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Comment by ccpotato | Hacker News Reader

"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business"

I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions.

e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share.

Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).

Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.

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> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.

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

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.

> 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

Well you are partially right but also I live in a major metropolitan area. I don't think politics is an area where I can really effect change and I have so much going on with my life that I am also unwilling to expend the effort.

And that's fine, it's a choice you can make (we do not put the duty of being an informed and engaged citizen on the body politic), but it doesn't make what you said true. Just true for you. It's not at all uncommon for engaged people to leave significant dents in metropolitan local politics by picking up a phone or by showing up.

I find discouraging others from fully engaging in the civic process much more disappointing than choosing not to fully engage oneself, to be honest.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

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.

Being aware of current bills proposed and being voted on (at local, state, and federal levels) lets you contact your representatives and voice your opinion; lets you impact which bills are passed.

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.

I think it is important and in fact moral to spend some more time understanding politics, but still don't think news is a good way to do it. Reading a few books and discussing topics With Friends will do far more than sifting through countless shallow news stories.

Especially, according to actual US politicians, people who cosplay as hardcore hardline party line people are easy to negotiate with when the cameras are off.

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.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

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.

Additionally, the news does not present fact-centered, honest information about your government.

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.

One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out. Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top. The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

> One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out.

The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.

'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.

> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

> The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

Calling them "the same parties" is close to hiding the ball. Those parties have shifted and diverged in multiple directions over their history. See the Civil Rights era for an obvious one--or the rapid separation of both current parties, today. The generally-socdem push of the left wing of the Democratic Party is working to change policy and position. (The reactionary push of the right wing of the Republican Party is working even more dramatically.)

> Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.

This doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they not run? Plenty of authoritarians all over the world and throughout history have come to power through democratic means!

As for "which President", Donald Trump comes to mind for very obvious reasons around attempting to retain power through extralegal means. Whether he has the functioning cognitive capacity to understand what a dictatorship is an open question, but it does not change that he attempted to retain executive control via force and fiat.

It's funny sometimes seeing what people reveal about themselves unintentionally when they rail against something; if the news is all of those bad things for you, then you're not working very hard to understand it.

"News" is literally just "what's happening around me". There's no bias in that. It's just a set of facts. News media outlets can be biased/partisan/etc. but bias doesn't just fall out of the sky to hold us hostage. You can account for it.

No its not whats happening around me. Its shocking things people who want me to look at ads choose to show me from all over the world

That's news media, not news. The media reports the news, in ways you may dislike, but the actual content they're sharing with you is rooted in literal events that took place.

Well fine, you win the argument over semantics. Everyone here is referring to news media using the term news. Now that we've come to this understanding that what we mean by news is news media then my point stands.

No, they aren’t. They’re discussing whether or not knowing things is worth it, which is completely different.

Your point doesn’t make sense once you realize there’s a difference between news and news media.

The problem is, the original article itself doesn’t really differentiate. It DOES call out longer form pieces like books or magazines as better alternatives (suggesting the article is primarily referring to news media) but also implies not jumping on the latest story and waiting for those that outlast the news cycle (which would suggest the article is also about “knowing things” in so much as we don’t need to know all things immediately all the time).

I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.

But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.

I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.

News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.

If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.

At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.

Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.

One question; who introduces bias into reporting?

Potentially anyone involved in the making of the report.

Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.

What phrase, if you had to choose one, would you describe the group of people who do this work? The work, as you clearly explain here, is how bias gets introduced?

Maybe, perhaps, news media?

Learning for the first time what the issues are (or who the people are) to be voted on day-of is a great way to get manipulated.

> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

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.

On the finance point, the market has probably absorbed any news a nanosecond after it hits the wire. I don't think that understanding that AI was going to finally take off gave anyone alpha to invest into NVidia.

No, the market is surprisingly slow with this. Sure, there are some professional traders that react very quickly. But it appears that there are masses of investors that get to learn the news very late, or only react when they hear from other people who heard the news before them.

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.

Er, individual stock trading is gambling, not investing.

Every investment is a gamble.

A gamble vs. gambling; English is weird, the former means a general risk/reward bet, whereas the latter means to take undue risk for entertainment purposes.

Buying individual stocks is the act of taking unknown risk for entertainment purposes.

> Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker).

Sorry to be that jerk, but:

If you need to follow the sports/entertainment news to engage in small talk when coworkers discuss these issues, it just means you don't know how to do small talk.

I said I like to be accommodating. I personally would rather little to no interaction unless it's pertinent to work at hand.

> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote.

Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind.

And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.

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