read beyond the headlines.

There were different wars at the time, as well as labour disputes. It was often that you would read something that foreshadowed the news of the day on the radio - which we called 'wireless' back then.

I found that the old news, read this way, was a lot more thought provoking. I found myself questioning more.

Nowadays you could go onto the Internet Archive and find the headlines for a given day. However, we tend not to do that. The news just morphs from one day to the next, lacking distinct daily episodes like it did in the days of printed papers. Articles can be edited and updated, to be the same but different.

I agree with the article and try to encourage relatives to stay away from the gogglebox. The TV news is utterly toxic. But I feel that it is end times for this mainstream media. Only boomers truly consume it, anyone under fifty isn't tuned in and were not around when the news informed a national conversation.

The blanket propaganda/news of today is not the same as the national conversation that was once a thing. The Overton Window has gone widescreen and narrow at the same time. If you are not with the mainstream narrative then you can only be deemed to be 'worse than Trump/Putin/Assad/Hitler/Farage'. Or a communist. What was the left has got old and conservative. Or co-opted, particularly when it comes to identity politics. It has become infantilised with the majority under fifty just opting out of giving a damn.

LOL the "olden days" of open fires are very much alive and well here in NZ. There's a small town near me that gets smog in winter due to coal smoke from people who only have space heaters and single glazing.

The idea that only local news affects me is simply wrong, because the world is connected and things are influential.

I do not live in Texas, but the Texas legislature restricting access to healthcare and allowing citizens to sue providers affects because certain political parties will treat that as a template for laws across the country, including in my area.

The Florida legislature trying to ban books and discussion of topics once again sets precedent that will become attempted law in my area.

People need to be aware of these efforts to know what to look for in their community and to prepare to counter such efforts. Information spreads and strategies are organized. Waiting until something is in my local area before trying to respond is guaranteed to lose.

Even on a large scale, knowing about international conflict made me aware that I should stockpile Baltic Birch plywood before its price skyrocketed. Reading the news saved me hundreds of dollars.

Fundamentally, ignoring the news is a luxury afforded to those who benefit from the current power structure. If you are well off and white, yes, you can probably ignore the news. If a subset of the government is constantly trying to find ways to harass you, deny you the right to vote or get healthcare, you have to be aware of things to prepare for and effectively counter them.

Conversely, you could follow the news, buy a home because you think you'd be permanently priced out due to investors, and end up underwater in a few years. Because you read the news, you'll choose to make financial decisions, some might be wins, but not all are guaranteed to be wins.

Agree with this so much. A lot of people take pride in being naive about the news. That's a privilege if you live in a reasonable environment, when others take care of reading the news, defending you from unreasonable legislations, policies, etc. It's not something to recommend to others, though. Imagine living under an oppressive government (this is surprisingly common) that invents laws every day just to arrest you for saying the wrong thing - knowing how to minimize your chance of getting arrested randomly is critical.

Why follow local news? In my case it can be summarized to violence and petty politics. The day something important and out of ordinary happens I will probably know about it from family and friends before it became news.

Far away problems are so much more interesting than those nearby. You needn't really do anything about them, and its much easier to assign your own valuation to anything you do. Your successes can be trumpeted as much as you like and your failures need never be known to anyone but you.

Yes! And unlike nearby problems you know you can't really do anything about them. How many people in the US would read a national story about crime or education without knowing who the police chief is of their city, or who is on the school board, or even who is on their city council..

This is true, there's an inner kibitzer inside all of us who needs material. This is the real source of entertainment that the article mentions. Every section of the paper caters to this: what would you do about the war, would you have given poor people better benefits, would you have slapped Chris Rock, what would you have worn to the awards, would you go out with that guy, how should your team have set up their defense?

The only actionable section is the weather report, you can decide shorts or umbrella.

The piece is utterly right. News in the constantly-coming format is junk food. Almost no context is given, even thought nothing at all makes sense if you just watched the news. What is NATO, what is a central bank? Why are the same teams at the top of the league? All of these things need some basic explanation that is never in the news, but always in any basic long-form piece.

International and national news are often important, but rarely immediate. By not immediate I mean that you can't affect it, it won't affect you and you don't have to do anything about it. Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe? Interesting, but nothing to do with me really. Ship stuck sideways in a canal? That might cause problems at work later and maybe I should get that bike I was planning on now rather than later, but I'll be fine. War between nearby countries that produce oil and food... I better check my emergency stocks are in good shape and that full electric car sounds good right about now? And so on, important and some of them will affect you, but usually with a delay or in a roundabout way.

Local on the other hand. Very immediate, but often not that important, at least outside your local area. Sometimes you can even affect things and if it's something that can affect you and requires action, it might be a matter of hours. Water main breaks, you won't have running water for three days? Fill up buckets, head to the store, right now! But that's a minor inconvenience compared to international news, if they end up affecting you.

> Far away problems are so much more interesting than those nearby.

However, as the world gets more and more connected, far away problems have a tendency to become nearby problems real fast.

I'll come out of my shell a few times a week and won't understand what's going on. News sites just tell me the last 18 hours' worth of updates... So... I either disengage entirely and can't carry on a conversation or I stay engaged and worry about events I cannot affect.

I'd like a "I haven't checked the news in [7] days and some guy at work mentioned [Ukraine talking to the UN], what's that all about?" website.

I guess it'd be 7 days worth of news synopses for the topic.

[7 days ago this city fell, Joe said stern words about it, and the Sauds started selling oil in Yuan because it didn't want China to get all its oil from Russia.]

[6 days ago that city was retaken, and everyone was surprised.]

[5 days ago Joe said more stern words but had no effect.]

etc.

Can just read the Economist weekly. Their articles are very brief but well written summaries.

Also heavily editorialized with a sharp left / European bias

The Economist is many things, but "sharp left" it is only to a certain subset of people.

The rest of the world would mostly call it "left-leaning", or maybe "radical centrist".

Perhaps more like globalist/corporatist, which reflects their recent ownership?

In 2015, Pearson - a publishing company - sold its controlling stake to a bunch of corporate owners, like the Agnellis (43%) and the Rotschilds (21%), among others.

The change in their editorial direction was immediately visible (I had been a subscriber/reader for 35+ years until 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Group

I wouldn't argue with that one, either. But it's also not "hard left" :)

The word - if we're willing to shed many of the more populist overtones around it - is probably "neoliberalism". Consistently siding with money & corporations, with a democratic bent. (But not too much!)

Since 2016, it's more and more living on its reputation and not coming quite to terms with the changes in the world. It is still firmly rooted in facts - can't really provide economic guidance when you deny realities - but it seems somewhat unable to engage with the rise of populism and nationalism in an economically intertwined world.

Not unlike centrism :)

Sharp left, not hard left :) Think of it like a sharp taste, as in "distinct", "memorable"

It's not distinctly or memorably left, either. It really, really isn't. It's milquetoast centrist with a helping of globalism, and a good chunk of neoliberalism.

You won't see it calling to defund the police, or that we should tax the bejeezus out of billionaires. And these are moderately left, not memorably left.

The Rothschilds have had a substantial stake in the Economist for 70 years, including prior to the time when Pearson was a shareholder. Pearson did not control the board, had only 6 of the 13 board seats, and never had majority control of the company. It's unclear what is meant by "corporate owners;" Pearson is a publicly traded corporation.

I'm also a long-time subscriber and do not understand the "shift" you are referring to. The Economist has been pro-free-trade, generally against heavy regulation, and a magazine that consistently takes small-l liberal positions for a very long time. That stance means that sometimes they are right - deregulation has been good in many areas - but sometimes they get it wrong, when, for example, free trade may have adverse effects.

Sometimes they take positions that are bad - they argued for the second Iraq war - but they are pretty up front about their biases, and generally don't represent their biases as purely objective facts, as many traditional newspapers do. Their writing is clear and concise and is not meant to be consumed uncritically. The magazine is still unparalleled for what it offers.

Pearson had a 50% stake, most of which was sold to the Agnellis. So now, the Agnellis and the Rotschilds are the largest (and, together, controlling) shareholders.

Board members like Lady de Rothschild and Eric "you have no privacy" Schmidt publicly supported/donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Rotschilds were invited by the Clintons to spend their honeymoon at the White House. The rest of the board reads like the attendees at the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. The very definition of elitism, and collusion with the governments (Schmidt, Alex Karp, who is also on the board, there are also Sirs and Baronesses). "Free trade" - yes, reserved for the multinationals, Most definitely not mom-and-pop, small/medium business oriented anymore (which they used to be, before the sale).

The fact that they (probably still) have superbly written articles should not disguise the shift in their political stance.

I've actually found that Improve the News [1] is good for something like that. It has sliders to let you select what kind of new you are looking for with one of the sliders which controls "shelf life" ranging from short to long and "recency" from evergreen to recent. Not exactly what you are looking for, but I've found it can serve a similar purpose.

[1] https://www.improvethenews.org/

I think that left/right categorization thing actually makes it worse. I'd like a "just the facts" option.

I used to think the same, but eventually realized that both "facts" and, perhaps most especially, the omission-of-coverage categorize a journal as left or right...

Even the words a journal uses are dog whistles for "we think alike". "Latinx" versus "Latino". "Illegal Immigrant" vs "Undocumented Worker".

Wow, that's super neat. Thank you for sharing.

I believe you'd have a far more satisfying and productive time coming out of your shell if you redirected Joe's conversation to asking about him, or his kids, or his hobbies- keeping it local like the article concludes.

Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.

I think that OP meant Joe Biden. Timeline checks out. It is unlikely OP is in position to talk about presidents kids and hobbies.

> Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.

A bit of very practical issue here is that Russian troll force is in full force right now, at least where I live. Trying to affect general opinion of people, in order to influence future elections and to make NATO/Eu passive due to pressure from population. The money were in fact flowing from Russia toward our right-wing nearly fascist or clearly fascist parties.

I dont think "everyone else should be passive" is good strategy here.

this is the the same with every piece of news

The Ukraine example might be true for a non-european country, but as a European in these times I want to be informed. I want to help refugees and the victims of war (either by donating or giving shelter for some days). If I wouldn't know things from the news, I wouldn't know about these things.

Knowing in what direction world events might change is good to be at least mentally prepared when things turn worse.

It doesn't have to be checking the news 24/7 but checking it once a day for the important parts I think it's important. I would rather say people need to learn how to distance themselves from the news a bit to keep a healthy mental state with all the things happening right now.

As a fellow European, IMO it’s very important to follow especially what non-Ukraine politicians are doing. That will help a lot in elections in coming decades. Let’s keep them accountable for once.

What do you think the advantages of continuous following are, vs. reading up on their history the day before the next election?

It seems to me that by waiting, you'll have more information on how their policies worked out. JIT judging, if you will.

I doubt there will be a non-biased compilation that doesn't bend narrative here or there.

But it will be interesting to compare my own experience to what people will try to make out of this later on.

Regarding COVID at least in my country it was pure madness. A lot of double standards, different media channels skipping different bits to bend the narrative, people who did little trying to claim credit, discrediting people based on information we have today even if they acted okay-ish given what we knew at the time....

It's very interesting to watch history that I witnessed being written. It will be even more to see how people reflect on this 20 or 50 years later. A lot of food for thoughts if history we know reflects what actually happened in other cases.

I followed that war since it started in 2014 and not by reading the news or, god forbid, the economist.

https://rumble.com/vwzzth-donbass-english-subtitles-2016.-do...

It’s pretty easy to understand what is going on in Ukraine in general. It’s also pretty easy to notice certain politicians/institutions/companies reactions. Then it will be pretty easy to make choices. If people ain’t passive, we can ensure this ain’t happening again in 5-8 years.

There's an "out of the loop" reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/outoftheloop

It's not quite for this use case but could be of help. I regularly use it to find out what that thing is people are joking about on Twitter or such.

This is an awful subreddit. It's mostly used for catching up on stupid Youtube/Twitch drama or asking why some other subreddit has been banned/locked/quarantined. On real stories the answers are very often very misinformed.

Wikipedia's current events portal goes back one week, and there's a link at the bottom to more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

https://biztoc.com and https://upstract.com pull in some news from there.

There are usually news programs on Sunday that will go over the past weeks worth of news. I like Bloomberg radio, which airs like 3 or 4 different weekly recap shows on that day.

This is why https://sumi.news is grouped/filtered by day. I like to browse by day once or twice a week.

I agree with some of the premises of this article, that much of the news is actually of negative value, but I have some problems with this part:

> If an event is actually important to your real life, you will find out about it. Such news will find you.

> Well, from my experience you ignore all of the things you cannot control and that have little bearing on your life (again, if there is some news that will actually effect your life you’ll hear about it)

Here is the crux. There are actually important things we need to know about (e.g. a nearby natural disaster that may threaten your area; an upcoming local election with important consequences; a worldwide pandemic). How do we find out about about them? This article assumes they will somehow reach you anyway even if you ignore all news - how?

IME, the way this happens, is that your relatives/friends/neighbors, who are following the news, tell you about it. In other words, this advice appears to me to rely on parasitism - a minority can ignore all news without harm because they can still rely on the majority who follow the news to provide really important information. As a moral position it fails the categorical imperative.

Maybe the reverse is possible? The majority can ignore the news until the few who are watching the skies notice something important enough for people to break their no-news policy.

Those relatives/friends/neighbors may very well have a healthier relationship with the news than you do. For a certain set of people (me included), news is addictive and destructive to my life, but for others, it's something they can peruse once a day.

Besides which, it's not like a majority of people will ever quit the news. You alone doing it is not doing anyone else a hardship. It's not like anyone is thinking, "Ugh, I have to keep scrolling twitter so that I can keep my news-less friend in the loop."

Weather alerts come through my phone (a notification for a watch, a buzzing for a warning, and some siren like thing for an active tornado).

> Fake news is a term to describe news that is merely untrue

In my experience it is more commonly used to describe news which the speaker does not like.

I feel like it's increasingly both and the lines are becoming more and more blurred.

That ship sailed 6 years ago if we’re being honest.

As far as the terminology goes, maybe. As far as people choosing to believe what is convenient, profitable, or flattering about the world around them, that's been the case as far back as anyone can recall. I think we like to imagine that technology both makes us immune to the problems of our ancestors and makes our problems immune to historically-informed solutions.

Oh most definitely - I'm talking about the meaning of "fake news." It used to be a very specific phenomenon: sites/articles designed to spread misinformation, usually by cloning actual news outlets in order to make it more convincing. These weren't just "overly-spun" opinions or something, it was stuff like "Ilhan Omar doesn't want you to see these photos of her training at an Al Qaeda camp" featuring doctored photos or just grainy photos of some woman with a gun (actually saw that posted by a cousin) and "Obama signs bill opening 100 abortion factories." Just absolutely ridiculous, completely fabricated stuff, designed to spread like wildfire for ad dollars by capitalizing on "just reading the headlines and sharing what looks right" culture.

NPR did a great interview with a "fake news creator" back in 2016: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

In my experience it's used as an umbrella term for biased, inaccurate, misleading, half-true, or completely false news.

That is a common usage, but not the meaning. There's really nothing we can do about people misusing terms though.

I have:

- Deleted facebook

- Unfollowed any news accounts and use Ublock to block suggested content on Twitter

- Unsubscribed from any news subreddits

- Of course never check news sites

And honestly feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care. To me, no human is designed to handle as much information input as we experience today.

100% agree. I think the 24hr news cycle is a huge contributor to negative mental health.

When we travelled to the in-laws over the most recent holidays, the news was always on, and always talked about and my wife and I both commented afterwards it felt like an oppressive blanket of stress was laid over everything while we were there.

> And honestly feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care.

I would not say so. But, I would expect you to NOT be outspoken and confident when someone else starts to speak about stuff related to current issues. And I would expect you to check yourself especially when it seems like the other person is saying something you intuitively disagree with, because chance that they are simply better informed is high.

It is quite possible you do it, I don't want to imply that. But, I have met quite a few people who don't follow news (proudly) but then are full of opinions about issues they don't follow.

That's the second part of de-stressing. First, stop watching news. Second, stop having an opinion on everything because at the end of the day nobody's opinion matters.

“Stop having an opinion on everything because at the end of the day nobody’s opinion matters.”

…don’t you see how nihilist this sounds? And also unrealistic. You will have opinions, everyone has opinions and beliefs and feelings or else they wouldn’t be able to function on a day to day basis. There is a scale to beliefs and opinions, based on how informed those beliefs and opinions are, and how well they mesh with conditions in your everyday life. It’s important to inform your opinions and beliefs; the news, however flawed in its current state, forms at least one source of that information.

I think that taking all of this as one absolute or another is unnecessarily polarizing this debate. It is very easy to argue that them news media economy is quite poisonous, but that doesn’t mean that all of the information is useless. For example: I need to prepare for a storm that is approaching the area, I need to know if a COVID wave is nearing so I know to be more careful, I need to know if parking rules change or trash day is being moved. These immediate events affect my actions directly and so I must pay attention, sifting through the other crap as necessary.

But even beyond that, this resignation to political nihilism is societally destructive. Like it or not, we are all connected in a society. Our actions affect others. We have shared infrastructure and services we all contribute to and benefit from. Part of that responsibility is a participation in politics. Is it currently toxic and despairing? Certainly. But sticking your head in the sand isn’t an option, as we depend on cooperation in order to preserve a society on any level and that requires coordination.

Should we reduce our news consumption? Of course. But we also shouldn’t eschew all outside information and live in a self-imposed bubble. Maybe skip the entertainment section and focus on stuff that impacts you directly. If there is something that is shallowly followed by the news that sounds important, of course dig into longer-form articles until you understand it in full or discard it if it is important. Discretion matters.

That was general attitude in post communist countries. I remember that well and had same opinion.

Later on, I realized that was what made us risk slipping back... and likely was contributed factor to why Russia actually slipped back to authoritarian, oppressive and aggressive. The countries that moved more toward democratic did so thinks to people who were not apathetic.

"...because at the end of the day nobody's opinion matters."

This is a danger that is in my opinion developed by over-consuming news and information from many sources. Of course, it is generally good to take news from multiple sources but if you are not payed for dig in information, you won't have much time to get deeply into problem and finally you just stay on the shallow top - which naturally let to resign on any opinion, because everything seems to be relative. It is not, it is simply a lack of invested time into subject.

Matrix 4 btw speaks a little bit about it if you pay attention.

On the other hand it is perfectly fine to say "I don't know". Which is not what we are learning at schools. We are persecuted to say that unfortunately. And here we are... Everyone has opinions on everything.

If you ask me my opinion on most issues my answer is going to be "I don't know" or "I don't care".

And that's the right answer that should be used by more people.

> Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care.

100% agree. The Media complex is the one that keeps pretending news is important-- its like a drug dealer saying drugs are important.

I agree with the general concept that, at the individual level, news consumption is bad for your mental health and pretty much useless. At the societal level though... if everybody took this approach there would be no accountability for politicians or corporations.

How do we find a healthy middle ground?

>How do we find a healthy middle ground?

In Europe we had teletext. In Spanish, but you get the concept:

https://www.rtve.es/television/teletexto/noticias/129/

Small paragraphs. Almost no bias. News condensed to be read on a small tv. No bullshit, no yellow journalism. Raw and short.

Teletext as shown on old TVs:

https://live.staticflickr.com/1453/25222724604_15d7a974a2_b....

Now they should create pages like this. Like https://lite.cnn.io or https://text.npr.org, but with small content, too. Not just the design.

How do you cover, for example, the behavior of the spouse of a US SCOTUS justice? You indicate that you think it can be done with "almost no bias" and "raw and short". Maybe. But this provides absolutely no context, which whether you feel that Ms. Thomas' actions are fine or reprihensible and disqualifying towards her spouse, you absolutely need in order to understand what is actually going on.

The context can be set in a second paragraph. With teletext we often (not usually) had a two page text for a new so you could get more info on important news such as major terrorist blasts or natural disasters.

Check in once every few months. That's plenty. Done. [EDIT] Exception for local news. Maybe every week or two.

Use the extra time to read books on political science, economics, and history. Maybe some media studies. You'll be a better voter doing that instead of following the news closely. It's not as if it should have taken someone who knew nothing about either person, but a lot about the actual issues and how politics works, a ton of time to figure out if they wanted to vote for Trump or Biden. 20 minutes of googling right before going to the polls should have been enough.

I spent my life trying to be a well-informed investor. It turns out that all you have to do is buy real assets when you are young and just hold them forever. And don’t ever sell anything. That’s it. As long as the world is relatively peaceful you will get rich.

> News makes you scared of highly dramatic and highly unlikely events (plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorism etc) while also being oblivious to insidious and creeping risks that are low-key and hard to make dramatic and visual (say antibiotic resistance or indeed chronic stress caused by being in a news-induced perpetual state of physiological arousal).

This is perhaps one of the most important points in this post that's buried pretty deep in the article.

The author here is not advocating for "head-in-the-sand" avoidance of reality.

Often when I see real, systemic issues brought up on HN or elsewhere: climate, the overshoot of industrial society, resource depletion etc. These concerns are often dismissed as "the media just wants you anxious!". But, by and large, the real scary pieces of information about these topics are not published by major media.

The media wants you anxious, but not so concerned that you seriously question our mainstream mode of life. You should worry about nuclear war with Russia, but not about the war for natural gas that's really going on. You should be anxious about climate change, but only enough to make you recycle, not so much that you question the economic system that is fundamentally unstable.

The media is owned by powerful corporations and individuals, but at the same time it's profitable to keep people in heightened emotional states. So on one hand they want to induce fear and anxiety, but at the same time they don't want to give anyone real concerns about the world we live in that might cause them to want to disempower the media's owners.

I agree with much of what the author states. However I find it hard to completely quit cold turkey.

I’ve settled into three subscriptions: the local paper (which also carries syndicated inter/national stories that I ignore completely–I’m looking for local politics and economy, and especially the special interest pieces in the Sunday edition and the monthly community-events inserts, not the crime report type stuff); The Economist, in which I ignore all the leader articles and merely try to find at least one or two interesting articles to read each week; and The Atlantic, with mostly the same strategy as that for The Economist.

I recently let my IEEE membership lapse but did the same with their Spectrum magazine.

I try to do the rest of my reading in books and not social media–HN excluded, of course!

I still have this teetering idea that I should cancel The Economist, it often seems like a gossip rag dressed up in sophisticated verbiage. But every now and then I do find interesting, if not useful, articles. Maybe I’ll switch out The Economist and go back to IEEE Spectrum or something similar.

I usually enjoy the long featured pieces in The Atlantic.

I'm an IEEE member mostly for Spectrum, and have noticed that some recent issues seem slimmed down a little bit. My assumption is that they just haven't had as much content to publish lately, and I'm glad they have made the decision to shrink the magazine rather than pad it out with filler. Aside from "Numbers Don't Lie", I'm continually impressed by their staff, and the submitted articles are often pretty good too.

I'm sorry but this is just total nonsense. The author argues very that being informed is an unimportant article of faith. I can name a number of recent examples where being uninformed of the news would have had significant impacts on my life. For example,

1. New Zealand is still under various Covid restrictions and they are in constant flux. These impact real-world decisions I need to make like should I plan to attend a particular event, should I plan a trip for the winter or even go to the office next week. If I don't stay on top of the news I will be helpless. Even the event organisers and shop owners use phrases like "Red Light Phase 2" which must be gleaned from the news - Red Light today doesn't mean the same thing it did 2 weeks ago.

2. The Ukraine crisis. Even if you don't think it's important to be aware of such a monumental ongoing geopolitical event for its own sake, if I ignored the news I would have no idea why so many people on my island on the other side of the world are carrying blue and yellow flags, changing their avatars and vocalising their support for an Eastern European country they have never even mentioned before. You can argue it's not important to be informed about this kind of event but that assertion is no less an article of faith than the claim that it IS important. And quite frankly if it became obvious someone I was talking to wasn't aware of the Ukraine conflict it would sharply diminish my respect for them.

3. We had an ongoing weeks-long protest in my city recently which blocked several important streets and caused a lot of chaos. Is it in my interests to not be aware of road closures and massive police operations in my area? Even if I don't care about the protestors, their cause etc, it's still directly impactful for me to know where I can, can't and shouldn't drive my car.

Why are you conflating being informed or following one particular event with being obsessed with the news? If Covid restrictions are so malleable in your city then you should find avenues that keep you updated, but once it's over you should also quit with the updates. Knowing what happens in Ukraine every single minute is useless. If you see all those hints around you about a conflict you are unaware of, why can't you just ask around or at most read a recap article or two? Why would this event entail being glued to your screen 24/7? Just like with other people in this discussion it feels as though exceptional events somehow justify the constant consumption of the news.

> Why are you conflating being informed or following one particular event with being obsessed with the news?

I'm not. This article isn't about "being obsessed with the news", it is arguing against following the news at all - in fact he addresses this directly. Did you read the article?

> So what are you supposed to do instead, you might ask? Well, reducing news consumption is a good start but like Dobelli I would say mere reduction is probably not enough. Personal experience of attempting moderation has made me more of a hardliner. Personally, I vote for going cold turkey and simply walking away from the whole idea of news and the illusion of staying informed.

Ah yes. Reading the news is useless in the sense that reading the mainstream news is useless. It's both deliberately (pushing a narrative) and by incompetence (Gell Mann Amnesia) wrong more often than not.

That doesn't mean cutting yourself off from the world is wrong. Large outlier events often cast shadows (Covid, Ukraine war) and if you're in the path of the outlier events, knowing early pays off.

The hard question is, how do you see the large shadows without having to twitch at every small event. The answer to this is, to some extent, mentioned in the article - expensive, subscription-based newsletters. It's still not the full answer. There are too many areas to pay attention to. Best answer I've found so far is having a group of friends & contacts with wide-ranging interests.

To me this is speaking to the echo chamber. I am so used to seeing this type of message, along with "Politics is the mind kill" and I nearly always see both blithely accepted, perpetuated, and unchallenged.

It also seems a ridiculously strong stance to take, 'going cold turkey on news.' A naunced point about how low quality discussion or sensational takes do more harm than good is reasonable, but this is not that. They themselves are neither long form, or considered and this website linking to their post is titled "Hacker News." It's ironic, to truly heed their advice we should ignore them.

IMO news comes in two flavors, one of which should be avoided like the plague it is, and one which you should pay somewhat close attention to (relatively). The first, national and international news. And the second being local news. We should embrace the local journalists who shine light on local politics.

I tend to agree; I don’t really follow news myself. If there’s anything big going on, I’d know anyway.

But IMO there are two blind spots in that philosophy:

- If everybody did that, even the big things would not propagate. You’d only know there is a war going on if you heard the bombs.

- Voting becomes a problem. Since everything you hear is from people around you, it is most likely an opinion, which you will then echo. Also you might miss stuff which would affect your opinion, but which your friends didn’t care for.

I generally think news(a majority of it) is shameless drivel with extreme bias to certain perspectives. That being said with the pandemic and all the changing laws/issues surrounding it, not to mention covid community case counts were invaluable to understand. I would completely abandon the news in a heartbeat but I trade stocks and need to understand world news along with business dealings for me to make intelligent trading decisions.

This reminds me of the ancient "no news" joke:

https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q4/badnews.html

I agree with you, but this text is unnecessarily long for the points you are making. Please try to be more concise, otherwise you will not reach those which I assume is your main target - the ones addicted to short sensational news.

Agreed. Introductory paragraphs like the one below always bug me. I know what news is, I wouldn't have clicked if I didn't.

"So what is the news anyway? In its simplest and most universal definition news is information about recent events or happenings. That’s it. And so the news has always existed in some form since the advent of language and civilisations. It was transported by messengers whether it be by Hermes, the herald of the gods in Greek mythology or by some mortal messenger who was quite often murdered due to the contents of the message in spite of the saying warning the recipient against such actions. We know we shouldn’t shoot the messenger, but alas."

Looks like the author reached a very similar conclusion as Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

I think this is a great and useful perspective. The most salient point being that "fake news" and "bias" and "balance" is a red herring to the much bigger problem of "news" in general. The near-universal acceptance that one can and should have firm opinions about complex ongoing events, some constant stream of incomprehensible information that is most likely completely unrelated to you, is the actual problem. I think the author is basically spot on here.

Where I think it breaks down is the prescription that everyone can necessarily separate themselves from "news". I think this is increasingly infeasible. Even if you, personally, don't buy a subscription or scroll twitter, I don't think it's too outlandish to expect that people around you in your family or community might take action based on some national or international news that is admittedly basically pointless. Are you supposed to righteously shut down every news-related conversation about that you're a part of?

More broadly this also runs into the absurdity of trying to define arbitrary boundaries around "news". You're just begging your unconscious mind to label subjects you are personally uncomfortable with as "news" and therefore not worthy of considering.

So removing "news" from your life as much as possible, or at least separating if from yourself and your ego to some significant extent, can really only be part of the answer and is also by definition an endless uphill battle. I don't think there's any getting away from the need for a broader media literacy.

Also:

>And perhaps there is something to that, given that my online avatar is a pixelated rendering of Stanczyk the Court Jester. But jesters are kept around because they say what needs to be said. And they express these unpopular messages with enough wit and entertainment that the kings let them keep their heads and indeed value their council.

This faux-humility disclaimer made me cringe. I thought this was a good piece overall, but this made me almost close the tab. Don't do this. They already opened the blog post, don't desperately plead with your reader that you promise that your thoughts are worth reading.

Oh yes, I agree. I have decided to create one tailor-made also for me.

During few weeks without the information overload I discovered that:

• Having the overview and discussing the current affairs personally as an unbiased listener is more liberating than analysing the text alone behind the screens.

• The categorization of received news reveals those which simply interpret the source and those which really generate the original information.

• Working on a computer presents a risk of being distracted by reading various articles and clicking on random links. Their reduction increases my productivity and I am able to be more focused on my tasks, without temptation of countless distractions.

• Ignorance is bliss. It eliminates the prejudices, teaches us not to be opinionated nor to ask the right question.

• Any form of “decentralization” of receiving information eliminates the manipulation of thinking.

We are being indoctrinated by a fear agenda to excessively consume media, television and radio. Let’s not forget that a frightened mind can be easily manipulated, which is used by both political power and corporates. Few of the wealthiest IT companies with a monopoly set the global opinions. They decide which information we receive; thus, they have boundless power. Because we don’t care. We consider the freedom of speech as a right without any duties and responsibilities and meanwhile it slips through our fingers.

- https://tobiaskucera.art/the-silent-march

Humm... reading the news saved me from entering into an expensive and hard-to-reverse lease in a teeny-tiny Paris apartment just weeks before the lockdowns. I'd have gone nuts there.

More topical still, reading the (right kind of) news got people to evacuate their folks from Ukraine just in time before it became really dangerous.

Sure, those may be once-in-a-lifetime events, but still.

I'll happily accept that I'm reading too much (way too much) news though.

The sum of "news" that you consume is close to the totally of the information you base your decisions at the ballot box on. In a world without news, democracy cannot function, because the link between action and reaction (such as reelection) is lost. It's like an AC being told the temperature you want, but without access to the feed of temperature measurements.

Articles that engender good feelings, either by revealing a positive story or reporting a positive event, do not receive nearly the same level of engagement.

Anger sells. Outrage sells. Media companies have known it since the dawn of the newspaper. Bad news generates anger and outrage, hence all news is bad news. It's a natural consequence of the human condition.

There's even a news industry adage about this: "If it bleeds, it leads."

Today I discovered a video of someone who walks into a forest in winter and builds an overnight shelter out of pine trees, lights a fire and sleeps the night in -25C/-9F temperatures with just a woolen blanket. There is no talking. His channel has about 380k subscribers.

The video has TEN MILLION views. So many of the comments are of the form "this is the most beautiful/relaxing/wonderful thing I've seen in years".

Things that engender good feelings do propagate.

I like stuff like that. A similar (but warmer) channel I subscribe to is “Primitive Technology” [0], and most of my subscriptions are about what is good in the world rather than what is bad.

Exceptions on my subscription list are Kurzgesagt (self-described as “Optimistic nihilism”) and the maker of the machinima “Freeman’s Mind” [1](voicing the silent protagonist as an antihero).

Thing is, I’m not normal. If my nature was the modal average of humanity, the horror genre and tabloids and spectator sports and celebrity gossip wouldn’t exist.

[0] https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1...

I used to start my day listening to the thirty minute, BBC global news podcast, which often has three updated podcasts per day during the work week, and one per day on the weekend.

Then, sometime around 2015, maybe 2016, I began to notice major changes to the BBC podcast as well as other sister news outlets. Suddenly, there were more ads, less investigative stories, and more filler about the latest consumer trends.

Over time, I began to gravitate in the opposite direction, away from international news coverage and more towards hyperlocal news unique to my area. Other problems become apparent with the local coverage, mostly a highly skewed and partisan bias by the owners who apparently flirted with political power and connections.

I’m still looking for the perfect balance between hyperlocal and international, and I would love to see a media outlet who links the two together and shows the connections between the two. As far as I know, that’s never been done.

I build for myself a little frontend over Google Trends, that fetches news items, translates them for me and kinda gives me daily / weekly top news from around the world, also with the option of checking local stuff. It gives me a pretty good overview of what people are interested in.

I can choose my country, and it's going to show me globally relevant news first but published in my country, then a good chunk of news from most of the political spectrum, and then a good 75% of it entertainment and soccer.

Some takeaways: India has a lot of stuff happening all the time. Soccer is pretty much the king of global traffic. I swear, it's crazy just how big soccer is globally.

I enjoyed reading this and I largely agree with the sentiment. However I don't believe in binaries ... reality implies nuance. Sure, if you look at the vast majority of commercial news outlets, the firehose, it's easy to make broad generalisations around worth, trust, etc. But there exist many news sources that don't fall neatly into this category. News may be piecemeal, but the outcome of taking on the tidbits, these seemingly disparate but (for many of us) carefully collected and ultimately connected pieces of information, shouldn't be underestimated. Having people -- not all, but some -- informed beyond your local neighbourhood, beyond a local sphere of knowledge, is critical in making informed decisions about your own life and your contribution for further generations. If this is your way. Without it we're just leaves in the wind of greed and corruption.

Personally, I've found that minimizing exposure to news is helpful to my wellbeing, makes me no less informed of crucial events taking place, and helps me keep my mind on things I actually care about, or can influence.

One thing to keep in mind is that news is a business. News outlets are honed and designed a certain way to maximize profit. I had a lot (a lot) of criticism for the way news work right now, what counts as "journalism", etc., which was one factor in why I just gave up on it, and now I have one less reason to be angry with something I can do nothing about.

Another factor which lead me to give up on news reporting was politics, or more specifically, politicians. I've attended an interesting class in Uni where we were introduced to Machiavelli. The similarities between Machiavelli's "strategy" and today's real world politicians simply could not be ignored. I can't overstate how awakening it was, as if I could suddenly see the game being played, how painfully predictable it all was, and how incredibly stupid they must think the public is. It was insulting.

That, combined with my perception that most things in politics work for personal gain through leverage, made me quit on politics as well. I realized not a single actor in politics can be trusted, all and any communication from a politician is carefully crafted to gain leverage regardless of the what their actual intent is. I've been called jaded for saying this, but I can't put the genie back in the bottle: once you see it, it cannot be un-seen. If you still think politicians are candid actors, maybe you do have a reason to give them the time of day.

It's not for everyone, but for me, quitting news and most of politics was a huge improvement in my life. It's your choice not be enticed, used for leverage, your emotions exploited for power or profit. Peace and quiet is something you can claim for yourself. The world is going to be 100% the same whether you give the News your time and mental dedication or not.

Ridiculous. There is one reason I read news, and it is stronger now than ever.

I started reading news when I was about 14 and this was my reasoning: "There were Jews in nazi germany who could have escaped the horrors but didn't. Some, not all, but some had the resources to emigrate, to run, but they either didn't see the danger coming, or didn't believe it will get as bad as it got, or had too deep roots to move themselves. I will want to be like the Jews who escaped, who kept their eyes open and realised what is coming and went and saved their life and their loved ones life." And that's why I started reading news. In case there are people thinking about killing me and mine I can bolt.

Now excuse my 14 year old self's naive understanding of history. It is never as easy as just that. But certainly there are dangers in life. I want to avoid those dangers. I want my loved ones to avoid those dangers. And here I don't mean the dangers of idk toxins in this and that normal foodstuff, or the dangers of strange man hiding in the dark. Those are catchy images, but statistically speaking they are not worth worrying about.

So what kind of dangers do I mean then? Normally I just say "i will know when I see it", but sadly we have a very clear and present example. I heard about the possibility of the Russian invasion first thing last November. I did recognise that it has the potential of being very bad and if I would have had family and loved ones in Ukraine I would have tried to make them move to a safer place. And increasingly as the signal grew I would have exerted more effort to make that happen. I hope that if I would have had family in Ukraine they would not be there by the start of the invasion. (And I know this also has a component of not just being well informed, but also having resources. I recognise my privilege.)

So that's why I'm reading news. To gather the temperature of the pot I'm swimming in with my loved ones. And I also understand that this makes me prone to overreact, and that is fine. I would rather be the pigeon who nervously flitters about than the pigeon who got eaten by the cat.

Did the Jews who escaped Nazi Germany know to do that because of what they were reading in the news?

I get that we all want to avoid dangers and that knowing about them in advance helps. I just question whether reading the news is a good way to do that.

Are you asking about the historical facts? I don't know. Not my speciality, and I don't want to say something which might be not true.

Are you asking about the younger me's understanding of this question? I can answer that. Understand the following in this light:

My understanding that their persecution was not a bolt from the blue. Politicians were agitating against them. There were speeches, there were marching demonstrations, then there were aggression against individuals. Shops burnt down etc. It wasn't like yesterday was everything A-okay, and today you are sitting in a cattle car heading to a gas chamber.

> I just question whether reading the news is a good way to do that.

I understand that. And I agree with you it is better to be skeptical about these things. But on the other hand with Ukraine I had a good 5 monthish heads-up. Maybe 2 month if i'm calculating from the "my spidersense is tingling enough that I would start walking out with nothing but the clothes I have on my back if I must" moment. So in the present day it's hard to convince me that it's not a good way to do that. One of course also needs a head solidly attached to their shoulders, and a good mind in it, but that's always needed for everything.

> Are you asking about the historical facts?

Yes, because that's what's relevant to the question of whether watching the news is or is not a good way to get advance warnings of the kind of danger you might need to take drastic action to avoid. My understanding of the historical fact is that Jews who left Germany to escape the Nazis did not do so based on anything they read in the news; they did so based on word of mouth about where things were heading and based on the declared intentions of the Nazis, which anyone who had read Mein Kampf could have predicted.

> their persecution was not a bolt from the blue

That's correct, it most definitely was not. There were warning signs years in advance. My understanding is that the biggest obstacle to Jews fleeing from Germany was not lack of information but the simple fact that it's very, very difficult to uproot your entire life and flee to a foreign country you've never seen where almost nobody speaks your language, so convincing yourself that it really, truly is necessary to do that is something people will have a very difficult time doing even if they already have all the information they need to see the necessity.

> with Ukraine I had a good 5 monthish heads-up

Based on what you read in the news? Or based on information you got other ways, that you would have gotten whether you read the news or not? Putin's intentions towards the Ukraine have been clear for years, certainly since the annexation of the Crimea. I don't think this was a bolt from the blue any more than the Nazi persecution of Jews was.

> Based on what you read in the news

Yes, there have been continuous coverage about Russia’s preparation leading up to the invasion, such as this article:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43371/russia-bolsters-...

Reddit’s /europe has had megathreads about it well in advance as well.

> My understanding of the historical fact is that Jews who left Germany to escape the Nazis did not do so based on anything they read in the news; they did so based on word of mouth about where things were heading

That sounds same-ish to me. “Word of mouth” is just news from people you personally know. It certainly enhances reading news in certain cases. For example if there were a modern day politician who would write a modern day Mein Kampf i would know about it because podcasts I’m listening to would mention it, and the twitterati would denounce it. I would count all of that as “news”.

> biggest obstacle to Jews fleeing from Germany was not lack of information but the simple fact that it's very, very difficult to uproot your entire life and flee to a foreign country

You are absolutely right. Knowing is only half the battle. I have other tactics which help me with the other half too.

> Based on what you read in the news?

Well maybe you got me. I believe the first signs I read where some satelite image analysis re-tweeted by either Dr Jeffrey Lewis or Decker Eveleth. I count these sources as “news” because occasionly they tell me stuff about the world I didn’t know before. Obviously you might disagree on that, and that is fine.

> I don't think this was a bolt from the blue any more than the Nazi persecution of Jews was.

Sounds like we are in agreement then. There is a sad element of “boiling the frog” here. As you say things are certainly bad between Ru and Uk since years. I could imagine that months ago someone less informed could hear rummours and murmurings and dismiss it as “oh, the russians are rattling their rabbles again”. I couldn’t even fault them! That was my first thought too, that this is just a replay of the Zapad excercise and nothing to worry about. But then i got more specifics from more sources and more modalities and remembered how exactly Zapad went and realised that there is something more to this now.

Heck! Five years ago I got offered a job in Tallin. I declined it for many reasons, and one of them amongst them was the closeness of Russia and their expressed and stated intents. Did anything happened to Estonia? Nothing so far, and hopefully nothing will. Being well informed is not just all about dramatic escapes, but also about avoiding being in harms way when possible.

I feel we talked enough about Ukraine, i have a different example too. I’m an EU national living in the UK. The current words of the settlement scheme basically grants me rights to stay here. Many of my friends are in the same shoes and they are really relaxed about it. The thing is I read about the Windrush scandal and know that what seems certain now might change a decade or two later. This motivates me to aim for more secure forms of attachment to the country I’m living in. They might loose (accidentally or intentionally) my paperwork, but they are less likely to loose my passport if i get naturalized. ( Less likely, but of course we know they can still do that, just think of Shamima Begum )

The details don’t matter of course. What matters is that I have listened to the news, heard things and changed my behaviour. This is the reason I listen/read/hear news from a variety of sources.

How important news is too you depends on your relationship to where the news is coming from. In times of disaster, we pay greater attention to those places we are most familiar with, or emotionally attached to.

Before email was so prevalent, my mother said the same thing when me and my siblings went travelling overseas for months at a time without calling. Now, she's in contact with us a few times a week and acting as the central news source for us all.

So of course: if one of us was in a country that was having some "news" she'd pay extra attention and reach out to share what's going on with us and the entire family.

I would really like to follow this advice and stop reading news completely. But I like talking to people and generally, news is among the most commonly discussed topics. Furthermore, it helps me evaluate if I have similar opinions to the person I'm talking to (and thus the conversation is likely to continue someday). The article doesn't mention how to fulfil this need and it seems that I would become isolated if I decided to really follow it. I agree with the assessment but I don't know how to fix the problem I've mentioned.

On kind of a random tangent, during the early pandemic I began reading a ton of cookbooks. I found it interesting how the quality of recipes and techniques was so vastly better than anything I found online.

I think a similar item is happening with news. Online news is rather superficial where really long form things like books can give you the reflection to think.

I was given a fantastic cookbook (Joy of Cooking) around the start of the pandemic. I used to loathe cooking. Now I’m hoarding cookbooks and look forward to trying new recipes. Turns out my problem the whole time was relying on garbage-tier internet recipes. Maybe it’s extreme, but I now refuse to make any recipe from the internet. It’s not worth it.

Sending you here to a rabbit hole:

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/good-food/favorite-cookbo...

(unfortunately there isn't a good food filter) https://www.kcrw.com/categories/books

Store just with cookbooks only in SF

https://omnivorebooks.myshopify.com/

    “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

Which is a hard problem. Personally though, I do a quick skim of the news each morning just so that I know we haven't nuked each other to death or that a new pandemic-like world event hasn't happened. I enjoy Reuters, Associated Press, and a local news feed for my area. Sumi.news[0] is great too if you want to essentially scan & skim the whole Internet in one fell swoop.

[0] https://sumi.news/

Ironically, though not surprisingly, that Mark Twain quote appears to be apocryphal: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/03/misinformed/

Most of them are.

If I insisted reading history was damaging, I suspect many people would object. The news is just history playing out; a daily dose of non-fiction with my coffee.

There are, of course, a lot of terrible news sources. Many of which seem more aimed at creating outrage than anything else. Consumption of those may indeed be an issue.

Yes. I'd also recommend abstaining from forums and anything bearing even a resemblance to scroll-down variety.

Lot of people in the comments are recommending the Economist for a monthly/weekly digest. Any complimentary journals or magazines that can provide a slightly different perspective?

I have heard le monde diplomatique is good.

I mostly read tech news and im very picky with them too. Anything important i will hear from friends. Dont see the point clicking all the useless clickbait articles anyway.

I would have commented on this post except I didn't see it.

If you were a Jew in early 1930s Germany, following the news would have been very important, but this is an extreme outlier. most news can be ignored.

If you're LGBT, following the news is incredibly important. It's essential to track legislation such as the Idaho anti-trans bill that jails parents, or Florida anti-LGBT bill that just passed, especially if you're an LGBT teenager or a parent of one.

Yeah, well, no. You can't really function in society these days without following 'The News' to at least some extent.

That doesn't mean you should buy into the '24h News Cycle' or the 'Extremism-inducing-filter-bubble', though. Myself, I don't pay any attention to 'The News', except as delivered on paper once-a-week via The Economist(1), and daily via their 'The World in Brief' email.

So, this morning, I learned that 'At one point an actor slapped a comedian, sending the internet into a frenzy' -- which is, like, all I needed to know, right?

Footnotes: (1) Yes, which is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication. I love it, especially disagreeing with it...

In what way can you not function in society? Is that just in the sense that the news creates common cultural touchpoints for people to chat about around the water cooler? If so, as you say you don't really need to be that engaged to know the gist of what's going on. An occasional glance at a reputable, less-doomscrolly news source like the Econ, BBC, NYT or something like that should suffice.

I'm not sure we disagree? If you read The Economist weekly, you should be fine (although you can still be caught out not knowing about, say, today's Oscar's <tm, now go away> scandal.

But completely disconnecting from 'The News'? That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid. I quite vividly experienced this a while ago when I returned from living in the US to my native Netherlands: I was completely unaware of some extremely-popular local hit songs. So, when people quoted these to me, I just didn't get the reference, like, at all. This caused quite some awkward moments.

Now, magnify that experience to the world stage...

oh yeah I wasn't disagreeing with you, just trying to think about what you meant. I agree, you probably want to know the basic pop-cultural and international goings-on in order to not be left out of conversations.

I’m still not seeing the need for “The News” here. There’s no reason not to follow your interests/hobbies. And there are other ways to catch up on world events without the daily drip of sensationalism. The author isn’t saying you shouldn’t read anything ever.

But you don’t need to read the front page of CNN every day to stay up to date on the latest music. In fact, you’d be much better served by reading publications focused on that - the opposite of consuming the content meant for mass consumption.

People quote things that I don’t recognize all of the time. This is likely to happen for all kinds of reasons, e.g. generational gaps and not just because you stopped reading the daily headlines.

I think what you’re highlighting is that getting off the news hype cycle might make people around you notice. But a different response to that would be to have a conversation about why you unplugged.

That’s what I do, and it leads to some interesting conversations.

Only you can decide if the personal cost of continuing to consume is worthwhile just to maintain a certain vocabulary so you can continue socializing as you always have.

This isn’t a value judgement by the way, just an observation.

> That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid

I'm afraid I don't follow your point. Saying that something "won't work at all these days" means that there are meaningful, and I stress: meaningful, aspects of our life that totally break down in the absence of said thing. An occasional few seconds of awkwardness (which is a totally fine emotion to feel) regarding some celeb drama is, in all honesty, insignificant. You didn't talk about being fired or being shunned, being discriminated or being laughed at; you presented a very very bland example equivalent to admitting to your colleagues that you didn't notice a new coffee machine was installed. Maybe you suffer from a mental condition that amplifies these emotions so much that you can't stand that occasional awkwardness, but I don't see how that justifies defending being addicted to the news cycle.

> [The Economist] is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication.

A comment above, in response to the publication being labelled as having "a sharp left / European bias" says:

> The rest of the world would mostly call it "left-leaning", or maybe "radical centrist".

I would probably categorize it as centrist myself, but it's funny how confirmation bias works.

There’s a lot of virtue to be found between complete abstinence from the news and drinking from the firehose.

I dont read news except cs related because they have no direct impact on my life meanwhile big stuff like covid is big enough that i will eventually hear about it

All that negative stuff you have to go thru when reading news makes it being bad deal

"Pour vivre heureux vivons cachés"

Recently I have been reading a lot of news and IMO they are mostly useless and misinform more than inform. A few sources can provide valuable insight about things happening right now but still it's mostly pointless, even for active investing. The market is more efficient than the news industry and stock prices are mostly uncorrelated from world events on the short term.

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