Stop Reading News (2013)
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"News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last."
Couldn't disagree more. As a counterargument, consider, for instance, the question of how it would be possible to write history without a connection to news (and other things) stored to archives?
But this I can agree with:
"Like other purveyors of drugs, producers of news want you to consume more of it."
Yet, the argument is hardly novel:
I agree, to state simply: news becomes history
So, my understanding of history is: integral(news)dt + history_reading
I'd argue that watching the (news)dt occur also helps me to evaluate the quality/accuracy of the history_reading, to see how the sausage is made.
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"Like other purveyors of drugs, producers of news want you to consume more of it."
Sure, but also: "Like other purveyors of drugs, producers of _x_ want you to consume more of it."
I'm definitely interested in a better method for learning, but if my target is understanding historical context in my lifetime, what is honestly better than contextualizing today's news with (history * yesterday's news)?
To think about things maybe dear to us, the history of Apple, Steve Jobs, Amiga, Atari, is very different than the integral of news about those. It is more influenced by people's stories that were never "news". I'm not sure any news about these really constitute a major part of what we'd call the history there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History says "inquiry; knowledge acquired by investigation" ... most of what we call news doesn't really involve much in the way of inquiry or investigation. A lot of news is just PR. E.g. the crime reporter in the news knows some guys in the police and they give him some story and he prints it. That's news. Often the history of significant events is discovered over much longer time frames through more serious investigation and research. The events that aren't significant sort of fade away into nothingness.
Good journalism, investigative reporting, that provides some insight, seems incredibly rare in any domain.
When news stories come out about some technical discovery or science, and you're familiar with the domain, they very rarely are accurate. Like those "cancer is finally cured" stories that pop up every now and then as "news".
I guess it's like "reality" shows?
It seems like the distinction between PR and news as content is clear though, and their conflation is from being published together
> News become part of history but I don't think history is the integral of old news.
Certainly not; so my mental model can be amended: History ~= integration(old news + X)dt
And my question then is what to use as X?
I think your point is that some PR is officially PR but that's not what I'm talking about.
A tough question. The issue, I think, is that we cannot reliably reflect/contextualize about today's news/events until it becomes history, i.e. reliability (for a lack of a better term) comes only with distance to past. But now we are already on a dangerous ground because, you know, '84.
> " think, is that we cannot reliably reflect/contextualize about today's news/events until it becomes history, i.e. reliability"
This is exactly my point so far:: the best approximation I have for contextualizing today's news is by examining the diff of today's history and yesterday's news.
I'm not confident in my grammar; let me make a graphic:
......................................
..........|yesterday|Today
news...| A ........ | x
history.| B ........ | C
......................................
diff(x, reality) ~= diff(A,C)
......................................
Given A, C, and x; my goal is to determine reality, with the assumption that x does not necessarily equal reality.
over repeated days:
diff(x+1, reality+1) ~= diff(A,C) + diff(A-1, B) + diff(A-2,B-1) ~= integral(diff(A,C))dt
So, over time, reading current news allows me to contextualize current news as a function of how it became history in the past; increasing my ability to evaluate >"reliability" of current news.
Whatever improvement I'm looking for almost certainly lies in reading history, and comparing to what would have been current news at the time.
Is this where you're imagining big brother?
https://www.404media.co/reuters-takes-down-blockbuster-hacke...
I’m “posting too fast” or I’d submit it to HN myself - feel free to do so, dear reader, as it belongs on HN.
> “Reuters has temporarily removed the article ‘How an Indian startup hacked the world’ to comply with a preliminary court order issued on Dec. 4, 2023, in a district court in New Delhi, India. Reuters stands by its reporting and plans to appeal the decision,” the editor’s note reads. An archive of the story, hosted on the Wayback Machine, is available here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116164611/https://www.reute...
I keep coming back to an infinite necessity of news/reporting; definitely read more than just news, but nothing in this thread has pointed me to "stop reading news", as the title directs.
Look to the East.
- Most news is actually entertainment disguised as information.
- You can't act on the vast majority of news.
- Most medias, including specialized ones, can give a very good appearance of competence while actually knowing nothing of the actual situation.
- Medias, of course, have agendas and allegiances.
- You don't have neither the skill nor the resources to verify what they tell you. And dig a little once, you usually find out how alarmingly distorted the story is, suggesting you should do it thoroughly every single time.
- The volume of news, and noise vs signal ratio, is increasingly playing against you.
- It's fine to not have an opinion on most things. You opinion is worth zilch on most topics anyway and your decisions suck.
- It's exhausting and bad for your health and happiness.
He still reads some news, but consider it a way to entertain himself rather than being informed.
Tim Ferris has a similar view, and get most of its news from conversation with others, assuming that if they are in the mind of people, the filter of consequences on his life has already been applied.
n = 1, but I've seen my father has been watching an analyzing the news every single day for all my life. Thousands of hours of consumption, reactions, debates, bad moods and judgement.
I never saw him ONCE make a daily decision based on the news that made his life better.
Personally, I've found most medias content to be very low quality, and the propaganda everywhere. The time and energy it takes to untangle all that is not worth it.
I find way more interesting the reports of individuals with skin in the game. That's one of the reason I'm on HN.
And still, I know that even HN is most of the time, entertainment for me.
And that's true. Following the wars in Ukraine or Israel/Gaza isn't going to change anything about my life for the better, even if I feel bad saying out loud that maybe I just shouldn't read about it -- that makes it sound like I don't care. Reading about the antics of Trump or Biden or Schumer or Johnson or Jeffries or McConnell isn't going to change what I do day by day, at least not for the better. Getting angry at Ken Paxton or the Texas Supreme Court for their utter disregard for human life brings me down, not up, and there's nothing I can do about that situation anyway.
An argument I can think of for keeping informed about that sort of thing is that it's one of the factors I might put into the next time election day comes up. If a particular candidate had a good response or bad response to these things, it might help me decide who to vote for. But the thing is, I don't need to follow these events in real time to get that help. I can wait until a month or two before the election, and start reading things, nicely summarized, about the candidates' positions, reactions, voting record, etc. on these topics. And I'll spend a lot less time doing it, too.
(Let's ignore for a minute whether or not voting is a productive activity; I'm going to vote because I feel like I have a responsibility to do so, regardless of its efficacy.)
And here I'm just talking about political news. There's so much other news, and I can't see how much of that could be any more useful to my day-to-day.
If you don't e.g. mind being unaware of the local situation, which goes to preparedness. -By all means don't read news outside of tornado season, and don't mind being caught up in current affairs with no situational awareness.
If you don't mind abrogating decision making to others, where you have some locus of control. If you have no locus of control in the situation then being un-informed is almost exactly what those who do have some levers, wish.
Certainly, reading "news" as "olds" is somewhat easier on the mind. perhaps we're just disagreeing about how old you should leave it to be.
It's also funny how you've written 'unable to engage with peers on anything except history'. Like, do you speak with your peers only abt news and history? When we gather with friends we discuss many personal things too, and some news too, but not bc we follow them, but bc news were so big that these got to us through another channels indirectly.
Being aware with local situation is strange too. Except from some big things that directly impact me, why I should be aware about the things in the city? Most of the time it's just irrelevant except some strikes of the public service workers or some festivals?
There are ways to read news by using an rss+ some llm combo to filter out irrelevant things but it's too cumbersome
"I didn't know the Stones were playing that gig" is big in this. If the stones decided to play the gig 24h ago, and you're in the city, the FOMO may be worse than the other choice.
Look I'm not dying on the hill on this. I think some amount of engagement is wise, beneficial. Too much is definitely bad.
("Reduce news consumption, turn into unsocialized disaster victim under the control of others.")
"oh, I am sure it will be ok" right until it wasn't.
But your point is good otherwise. It's a continuum. How far down the slider you dial it, is up to you. I dialled to "completely disengaged" but there's "keep an ear open" further up to "read obsessively every day"
I firmly stand by my opinion that "Stop reading news" is the best advice that can be given to most people interested in being better informed about the world.
My friends tell me about the « big » happenings like Ukraine or Israel big.
The rest, I don’t get and I don’t care. I don’t miss anything regarding the local situation. Yes, if I’m going to see some stand up, maybe I’ll miss on some references, that’s the price I pay for the peace of mind I get by not subjecting myself to demotivating content on the daily. Funnily, about your locus of control argument, focusing on things you can’t control (like inflation, some disease in a land far away or another murder in the USA) is not going to help you deal with things in a better way. Quite the contrary. You have much, much less control than the info you can take in generally.
I don’t know, I think one should be more mindful of their mental diet whenever they engage with a piece of content they can access for free. Especially in our ad driven economy, always being aware of what’s being said and why is it said that way helped me understand a lot, more sometimes than the message in itself.
We are figuratively being bombarded with information nowadays. It's not good. And almost all of the news we consume doesn't significantly affect our personal lives. And it's all like propaganda, even if it wasn't the intention.
The rest of your post is in a similar finger-pointing parent-telling-their-child-how-the-world-works mode, but the first line is already wrong. The world is a lot bigger then just historical facts and what CNN is currently telling you. I can easily interact with my "peers" without talking about history or COVID, thank you. I am pretty saddened that you believe otherwise.
There's a lot of room between "obsessively read everything" and "you didn't know about the tornado warning until your house blew over".
I get that it's hard to find the best spot on the continuum. And that best spot is probably not the same for everyone.
It's interesting that this article was written 10 years ago. Social media was already not great even by then, but it was nowhere near as polarizing and engagement-centric as it is now. Subscription models for online newspapers weren't quite as pervasive as they are now.
So I don't know... honestly I couldn't make it all that far through this article. It was so filled with absolutes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that there are choices between everything and nothing. Exhausting.
Oh, you will definitely enjoy this quote! Try to guess when it was written. (Warning: there is a spoiler in the replies.)
I guess this shouldn't be surprising: news publishers have to pay their staff and keep the lights on, and always to some extent will be biased toward journalism that sells.
But also consider that Jefferson is on the side of the state: even if he was in favor of freedom of the press, I'm sure he had his own biases that made him think journalists could be annoying, at best.
This is the way. I treat news headlines as a list of recommendations for which Wikipedia articles to read today. I have even built my own archive of Wikipedia's "Current Events" pages[1] to make this process as seamless as possible, and skip all the non-news garbage that news websites tend to be infested with.
I'll be consuming this from now on, combined with newsminimalist.com . Should cover 99% of what I want to know.
Can you add RSS feed to pastevents.org? That would be even better!
> What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
I fully agree, but even after not reading/watching 90% of the news, I still feel like checking HN or watching the 17:00 news
I know that (audio)books and podcasts are way more informative, and I enjoy reading or listening a lot, but still, the news is simply addictive.
> Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.
In the case of Israel vs Hamas I did not pay much attention to the event initially. It https that I have no special interest in any of the actors.
After a few days I had a better view and I build dig into the history of the conflict and end up with something more substantial that hysteric and contradictory information.
I am French and our minister of interior has had his proposal of law rejected. Looks like this is something serious but I will wait a few days to look more closely once the dust settles.
Following the news is extremely stressful and outside of effects that directly touch you, I am for the wait and see approach. The last event that required an immediate followup, as far as i remember, was the beginning of COVID when regulations applicable overnight were coming daily.
https://blog.ncase.me/we-become-what-we-behold-a-post-mortem...
> Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
It was written by Thomas Jefferson.
Another example would be not going out if there is a riot or hurricane outside of my house. News can also bring safety.
I can agree with not reading every single piece of news and becoming paranoid/too unnecessarily informed about every possible thing out there.
Further political media is a joke and personally if you watch either side of that junk you like to be spoonfed junk vs. think for yourself.
https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/06/15/Curated-New...
If we existed in a world where “News doesn’t make you more informed; it just makes you more confident the information you have is all there is.” was something that could be false, it would probably be Not Good to present it as true and move on here. Luckily, since this is an an obvious analytic truth, the author is right to simply say it and move on. As a suggestion to the author, it would be helpful to list all the propositions which need to be justifiable a priori for his argument to be justified (in this case all of them), so that readers can know whether or not to take him seriously at first glance.
Everyone knows there is problems with the media, particularly with attention seeking (read click bait), and bias (read telling you what you want to hear).
The news is a contributing factor in the current political climate, it is mostly unhealthy. Why is it unfounded?
To drop the sarcastic frame - the article either argues something that could be incorrect or it makes a meaningless argument. If it’s arguing something that could be otherwise then it needs to give evidence for the things it’s saying. It doesn’t and treats everything it’s saying as completely self-evident. But these are empirical assertions that need evidence to be proven true or false, and the article stands out in using zero evidence. Personally, I think that this inadvertently reveals the disdain for news is really part of a broader undervaluing of evidence in general, but I don’t think that’s provable really.
the article is an opinion, like your earlier comment, there is no need to cite anything or be to pedantic.
As a native English speaker try to simplify the wording on your arguments a bit. They are somwhat highfalutin and a little convoluted. Your message is fairly simple, no reason to add extra complexity… best case you confuse some esl people, worst case you seem like hot air.
“The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words” - George Eliot.
The news today is what history is tomorrow. You can frame it as not being able to think long-term, but it just smells like fresh history-making to me.