News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier (2013)

Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.

Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.

Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.

If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.

One nice thing about not fully comprehending what's going on in the news is that in social situations you can ask others lots of questions about current events and the people you're talking to will feel very proud that they can explain things to someone else. It's a good ice breaker, at least until it gets to be all political...

If you in some unstable place, you want to move someplace else, change significant things in life, then it makes more sense to follow news, albeit it would help to curate them. But its a dopamine drug, I see otherwise very smart folks to fall prey to this completely helplessly. They even buy things like smart watches to know instantly there is some notification in phone. Of course all of these folks have higher levels of anxiety, they were there before smartwatches but those are definitely making things worse. And cycle repeats and goes deeper. For them I do hope seamless AR/VR is a thing of distant future, they will have hard time not making it into some cyberpunk version of addict.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon.

I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case.

> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.

I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name).

I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.

So much FOMO. I subscribed to and read a once-a-week article which summarizes the world events that week. Focus of the article is important catasthropes to avoid, kind of. That's enough for me.

The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.

> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.

You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.

I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.

I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.

The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.

The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.

Some have suggested that a subscription model to multiple papers (e.g. Spotify for news) would be appealing, and it might, but that doesn't immediately solve the problem of the form and content of the news. Longform article sources or retrospectives are probably the current best way to consume news.

The BBC channel only produces a few hours of news a day but manages to cover everything from the Titan sub to French protests to Israel’s anti-terrorism action in Jenin to Bolsonaro’s ban. They’re pretty much the only news source that reliably covers Latam, Africa, and the Middle East. They’ve got a rather predictable bias and a half hour a day is enough to get a broad view of what’s happening.

FP is great for deeper analysis from the perspective of the neoliberal establishment and its primary competitors. However to stay informed the only thing I feel I really need is the Wikipedia current events portal. Past days are updated as information comes in so I can go back when I have time and grab any headlines that I missed. It’s actually surprising how few eventful events actually happen in the world when you get rid of all the ragebait.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

What democracy? The News is kind of like so-called democracy: something that every serious person needs to do but that has very little impact on anything. The most exaggerated example is the US presidential election which in fact has a very, very long media coverage (News) up until the election itself. And what does a person who can vote get back from that? They only have two parties that they can vote for if they don’t want to “waste” their vote, and the nomination is filled with a mix of serious candidates and people who want to boost their careers (Buttigieg) and then eventually the party itself circle the wagons and boosts one anointed candidate (that was the case for the Dems but I’m not sure about the Reps since I didn’t pay much attention).

One counter-example though to the News not being actionable was Covid. I felt that a lot of the news about Covid was actionable. And it was useful to know what people/experts thought about the current threat-level day-to-day.

The Economist is still going strong. It's my primary news source for exactly these reasons

I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a lot online and I suspect it comes from activists who wish to guilt trip those who aren't engrossed in their cause.

Who’s the privileged one? Hard to say.

There’s also countless times when lack of knowledge makes on life far harder than it needs to be.

I doubt a mind will be changed by reading that warning. But one can try.

And collective action by informed voters would quickly solve most major issues - but most Americans becoming well informed voters is an unrealistic expectation.

So no, people do not need to be creating value to be paid.

And of those who think their jobs aren’t pointless, still most of tasks can be pointless. My job isn’t pointless as a whole, but still about 60% is spent on stuff that should not be needed and helps no one, especially not the business. Ok technically it helps one incompetent person in the cto’s office who rose beyond their competency level feel important.

Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Even Marge Simpson has a trust fund setup by her relatives. And mutual funds, family income, real estate appreciation, pensions ... I'd say that there are large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Their role in society is to consume, and occasionally vote.

The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.

This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort.

You can get pretty far just by talking to people.

If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)

> you have a few options a few times a year.

You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.

This kind of action does have an effect, and the effect is significant when many people do it.

Much like how participation matters during elections.

What you get in the news is a performance, either carefully crafted or off the cuff crazy.

The only way to "shape a perception of government" is to check how your representatives actually voted for different issues. Talk is talk, votes are fact.

Election day is the least significant day in politics. It is merely the hiring process, and who you hire doesn't matter all that much (within reason). Your actual job as the employer starts after you have selected an employee. The onus is on you to direct and guide the employee you selected. If you don't know what is needed for your organization on an ongoing basis, how can you serve as their boss?

Or, of course, you can pray that you chose a mind reader and ignoring them will lead to satisfactory results. However, I think all employers will tell you that if you disappear into the night and leave employees to their own devices, you won't be impressed with the results.

> Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

Being the boss in general leaves you pretty impotent, frankly. This is as true in government as it is in enterprise. Employees aren't robots. It takes an incredible amount of work to keep the workers aligned on the vision, and against competing leadership interests.

But it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, the wealthy among us who feel they don't have time to be the boss directly will hire other parties (a.k.a. lobbyists) to guide the workers for them. If the employees cannot be tamed, that practice would not take place. Of course, like everything in life, if you are not so well off you're going to have to do the work yourself.

Nobody ever said that democracy was easy. There is good reason why some people in the world stand by other political systems – because they don't want to put in the hard, hard work of democracy. But if democracy is the system you and your fellow neighbours have chosen, it is the one you have to accept, hard work and all.

It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.

It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.

Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.

I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.

And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.

Because you leave yourself more susceptible to recency bias, and the prevailing media narrative on election day rather than continually evaluating the actions politicians take in real-time with proper context, evaluating the raw facts for yourself.

Some striking examples: look at the stock prices of pharma companies after Covid broke out. Sure they went up, but it took a full year(!) before most of them finally reached their peeks. Or look at shares of weapon manufacturers after the Ukraine invasion. Same story, share prices went up but it took months.

My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children.

Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration"

Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is

https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be...

but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National.

---

Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.

There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever.

Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.

They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top

This is very much country depended I guess. Here in Poland if you only tuned in right before an election you'd miss a huge amount of crucial context.