News is bad for you | Hacker News Reader

News is bad for you

theguardian.com

486 pointsvvsanil232 comments

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw

"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain

"I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard

''Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.'' Oscar Wilde

It's so ironic to use quotation in this case.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

What is the point of this post? To say that journalism is a worthless endeavour? It would be just as easy to go cherry pick some quotes that say just the opposite without providing a substantial argument.

News is not the same thing as journalism. Journalism is worthwhile when it is the news, not when it covers it.

The post doesn't make such a distinction.

> "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

To be fair news papers are much different now than they were then. A history of newspapers in America will show you journalistic credibility was hard to come by early on.

I get that newspapers and the journalistic profession used to be different, and in many ways better, than they are now. Still, doesn't it strike you as interesting that brilliant, thoughtful people living at at the same time as those "better" newspapers made criticisms similar to those being made today? Thinking too poorly of the present and too well of the past is a common error. Or, on a related not, "There's nothing new under the sun."

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

Hmm, I certainly thought he was implying that things used to be better. The fact that "journalistic credibility was hard to come by" was surely a good thing, no? It means readers are applying more stringent standards to what they read. As opposed to now, when (supposed) journalistic credibility is easier to come by, but worth much less. . . .

Quite the contrary, I believe, and I'm sure your original parent comment was making the opposite point of what you think.

As far as I remember from grade school, newspapers in the US started doing legitimate work around the time of "muckrakers," early investigative journalists. It seems we've returned to the days of yellow journalism, when sensationalist articles were written just to push up circulation.

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

Interesting. Thanks. And I had always thought of 'muckraker' as a derogatory term, though it seems it must have started out, at least, as an approbatory term for the positive development of muckraking out of yellow journalism(?).

Information is power. A nexus point for distributing and legitimizing information arguably involves more moral hazard that just about anything else.

While I agree with the sentiment, Rolf Dobelli himself is a plagiarist. This whole reasoning is basically stolen from Nassim Taleb.

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/dobelli.htm

http://blog.chabris.com/2013/09/similarities-between-rolf-do...

EDIT: For another take on not reading the news, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

I thought I'd heard that line before...

So? It's a summary article with the high level points easy digestible by current news addicts. It's A lot easier to get someone to read this article than Fooled by Randomness.

And the irony of that truth just made my head explode.

He mentions Taleb in the article, and is it Taleb who came up with the idea that news is bad?

I don't think so this idea is in Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985). A must read.

Thank you, I was just about to mention this book. None of this is new and I can only imagine what he would think of the today's media. He died in 2003 and even though the internet was going strong back then it has greatly surpassed that since then.

I wonder what he would think of the proliferation of cell phones (now) and how they distract immensely from life and thought.

No wonder he doesn't want you to read news :)

Maybe Dobelli's ghost writer messed up.

His account on the plagiarism story. http://www.dobelli.com/book-corrections/taleb

It's definitely easy to see his book as heavily influenced by Taleb, but I supposed everything would be correctly referenced to Taleb — I never actually went to check references. Despite that, the book is a great summary of thinking biases and is clearly explained.

The rebuttal from Dobelli >> http://www.dobelli.com/book-corrections/taleb

That's not a rebuttal. Look at the diffs for Taleb/Dobelli and Chabris&Simons/Dobelli for yourself. This is textbook plagiarism.

Taleb concedes that Dobelli's work references Taleb 23 + 12 times. The examples I didn't recognize as being specifically Taleb's (and I have read all his books). These popular science examples get regurgitated over and over on websites, blogs and so on. Perhaps Taleb was the first to think of these examples, perhaps he was not.

For example the comparison between wall street investors and monkeys and the subsequent selection bias was featured in A Random Walk Down Wall Street - 1973.

So I'm not convinced there was malice involved here.

That this is the top comment on Hacker News, rather than discussion about ideas, demonstrates Rolf/Taleb's ideas pretty well

Of course we can put our heads in the sand.

The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:

(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.

If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.

If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.

I love your optimism! Almost as much as I do your boundless naïvete. And I stopped voting years ago. It's an unhealthy habit, and only encourages 'em.

> If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.

If the elected actors interfere with the news you read, you also stop being a responsible citizen. We simply never had a chance.

I stopped reading at Taleb's first example. I've seen very similar stories from both Richard Feynman and John Littlewood. Here's Taleb:

"I was thinking about calling my third cousin Antiochus this morning when the phone rang. Miracle! It was him on the other line; this confirms my developed sixth sense! This is a great omen except that perhaps I should wake up and take into account the number of times when I thought about calling him without his calling me; the times when he called me without my thinking about calling him; and, most significantly, the numerous occurrences of my not thinking about him, and him not trying to call me."

Feynman has several variations on this theme. Here's one:

"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays-- my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck--after all, my grandmother was very old--although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon."

And another:

"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing! "

There's an extended quote in the Feynman biography "Genius" (by James Gleick) which is a closer match than both these. I don't have an easy cut-and-paste, alas, but here's a link on Google books (it's the third page link):

http://books.google.ca/books?id=j42RD66g72oC&printsec=frontc...

Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote.

Edit: I couldn't resist reading on. Taleb's article is embarassingly bad. Half his "original examples" I'd heard before from statisticians and other scientists, often years before Taleb's books. I will say this: there are a few instances in there where Dobelli should be genuinely embarassed. But Taleb should be at least equally embarassed by presenting, Wolfram-like, well-known truths as his deep original thought.

Don't you think there's a difference between isolated anecdotes and two dozen paragraphs with very similar content? Not to mention the fact that Dobelli reviewed Taleb's book, and that other authors have noticed similarities.

Also this paragraph:

Note that correspondence of content doesn't imply plagiarism. There is a book EXTREMELY similar to Fooled by Randomness called The Drunkard's Walk. Yet not a shade of plagiarism. Why? the examples and terminology were very different. Some ideas can be rediscovered by two people. And when asked, the author said: Had I known about FBR I wouldn't have written that book. An honorable man.

EDIT in reply to above edit: Note that Taleb isn't saying he's the originator of all the examples. Many are attributed in his footnotes, and he's not claming authorship of them. Many of the examples, as you say, are already in the common consciousness. Taleb is using these examples to drive other points. The only thing he is saying - in this article - is showing how Dobelli is obviously plagiarizing what he has written.

I said Dobelli should be embarassed. He certainly should be embarassed by several of those examples.

But Taleb's page is also embarassing to Taleb. He's presenting many of these as his original ideas when, well, they're simply not.

I don't think Taleb is presenting many of these as his original ideas, he's merely (in the original context - his book) using them as examples to drive his other ideas.

If you ask Taleb himself, he would say that he's only had one idea - the rest are just derivations (his or someone else's), and using already observed phenomena and anecdotes to explain it and its consequences.

The only purpose of that article is to expose Dobelli, nothing else.

As to the specific quote Taleb basically reads as a reorganized and edited version of this last quote. - isn't it possible that he has had a very similar experience?

How can he be a plagiarist when this should be general knowledge?

For anyone who isn't ready to completely turn off the news spigot, consider switching to a weekly (or monthly) source of news.

I get all of my (non-HN) news from The Economist's audio edition. It's released weekly and they have a section right at the start about big things happening in business/politics around the world in the last week. It's no more than a couple minutes to scan, and 10-20 in normal speed audio.

The rest of the articles are at least one step back (since they summarize a week of what's happened). Many others are looking at some larger event or trend, sometimes with a recent event/anecdote as a lead in.

I like the audio edition in particular since I can put it on while I'm doing chores or commuting and I'll pick up bits and pieces even if I'm not fully paying attention. I can also have only the sections I care about included, which lets me skip the ones I really don't care about.

Is this only a soundcloud thing or is this available somewhere as an (offline) podcast?

Soundcloud link: http://l.economist.com/204894&t=v1g49i1qmlsq6a25ld8r6j8u40

You have to be a subscriber, and then it's available on their website: http://www.economist.com/audio-edition

If you just want to read The World This Week it's available online for free: http://www.economist.com/printedition/

To be clear, since I can't see without being a subscriber, the "audio edition" is different from the "Economist radio" linked on Soundcloud?

Yes. Audio Edition is a word-for-word reading of the print edition. Economist Radio looks like it has the random other audio things they do (there's also a podcast on iTunes with those sorts of things)

FWIW, I think all soundcloud stuff have download options. http://i.imgur.com/DzaoYSK.png

Not all, I believe whoever uploads it can turn it on and off...

Here's a direct link: https://soundcloud.com/theeconomist

Scroll down to "recent" and you'll see that many, but not all, of them have a download button.

Love the fact that they put it on soundcloud since I already use it

Read the economist a lot while I was studying for my undergrad. Never felt more informed, and have never found a more balanced presentation of things, imho.

Nowadays I read the guardian website and watch RT sometimes. But I think I'll go back to the economist soon.

I also love the Economist audio edition. I listen to it during my commute, and mostly get through it each week. It kept me sane on a horrible commute with my previous job.

They have a separate digital subscription, if you just want the website and audio edition. It is included in a print subscription as well. You can buy a single week, if you want to try it out.

Highly recommended if you want to ignore the advice of the OP.

I think new subscribers must choose, print and digital are not included in each other, but there is a more expensive option for both.

Sorry, it changed since I last looked. They used to offer a regular subscription with both digital and print, or a cheaper digital only. As you say, now they offer the regular option with both, or a cheaper option with either digital or print.

That section is really great. If you would read nothing else at all, and just add one thing, that would be the first thing to add. What I miss is something similar on a more local level. Both local-local, but also for my country. I even thought of doing a start-up at this (produce a one page PDF weekly to complement this spread).

News media, such as The Economist, is also VERY different from what they talk about in the article:

>The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking.

Most of the news stories aren't really what I would call news anyway. The type of news that is apparently bad for me, is the same type of news that embodies everything that is wrong with most news media. The topics of you evening news broadcast is about as relevant as the sports scores.

I think you guys are missing the point. Most of these effects are caused by ALL news, even high quality sources like The Economist and HN.

Whether news is bad for you or not probably depends more than a little on what the source is. I don't watch television—for years our TV was in a box in a closet, brought out mostly just for watching the Olympics. But I do look at Google News and try to train it to give me mostly long-form suggestions about science and world issues from diverse sources with professional reporting and editing. That helps.

The claim that giving up reading news will make you happier is a medical claim in the article that is not backed up by reliable medical sources,[1] so I call baloney on that. The newspaper opinion writer here (promoting his new book with excerpts from the book) doesn't report the issue the way a competent reporter would report it, but just makes a bunch of broad general statements with no nuance. In other words, the medical claims about happier human life in the article are just like the made-up opinions we can all easily find on the Internet, and the article stands as an example of how we can find blatantly misleading "information" inside or outside the professional news media. I have no reason to suppose that the full-length book is a medically reliable source (the publisher of the book is identified at the end of the article).

Anecdote alert: I'm a curious person and I like to learn, and so one of the reasons I come here to Hacker NEWS is to find out new facts about the external world that I didn't know before, including facts about current events ("news" in the narrow sense). My personal experience—which, to be sure, may differ from yours—is that I am a happier and more productive person when I know, from good sources, what is going on all over the world and the broader context of expanding human knowledge. But I'm sure you can find an opinion column somewhere based on a popular book with a different opinion from mine.

AFTER EDIT: Good catch! Another participant here on HN noticed that the author of the article kindly submitted here has credibly been accused of plagiarism by more than one published author who works harder than he does. I upvoted that comment for what it added to our understanding of the article's background.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MEDRS

> Google News and try to train it

Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?

Google News is most definitely trainable. NO WAY would I visit Reddit for news (I was an early adopter of Reddit, and with Hacker News in my portfolio of news sources already, I don't see enough value-add in trying Reddit again.)

It has gotten harder to train Google news due to the big uptick in the 300 word reprint practice that is playing out in media recently. Even if you manually block all the major outlets, so many sites reprint their stories that I still end up with Miley Cyrus news in my feed.

How do you do that? The only way I can think is discarding any story I'm not interested in, but how do I say, hey Google Now I liked this article?

+1?

Or how do I say: "this was a really bad article"?

Here is a Ted talk (2011) by Eli Pariser [1] about the "filter bubble" and its unintended consequences.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

You've entirely missed the point. News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable. Ie bitcoin articles focus on the speculative aspect and not that it's a more useful, less friction method of payment. Business shows focus on day to day movement instead of broad sweeping trends that are game changers.

The medium is partly the problem.

News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable.

I think you've missed the point of my comment, which is that I actively disregard sources that have that defect, and look for sources that tell me about verified, actionable information. (I have been wondering about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my comment, and if this is what people think I am saying, that I like the sensational, they are badly misreading my comment.)

I think there's some misunderstanding over the meaning of the word "news" here. The author of the article uses the word "news" when referring to "sensational, bite sized news articles" (because it makes for a better headline). He doesn't think all journalism is bad. The article concludes with this thought:

"Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too."

You and the author seem to mostly agree in that respect.

> Ie bitcoin articles focus on the speculative aspect and not that it's a more useful, less friction method of payment.

... what if bitcoin, currently, _is_ only about the speculative aspect, and is not actually more useful with less friction?

If that is the case, then I used a bad example, but I really don't think I did.

Off topic, but... I recently bought a days usage from put.io with bitcoin. They got their money instantly, I don't have to worry about a hacker getting my credit card info or using more bitcoins in my wallet than I gave. I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.

> I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.

You are wrong here. You did exactly that (a bitcoin transaction is that), just in a way you are not used to.

Yes, but I didn't have to fill out a two page form, I clicked send in my bitcoin client.

When a hacker gets your credit card info, you're liable for $50 and have the hassle of a few days without your card until you get new one.

When a hacker gets your bitcoin wallet, they can empty out your entire account.

That's why you have multiple wallets, which you can create with a click of a button. It's effortless to create as many wallets as required for you to feel safe.

It is just sooo much easier to get credit card information though. You literally give all of it to everyone any time you use it.

I don't really know why credit cards don't have a public/private key situation but they don't, so people are just stealing them constantly or applying for them with a bunch of stolen personal information and then running up your credit in ways that are pretty difficult to detect.

A lot of the fraud that is occurring today is because the systems we are using to transmit wealth digitally are inherently very insecure.

When the government wishes to make your life miserable and you have a credit card, they can call your credit card company and get your account frozen for reasons.

When the government wishes to make your life miserable and you have a bitcoin wallet, they have to do a lot more work if they want those funds.

Because the government making your life miserable by freezing your account is just as common as someone stealing your credit card, right?

I bet people losing their bitcoin wallets to an intruder (or indeed any file on their computer) happens less often than credit card theft.

Well, credit cards are a lot more widely used than bitcoin. So base rate fallacy.

I think it was a great example for a possibly not as great point. I think both you and tokenadult would prefer to read a paper on using bitcoin in vending machines http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.t... rather than something more sensationalist like http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/robocoin/ ( with titles along the lines of Bitcoin ATMs: Valhalla Incarnate or the Looming Death of Civilization?)

And I like your example of a use of bitcoin apart from speculation. The sensationalist articles love bitcoin because it is new, but also because a few people have become rich and poor from speculating on it and its future is uncertain, which leaves lots of room in the stories for "raising concerns".

But as tokenadult pointed out, we can avoid those articles and the sources that tend to deliver them.

Oh man. News that focuses on actionable. Utopia !

I actually believe this renewed news spam (brought by ourselves through the internet) probably makes us all dumber as a whole, over time.

Tangential comment:

News is bad because it focuses on the sensational and misses the actionable.

That's actually what frustrates me most about this article. For people who do plan to continue following news (likely including most readers of the article), the article isn't very actionable.

I would love to see a few smart people work together, look through the author's points, and outline a few ways to mitigate the legitimate problems summarized in each point. The article might be useful for other people who haven't considered these points before, but in its current state of merely spreading awareness, it's not very useful for me.

Why would you expect there to be medical evidence that speaks to being happier after giving up reading news?

I don't think you are entitled to expect that. Medical studies don't tend to focus on the happiness of healthy people. Even if they did, I would be surprised if a good study giving us data on happiness on reading news already exist at a scale that would represent the range of population behaviour.

I don't disagree with you wanting good scientific evidence - that's commendable.

I disagree with calling baloney on a sensible hypothesis ('reading news as a typical Westerner does is detrimental to overall happiness for most people') just because that scientific evidence does not yet exist and this opinion piece does not yet provide it.

Bias alert: I'm pretty sure I read to much news, and am solidifying this meme in my mind to try to improve that.

That's sort of like saying "whether candy is bad for you depends on what candy you eat". Sort of true, but, you're still eating candy.

Which also ignores that point that not all candy is bad for you, and even candy that's not necessarily good for you in quantity might be perfectly fine in moderation.

Chocolate, for example, decreases the risk of stroke, is good for your skin, improves vision, stimulates brain activity, etc. How much of and how often you eat it affects whether it's still beneficial compared to its negative effects, which include high cholesterol, diabetes, weight gain, etc.

Someone eating candy isn't necessarily doing something bad, despite the stigma. Equally, they are not doing something necessarily good.

Yes, indeed, heartily concur.

"News" is nothing more than a report of events potentially affecting our lives: if a particular report is intelligent, trustworthy, and helpful to our understanding of what we need to do to better our lives, it is something to be valued and even on occasion treasured; if, in contrast, it is nothing more than what amounts to a reporter's trick for grabbing attention or an attempt to pass off what amounts to drivel as something that somehow should command our time, we have good reason to shun and even resent it. We do need to care about things beyond ourselves but who wants to endure the institutional barrage of worthless or semi-worthless reports that can impose upon us throughout a given day if we allow it in this age of instant and ubiquitous communication? I wouldn't go so far as to say "please turn it all off" because then you do lose the ability to get a minimum exposure each day as needed to stay meaningfully informed as a person and as a citizen but I would say "give me one giant filter" to be able to control and limit the flow. Who can realistically profit from a daily surfeit of junk-bond-quality reporting and especially about things such as a sensational car wreck (or whatever) having little or no affect on our lives? Since that is what "news" mostly is these days, it is best to apply that one great filter available to us all - that is, personal self-control. That is what I love most about your comment: it reminds us clearly that it is within our power to use such self-control and to thereby focus on quality while filtering what is junk.

The article itself is somewhat dubious, as you note. Important note for those who would commend their views to others: scatter-gun assertions made in support of a point can leave one doubting how great is the author's grip on the topic at hand; if you have something to say, think it through and develop your points well before assuming that others will want to hear what you have to say. Not really well written at all.

A "giant filter" over google news still does not cut at the root. I think the problem is the perverse use of this medium (i.e. computer-web system). It is a medium that is not sufficiently understood by most, or perhaps any person yet. From reading (Englebart, et al) it seems this medium would be best used as a tool for collaboration.

Unfortunately most people (including myself) don't deeply reflect on a new medium/technology, to figure how best to yield it to amplify human intelligence (or make human progress).

I argue "cutting cord" for news via TV and the web may be the best thing to do now until more is understood of its affects on humans. People don't realize that it is the medium that is the problem and there is no amount of "filter" that will help them and they suffer unnecessarily.

The biggest problem with news is that it's about newness and rarity. Whereas what we actually need to know is mostly not new. Eg, "man eaten by alligator" is a billion times less important than "decades of data say you will likely get heart disease."

Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.

My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:

Not News - A car accident across town - A single crime in another state - Celebrities - Scandals - Daily stock market fluctuations

News - A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me - Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city - Economic trends and their underlying causes

Another comment mentioned the economist's weekly digest - this gives a good summary of the important world news, but won't help with your local news.

As an example, it covers the riots breaking out in Ukraine but completely skipped that Paul Walker died..

Your post reminds me of "The Truth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_(novel)) by Terry Pratchett, in which the characters invent newspapers and deal with these issues. Hilarity ensues.

> Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.

Totally agree. OTOH many e-newspapers have unlimited capacity of producing news like "man eaten by alligator", "bus crash in Bolivia" etc., every hour, updating their homepage and moving all the articles down the list (including the important ones). Here the newness is taken to its extremes. Some solution is the "most read" list, however it also often consists of the sensationalist stories.

A good e-newspaper which updates just once a day would be a great thing.

I recommend reading weekly magazines for exactly this reason. The longer time to publish also affords better perspective than the 24 second, Twitter-fueled, cable/internet news cycle.

News in the UK has several problems.

News papers are either horrible - I cannot describe just how vile much of the UK news press industry is. The decent newspapers have tiny distribution figures. The Guardian, for example, has a circulation of under 300,000 people. Obviously, more people read it, but still, that's a tiny figure.

UK news allows the agenda[1] to be set by spin doctors. We frequently has stories about how a politician "will announce" something - the speech has been released by publicists before it has been given, allowing the speaker to set the tone of the coverage.

I don't know why that's allowed or why they do it. It's incredibly frustrating.

And there's very narrow window of what is or isn't news. A blond white girl goes missing? We'll have wall to wall coverage of it for weeks. A non white person, or a boy, goes missing? Not so much. Compare, for example, the Soham coverage (two white girls killed by a caretaker at their school) with Adam Morrell, a boy who was brutally tortured and killed.

For years I read about agents that would go out and find news items that would be interesting to me. It still hasn't happened. I would pay money for something that works for me:

1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm interested in news items about mental health, even if it's poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a stigmatising way.

2) Suggest items that I might be interested in based on my reading history, and what I am or am not interested in.

3) Provide suggested items to break me out of my bubble. This can be things about what I'm interested in with an opposing viewpoint to my regular sources; or it can be things that I haven't previously shown interest in.

[1] I don't know if "news agenda" is a peculiarly UK term.

Not to dump on UK, but I also find the UK newspapers to be very mean spirited. US tabloids gawk at celebrities, but UK tabloids are out to get them. I would not want to be famous in the UK.

That's not dumping on the UK, it's a very true point. Many UK HN readers will agree with you that a lot of the UK press is just toxic.

I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press).

The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority.

TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4#t=38

I agree, wholeheartedly. I would also like to add this about what is going on in the UK:

There is no local news. Remember in the olden days when there were local papers that people did actually pay for? I delivered them as a child and I did find them rather dull at the time. However, looking back, you could have small ads and sports news that would reach a target audience of locals. There were also syndicated articles, e.g. new car reviews, that were okay to read. If something actually happened in town, e.g. a book signing, a gig or even a jumble sale then it would be in there. Things the council wanted to tell you were in there. Then there were letters, probably one of the more interesting pages.

The problem nowadays in the UK is not just national/global news it is also with the local news. We have the Internet and those local papers have moved online, however, it is not working.

As for the relationship the press have with the politicians, the press need access or else they cannot write anything. So they have to do as they are told to get that access.

Most of what passes for news in UK papers is stuff cribbed from the news wires. This means that it is a very easy system to game - get your story on the news wire and it will make it to print. Meanwhile, you try and get some investigative journalism of your own creation into the papers - impossible!

    > 1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm
    > interested in news items about mental health, even if it's
    > poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a
    > stigmatising way.

I have set this up for myself for other topics with a wide range of rss feeds plus some filtering through yahoo pipes. It's pretty simple to do. IIRC there are also some commercial services that offer rss feed filtering.

I've been trying an experiment for the last year or two. I have an app that collects commentary, tech and science stories from across the web. (Recently I added news, but that was a mistake)

I find I stay just as informed reading commentary, where I'm purposefully being manipulated, as I do reading news. In fact the news is better, as various authors advance various personal theories they've been working on for weeks or months, using the current events as fodder. Reading a couple of these from different viewpoints provides wonderful context -- and context is the one thing critically missing from most "breaking news" reporting. The only difference is about a 12-hour delay. Trust me, the world does not depend on whether I know something that quickly. Twitter peeps will annoy me if something truly incredible happens.

I'm also finding that branding, whether by news outlet, author, or social signaling, is a terrible indicator of quality. As I continue to flush out the app, my belief is that a better indicator is statistical clustering around personality types, but that's still a year or two away.

But one thing is for sure: I've been much happier since I gave up all forms of news consumption. News is based on emotional manipulation. It's always a crisis, there's always an argument, and there's always some terrible danger you've been unaware of. That stuff will rot your mind. It's always been bad; it's just gotten worse over the last few decades as the news cycle has shortened.

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'd quite like something that collects commentary about the state of countries around the word, but I'm lacking decent sources, especially for outside of the west. Have you found any particularly enlightening sources of such things you'd care to share?

Foreign commentary can be a hoot! If you thought the western media was bad, you should get out more :)

Here's a secret ninja media consumption tip: http://watchingamerica.com It takes commentary from around the world and translates it into English. Quite informative. I wish we had far more services like it.

What does 'rot your mind' mean in this context? I agree, and intuitively feel there's value in avoiding short term distractions, but what's going on there? Is it just opportunity cost, spending time watching TV instead of thinking and learning so you miss out on the mental benefits? Or do certain types/durations of distraction make you less able to do complex mental tasks when you go back to them?

I think what happens is that we start viewing the world in overly-simplified political narratives, say left versus right, that can fit inside a typical news story. So if there's a shooting, it's a gun control story, and we have the same old assholes on TV saying the same old things. We become conditioned to think of everything in the world in cartoonish terms. Media outlets are only too happy to fill the space with people arguing. And it's always the same arguing. Arguing has become a commodity for consumption.

This makes the reporting itself really bad, since the only context the reporter needs to fit the event into is some off-the-shelf political bullshit, and it makes the outlets try to drive up viewership by having presenters who more and more have these recurring populist rages. Every night on TV there's somebody getting mad about something. So the reporters dig up enough to fuel the machine -- usually fed by the political parties, PACs, or other interested groups -- and the pundits and reactionaries do the dance. The viewer is left constantly seesawing from topic to topic. Are HMOs out to kill people? Will a child molester living five miles take my kid? There's no context to any of this because nobody gets paid to provide context. They get paid to make viewers frightened and angry, which drives up ratings.

That's unsustainable, in my opinion.

In printed media, without the branding or signaling, authors are required to provide a thesis and support it with an argument. The reader can choose to engage or not. There's no "if it bleeds, it leads" nonsense. I can read great commentary that I disagree with -- and not feel angry or somehow moved to outrage. Or I can read commentary I agree with that's a piece of junk. I'm no longer taking sides. Instead, I can separate my consumption of events from my characterization of the reporting itself. That's the critical piece that's missing for most news consumers.

Just guesswork on my part, though.

I think this is a great observation that has really only become possible from the internet: the ability to consume viewpoints from others outside of your small social circle has been increased massively. Sites like HN, reddit, dig, slashdot, etc have enabled that dialog on top of the usual one sided article.

Think back to when news was mostly distributed via TV or newspapers. Where could you get alternative views? Neighbors, churches? These folks won't likely come from as diverse backgrounds as folks you might find in an online forum. They will have grown up most likely in the same town you are in, raised in a similar fashion. These days, I might read twenty different viewpoints of NSA wiretapping, from twenty different countries perspectives. It definitely provides the reader with a much richer experience, making the original article less valuable (except as a catalyst for the discussion obviously).

I've got a fiver that says your "twenty different viewpoints" are just twenty differently phrased reiterations of how Godawful bad it is that the NSA should do what the NSA does. Nothing personal -- but I strongly doubt that the ability to obtain, consider, and benefit by perspectives other than one's own, correlates meaningfully with the frequency with which anyone actually does so.

Yeah but the internet has also made it easier to filter out news you don't like. Back in the day, your local newspaper had to appeal to a general audience, and contained editorials from people with many perspectives. Now a days, you can chose to only consume news you agree with. If you're a conservative, you can read Drudge Report and Fox News Online without ever having to encounter a liberal viewpoint (except as the target of mockery). Liberals can get all their news from Daily Koz and MSNBC.com in the same fashion.

That's my experience too. It came naturally ages ago, when I started reading /.. The explosion of different viewpoints was fascinating.

You have piqued my curiosity, your app sounds really interesting! Can you share more details about it? What sources do you aggregate from, how do you filter your stories (manually / statistically)? Actually i've been wanting to build something similar too!

This is a rather ignorant stance to take.

I know a lot of people don't like the doom & gloom of news. But it's needed. I recently discussed with someone who doesn't consume news about the NSA revelations. They were shocked. They said "why didn't anyone tell me?"

Instead of blocking things out and being happy with our ignorance, we need to change how news is done. If you whine about something, change it. The Guardian can certainly make an attempt to change the dynamic.

this may be a little facile, but the article reads like a "psychologists have found..." version of "ignorance is bliss"

I change cable news by not watching it. When nobody watches their propaganda tabloid trash anymore they will cease to exist and something better will replace them.

Cable news is only a sliver of the news picture.

We have yet to come up with a better alternative because we consume & we want it all for free. We cry about journalism yet we don't want to fund any. When good journalism is done, no one or very few people read it.

The key to changing news will be finding a way to monetize online content. Without this, all we will get is link-baiting and stories that are sensational to get people to come to a website.

> I know a lot of people don't like the doom & gloom of news. But it's needed. I recently discussed with someone who doesn't consume news about the NSA revelations. They were shocked. They said "why didn't anyone tell me?"

So I've been following the NSA news closely. But I'm not American! What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me? I can't influence the US government in any way. The most I got out of it was that I should move to non-US based service providers if possible - but this was clear when the first revelations hit. Did I really need to spend (I'm guessing) 10+ hours reading articles about the NSA's revelations?

I could see a case for following local news - where local might mean relevant to your industry or to your community. The more local the news, the more actionable the information. Nightly newscasts rarely focus on this though - they're basically entertainment, real reality television.

What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me?

Encrypt your data better, perhaps. But that's kind of besides the point - are you suggesting that there is no point knowing about things you have no control over?

Are you suggesting there is some point? That there's real value, to oneself or to anyone else, in repeatedly dismaying oneself over things which one does not have, and cannot obtain, the power to affect?

I suppose I just can't imagine being content at being ignorant of the world. By that principle surely it's also worthless to learn about world history?

It's probably hard to have a general rule about something like that. My take away from the article was that much of the current news that we consume isn't particularly useful to us--it doesn't improve the way we think or act, it just makes us sad and afraid.

Like, say, watching a report about a kidnapped child. Or reading about the trial of a serial killer.

Not in the slightest; the mistake there would lie not in studying the dead past, but rather in taking it personally enough to experience dismay. Taking sides in the past is pointless; one studies the past to take sides in the present.

I also want to pick on the fallacy I find in your equation of largely ignoring journalism and being ignorant of the world. Having in early life studied journalism without reference to history, and then later studied history without reference to journalism, I found the former to leave me bewildered in a morass of facts with no useful means of assembling from them a coherent picture of the world, and the latter to furnish me with the cognitive mechanisms necessary to derive a coherent, if of course not perfectly accurate, model, into which to fit the facts I derive from review of what I am forced to conclude is the rather slapdash and careless journalistic profession.

How about: Ask your political representatives for their position on surveillance of citizens and vote accordingly.

No you don't need to read 10+ hours of news about the same story unless there's new information and it has an effect on you. I didn't make that point so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.

I used to work in television news. I agree with you that some of it is just entertainment. The problem is that's what people want. Not everyone. But a good portion who never speak out about the news don't mind the entertainment part.

There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.

> No you don't need to read 10+ hours of news about the same story unless there's new information and it has an effect on you. I didn't make that point so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

The NSA story keeps coming back around as new information is revealed. The initial revelation was in May of this year and information is still tricking out. Following the news means taking in at least this much information on the NSA scandal.

> There's plenty people can do: develop a means to protect ourselves from the governments spying, activism, find out who was responsible at the top and try and get them removed.

The only means we have to protect ourselves is encryption (where possible) and keeping things offline. Ok - done (after the initial revelations, as noted). As a non-american I have no influence on the American political process so the other two are out.

> There's also reason to educate yourself about the world and culture without having to directly apply it. But that's another philosophical argument.

I agree completely, but news isn't education. Most of the information in daily news has a very short shelf-life (e.g. current events) so it's not even an accurate representation of the world after a few months. Science reporting in news media is notably terrible - big headlines around single studies and results that turn out to not amount to much later. This is in-fact the opposite of education, it's information pollution because you're learning things that turn out not to be true.

I have not consumed 10+ hours of information about the NSA revelations and I feel I have a solid understanding of the situation.

When we read something like the NSA reports, we don't just think of what we can do right now to protect ourselves, but about how we change policies for the future. We look into what we need to develop. We look at how to protect ourselves without sacrificing privacy.

News is education. If you consume news about Kim & Kanye I would agree with you and call it information pollution. Good journalism is educating us. There's plenty of good journalism out there. Whether we want to read it and support it is another thing.

Another non-USian here. Most information is always unactionable. In fact, that's a more general principle: most of anything is trash. So, expect to waste some time for getting the usefull bits.

Some of what I got as actionable info: 1 - Don't trust services. That's different from "avoid services", and very different from "avoid US services". Some times you can use non-trusted services, other times you can't. 2 - The US is messing with standard crypto. I'm avoiding eliptical crypto while I understand it's history better. I increased some RSA keys, sometimes over the old 2k bits "maximum amount anybody would ever need". I got some ideas for what to do when you don't trust your crypto algos, but I didn't need to use them. 3 - Don't trust closed source software. I already knew that one as an abstract thing (just like #1), but it was reveled that it's a completely real thing. (Also, now I have facts I can throw at somebody.) 4 - Don't trust your LAN or your hardware. Yeah, the first part is good practice - but easy to ignore. The remaining means that one must evaluate all his data worth, and prepare if needed. Ok, not really an action, unless you have data that isn't worthless.

The Guardian is the dynamic. Either it's working out well enough to suit them, or the institution has grown too sclerotic with age to behave other than how it does.

I'm willing to wager many people who do consume news don't know about the NSA revelations, or don't care, because they're too busy reading about the tragic vehicular manslaughter of an attractive teenage white girl who lives 1000 miles away, or about this one weird old trick for increasing productivity at the office, or about the 10 new indie releases you should be listening to right now.

Junk news can cause as much ignorance as no-news. And we have to concede that most of the news we read is junk, especially what you find on Hacker News.

But I agree that a self-imposed news fast is silly. If we didn't get news, we'd be blind to the NSA's betrayal, among other things. So lets keep consuming news. But we need to consume far less news. Far better news. A small amount of high-quality reporting, as opposed to the usual firehose of bullshit.

I agree we need to consume better news. Instead of clicking on the link-bait headlines, take some time and read that long-form article that took months or years to research. If we tell the media that's what we want, that's what we will get. They need/want to make a profit.

I rely on talking to people who share my interests and do read the news. Works pretty well.

So what source is there for "what you actually need to know" news? Something that's not afraid to say "today's need-to-know headlines: none." Something that keeps track of the status of significant long-term stories even while they're not catchy, knowing that something is happening, and predicting it will be a big deal again later. Something that dispenses with the "sensational but not relevant" stories. Something that might have a modest price tag attached, to dispense with the necessity to grab maximum eyeballs daily to sell ad space. Thoughts? Future YC candidate maybe?

News is terrible for me at least. For stress related reasons I decided at the beginning of 2013 that I would try and avoid daily contact with news (outside of anything important enough to percolate up HN, reddit and FB). I'm much more relaxed and less stressed and find that in casual conversation I'm about as up-to-date on important events as most people I know.

Recently I was looking for information on something and ended up on CNN.com and was awestruck at how much just absolutely unnewsworthy garbage filled the pages. Curious I looked around at other new sites to see if they were all worse than I remember and yes, pretty much they were full of gossip, misinformation and obvious fear mongering.

No thanks, I like this new system better.

Huff Po links are like this for me. I'm no staunch republican, I just get sick to my stomach when I click on a link (often from HN!) that might be interesting and I am assaulted by tabloid gossip on the right side of my screen. I check the URI, and sure enough it's HuffPo, and it's always something scabbed from somewhere else (ergo, the original article should have been submitted).

I was raised on NPR and have used/use it as my main source for general news and find it very informative. Although it is not perfect, NPR seems to focus on the delivery of information in a balanced (if that is possible) way allowing me to draw my own conclusions. My problem with the big news outlets (cnn, msnbc, fox, etc) is that they are clearly a business and focused on profitability (I have much empathy for them as I do the same when I am at work). The problem is when editorial decisions are made not by what is news worthy but by what will draw the most eye balls. For me it feels presenters are trying to one up each other with outrageous comments as their personal views become the story at the expense of the news. I am sorry but I want the news presented in a sterile/factual way. But instead it feels like American Idol with the presenters angling for a book deal, more twitter followers or other forms of personal enrichment. Of course there is nothing wrong with self-promotion, I do it every day at work, but maybe I am old fashion in my longing for the days of Ted Koppel who for the most part delivered the facts as he knew them and purposely tried not to show emotion one way or another. So I don’t think consuming news is bad but the self-promotion/echo chamber creating delivery of that news is another thing entirely.

Yes, clearly mainstream news has been turned into an entertainment product. Agree that NPR delivers the news in depth without all of the cynicism and noise that makes mainstream news so depressing, except on environmental issues, that's a topic where the NPR coverage will suggest you should have a bunker in the mountains.

http://xkcd.com/1299/

I grew up without a television - deliberate choice. My friends couldn't believe how much cool stuff I could get done because of this.

I grew also up without a television. That was no deliberate choice, my parents are orthodox christians. I was very creative in that period and I kinda miss that now :)

So return to that period by giving up the tv again.

I did. No TV thru high school, minimal later, culminating in full-slate cable service, then dumped it all for nothing more than an occasional DVD. Have no idea how any TV-watchers get anything done, as I'm working (home chores included) flat-out 18 hours a day and feel I can barely keep up with life.

The problem now is not the tv anymore. I grew up and have now to deal with the distractions of this age and time.

This implies that people are getting less smug about not owning a television since 2000, I don't see any evidence to support that.

Note: I gave up my television in 2000, and I am a bit smug about it.

Already knew this, already did this, already got happy. I generally agree with the sentiment of this article. If it's really news and really important, I'll get spammed on Facebook (e.g. NSA, Superbowl Blackout, Healthcare.gov, Paul Walker, Nelson Mandela, etc..).

I would honestly rather just get my news from HN because the intelligence level is a lot higher than any news organization. While I may disagree with certain views on here, it's not a sensationalized conversation. Users on here generally have concrete conjectures and thought out responses which you definitely don't get on the news.

I agree... but I think there are two important caveats.

1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest.

2) News does have explanatory power, but mostly in weekly mags like The Economist, New Yorker, etc., and occasionally in analysis pieces by the NYT. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But to my first point -- I would love a service that would "curate" the need-to-know headlines, to send to me every morning/afternoon. Where each headline had a numerical score or increasing importance (say, 1-5), and I could choose to subscribe to all headlines of 5, and all headlines 3-5 in tech, for example. The important thing being that this is not a simple daily digest, but that I'd only receive it when there was something newsworthy -- plenty of days, you'd receive nothing at all.

In reference to your point 1: Ask! It'll get you a funny look or two, maybe, but my experience has been that people love explaining things that "everybody knows" almost as much as they do expounding their opinions. (I couldn't care less about the Superbowl, but I recognize lots of people do -- so, when one of them asks me what I think of it, I shrug and say I don't know a thing about baseball. This always gets a laugh, which usually leads into a conversation that's enjoyable for all involved even if the informational content thereof isn't worth committing to memory.)

Similarly, I've always dreamed of a service like this. At least one that informs you of world-impact-level events; wars breaking out, major disasters, etc. It'd be nice to find out about these quickly, without stumbling on it later.

I haven't tried this but you might get something out of creating a reddit multi (maybe r/worldnews, r/news, r/science, r/foodforthought, and whatever else), check it once a week and sort by top and "this month" or "this week". The top ten links are probably impactful, engaging, and relevant.

The lazy in me would actually like this in a weekly email.

No, just no. Maybe I'll sound like a curmudgeon, but that information is totally worthless, and for people like me, is exactly the kind of thing that makes me depressed. "Oh, hey, some random sports team recreated a pointless tribal warfare act! NSA? Who cares what they do, I've got nothing to hide." There are more important, more culturally relevant things to discuss, and one should not stoop to ignore them merely to "fit in." One should try to elevate discourse by ignoring the shallow, vapid happenings that happen to be in vogue (precisely what this article describes as being wrong with "news"!) and help to enlighten those around oneself.

Not picking on you in particular, but you are what you eat. Who is to say that people shouldn't eat what they want to eat, unless it is some part of you? Isn't it their responsibility to consume what they like?

Eating sweets makes people fat. You can eat what you want and live with the consequences, just the same as everyone else.

Recreated a pointless warfare act ... Man HN has a strong connection to the real world!

You are able to make the same point you are trying to make without over-generalizing.

I made the decision to quit news broadcasts (TV and radio) some time ago and I don't consider myself any less informed.

Scientific research publications, local papers, special-interest blogs and good old fashioned conversation are more than enough to get the useful information.

It's extraordinarily rare that the TV/radio news ever contains any information that's directly useful to my life and I have better things to do than pan for gold whilst being subjected to varying degrees of propaganda.

I first encountered this line of reasoning in Bulgakov's excellent 1925 book, Heart of a Dog when a doctor advises one of his friends:

  If you care about your digestion, my advice is—don't talk
  about bolshevism or medicine at table. And, god forbid—never
  read soviet newspapers before dinner.

It seems to me that it has long been known that unactionable information is not good for you.

Curiously, another HN reader expressed the same [1] feelings about HN.

[1] http://anton.kovalyov.net/p/soviet-newspapers/

As it mentions at the bottom of the article, this is a shortened version of an article Rolf Dobelli wrote in 2010 called "Avoid News" ( http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par... ). The first one was longer under the immediate challenge that people too mired in news would probably not finish it, so it's interesting to me that he shortened this prose specifically to post it on a news site.

I'm a fully recovered Digg, Reddit, Huffington Post, & Perez Hilton junkie. I've been clean since 2009. It really is an addiction that takes over your life. It's like a stimulation that you always have to have. I quit cold by banning the offending websites using my linksys router:

● Go to http:192.168.1.1 using your browser, the default name and password is "admin" and "admin" (please change the password to a REALLY long one and write it down on a sticky note next to the router (if you haven't already)

● Click the "Access Restrictions" tab | Enter a policy name and select "Enable" | ignore "applied PCs"'s edit list | Set Access Restriction to "Allow" | Make sure the Schedule portion has "everyday" checked and "24 hours" selected | Enter the URLs of the 4 websites you'd like to block | and click "save settings" at the bottom.

● Sure you can come back here and disable the access restrictions, but it requires extra steps, requires you to get up, requires you to type in a long password. And by that time you'll have realized what you're doing isn't good and stopped yourself. The whole point is to stop the bad habit of subconsciously typing in Reddit.com every 5 minutes. It took me a month and after whatever chemical high I had in my brain that was addicting me to Reddit/HuffPo/etc. wore off I just disabled the bans and haven't been a Redditor ever since. I've visited Reddit months later maybe twice but didn't care and haven't been back since. I'm free.

I bet you're fun to hang out with. :) Can you give me instructions for Netgear too?

Well, I have started embracing both my masculine and feminine side. I like watching "How It's Made", "Build It Bigger", "Extreme Engineering", "Ninja Warrior", and "America's Next Top Model". I'm not familiar with Netgear though.

If knowing the reality of what happens in the world leads to fear and aggression then perhaps we should be angry and afraid? We can't just shut reality out if we don't like the emotional state it puts us in.

If there's something one may usefully do, and which one would not have otherwise recognized, about whatever it is that's producing those emotions, then sure, you've got a point. But I don't think what's under discussion here would be such a universally recognized experience, were that the case. And if you're already doing whatever you can, or if there's nothing you can do, then why keep abusing yourself with constant exposure?

The reality of what happens is all around me - I observe it directly. What is on mass media is information that other people want to promote to further their own agenda. Whether it is for ratings, to get us to buy their product or to further political aims it does not matter (we all have our own motivations) but it is clearly NOT reality. The fact that you confuse the two is sad and frightening.

There are parts of reality that you can't possibly witness directly because you are located at a single geographic point. For example, someone suffering on the other side of the world because they've been gassed by a dictator or a terrorist group, or wrongly imprisoned, or they are dying of some easily curable disease. You would usually only ever hear of such a thing through the news media, and yet it is real

Things are not all one way or the other. The media is very imperfect, but it is not worthless.

No need to attack me.

The mainstream media is a tool for controlling us. As a random example, a tragic school shooting happens, and the media will be chock-full of people demanding more gun control, with maybe a couple of voices of moderation in between.

It only takes a moment's thought to realize that guns don't actually kill people - people do, so why are they whipping people into a gun control frenzy? I believe there was something about a militia in the Constitution..

The issue is the news is usually out of context. Last week a video of a BASE jumper smashing into a cliff got a lot of airplay. The same week 100 jumpers were jumping 4 times a day without incident in the same area. There were some obvious takeaways from the incident and causes. The news always reports as har, har isn't that nuts?

They do the same with war reporting and airplane crashes. See the knockout game reports for further reports of garbage.

I have stopped reading mainstream news for last 3 years and its the best mind-hack I ever did.

http://neurographs.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/news-diet/

What's a mind-hack?

The irony of reading this article on a news website.

My man Rolf became a journalist, worked his way up to the Guardian, and wrote a story about how busted up news is.

I look forward to the similar press release from Jony Ive telling us to stop using those blasted iPads.

One could argue that it's not news, so it's not ironic.

RSS Feeds saved me from a life of the bl-ews. I've got my hand-picked sites ranging from world news to space news to tech news with a little TIL and Adam Curtis mixed in. It takes me five minutes to see the state of things I am interested in & bookmark any interesting headlines for perusing later when time allows. Many days, there is no later perusing, but I get an idea of what is happening outside my circle of influence.

Now if I could get a continental breakfast one morning without being assaulted by the talking heads squawking on every TV in every hotel lobby saying the same shit every same day.

Perhaps because I've lived outside the US and traveled extensively what really bothers me about US news is how egocentric it is. You get a horribly skewed world view if all you watch is US news. Also, when it comes to accidents or disasters (plane crash, terrorist attack, etc.) for some reason I am really bothered when the talking heads engage in US citizen accounting. Something like this: "A plane crashed today in <insert city>, 45 passengers died, 3 Americans". I get it, it's US news, but for some reason it feels really wrong to me that it is being reported that way. It's almost as if none of the other victims mattered. I'm sure that's not how it is intended, but it really bugs me for strange reason.

Also, US news bugs me even more when I am abroad. Watching CNN abroad vs. watching it at home produces different feelings. When out of the country I often feel the news is embarrassing. At home, regardless of the source, it oscillates between politically charged, moronic or down-right egocentric news. Most of the quality information I get is from non-US news programs or the Internet. Local and national TV news programs, regardless of network or political affiliation are deplorable.

I can absolutely see a constant stream of sensationalized and skewed news being bad for someone, particularly if they don't seek balance outside of their usual sources.

Anyone find it ironic that a news agency (the Guardian) is saying news is bad for you?

Yup. But like cigarette advertisers and spammers who intentionally misspell so only uncritical people pay attention, most mainstream news sources have so effectively created the atmosphere of _learned_helplessness_, they can tell people in bold letters straight to their faces, "this is bad for you" and people still pay for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Early this year I switched to skimming headlines and reading editorials only. In short this was the best decision I've made around media consumption. Between how much time it frees up and my reduced stress I'm so much happier.

This thread gave me pause to think about what I believed then, in the media induced state of stress, and what has come to pass. Of the notable ones:

- twitter would fail and cause the tech bubble to burst. Twitter now sits pretty on $51/share

- the euro zone would collapse and riots would rock the world. I actually skipped out on two trips (a wedding in France and a stag party in Taiwan) because I thought the world was on the brink of disaster. Nothing happened.

I only list two but there are a half dozen others that haven't happened either. The thing that really strikes me though, is that my perspective on others' has changed dramatically. When I see people spinning themselves up into a state because of some media (and quite often it is not reputable media) I feel a combination of anger and derision; somewhat akin to the emotional reflex I experience when a homeless person is drunk.

Yes, though its not that black & white. The optimal solution in my mind is to cleverly filter what news you consume.

In my home country "news" consists mostly of bad stuff. e.g. I glanced at a local news paper _today_...among the headlines "3 y/o baby gang raped". Being bombarded with that kind of stuff daily can break the strongest soul, so I just don't read local news anymore.

I tend to focus on finance & tech. Even if there is an absolute bloodbath on the stock exchange it'll never rattle me like the baby thing does (and I didn't even read the actual article). The stock exchange is just numbers...maybe I lost some money - so be it. That I can absorb without lasting damage.

I'd love a open platform that can process RSS that I know won't close/change/fail me. Google Reader had some ability in this regard but we all know how that went. Plus I think RSS might no longer be sufficient...cutting edge news is now on twitter. Not sure if 140 chars counts as news though...headlines maybe.

I am the same as you, as far as focusing on finance and tech. I think there are reasons why these topics are far less stressful or depressing: Tech news and reviews are exciting when they are good, and irrelevant when they are bad. If something gets some bed press, you simply don't buy! Also the tone is often nice, probably because tech reviewers have a pretty good job. They get to play with new things all the time and get paid.

Finance is usually upbeat as well -- now, I get most of my news from Bloomberg, if that matters. But since hedge funds can't advertise, literally everyone in the financial news chain benefits from the stock market going up. This may tend to color reports to the positive, making for a happier listening experience. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt that they would ever "color" a story, then even in difficult times, the focus is on investment opportunities and interviews are always with those doing well. Ever since I switched to Bloomberg news radio and a focus on online tech news, I feel like I can bear to live in the world again!

This is article is very bad rip-off from the book "Art of thinking clearly". This book goes into each of bias that we face in everyday life. Knowing them can help you immensely. The articles just takes contents from the book to and try to infer that NEWS is bad for you.

It is very poor attempt. For every point discussed in the article present so many counter-arguments that are never discussed. Not just that some of the arguments are just contradictory. Not to mention there is hardly any research material pointed that made the author think that way.

Once it says that we don't think about news : "Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes,". This is ironic. The article itself is NEWS. Is it not making us think. Well if it not making us think this makes this NEWS itself is useless right?

The author just tried to create an article by combining things he read from the book. At the end he just presented HIS OPINION. This should not be NEWS !

If you attach a negative connotation to news then you're obviously trying to make people hate it. Essentially this article equates reading the daily news to a quick fix of heroin. But we aren't feeding an addiction when we read the news. On a high level, we are trying to stay informed. But you must recognize the deeper connection our minds make with new information.

The psychologist Gary Klein has written about how people make decisions. His most recent book provides several pieces of evidence that we have good insights because we can connect irrelevant information/ideas to the problems we see everyday (whether these problems are at work, at school, in the laboratory, or on the toilet).

Learning is healthy. Reading is necessary. The news is irreplaceable: not because of its pertinence but because its insightful value.

If you were ever part of an MLM network, or quixtar or amway, or anybody who was ever big on 'selling' things, you would know better than to read the news. A typical newspaper has a ginormous amount of negative articles. HN is different though.

You assume, I think without justification, that someone sufficiently ill-equipped that he cannot avoid being suckered into a Ponzi scheme, is nonetheless capable of recognizing the deleterious effect of excessive news consumption. (I've known a few such people myself -- they were decent enough, mostly, but generally encumbered with a regrettable excess of credulity.)

I'm curious. What does Multi Level Marketing have to do with news consumption? Why do MLM people know better than to read the news?

I've been hearing from more and more people each day that they have opted to receive curated news instead of jumping from site to site. Mainly from people outside the IT circle. They seem to me -- my impression -- to be less tolerant to ads then us, and even less to poor quality content. I think we from IT tend to judge content faster by just scanning headlines -- thank HN for that skill. Most people just can't do this, so curated news are a good thing for them, to the point some are actually paying to receive it on a regular basis.

Interesting article, but it doesn't seem very balanced as it only focuses only on the negative. Also, it is an excerpt from a dude's book which he is trying to convince you to buy for £7.99.

Here's how missing the news affected me: When I finished my CS degree, I decided have a go at postgrad in another field. I reasoned that if it didn't work out, I'd just quit and get a programming job like my classmates had done easily. It didn't work out. But when I went looking for a programming job, it was surprisingly hard. That led me to change career direction. Only later I found out what the "NASDAQ" was and what had happened to it while I was indecisively loitering at university in 2001.

Most major news sources are biased that the only way to get anything close to a healthy dose is (a) to turn the volume down and (b) turn the gain up.

Increase the number of sources, believe fewer of them, and use critical thinking. But only pay attention to things you care about.

I may be outraged with recent conflicts between tech carpetbaggers and SF residents, but I try not to invest any energy in it, because I've got my own local gentrification vs. crime issues and I only have so much bandwidth.

I have done this and I agree. "News" gives a single side view on the world and it is hardly an uplifting one. Personally I strongly belief that the general public opinion is negativer then needed caused by negative news-feeding. In the periods that I decided to not follow the news (opting out :)) I felt better and more relaxed. In the mean time I did not miss any big news and what I missed turned out not to be important. Easily to do as an experiment.

Information overload is depressing. No, I mean it can cause depression. Mild perhaps as opposed to clinical, but you're more stressed when overloaded. My first thoughts on reading the title, however, went here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU

"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."

Funny, I think news tends to make one dumber. For instance, you get exaggerated ideas about the dangers of muggings, lightning strikes, serial killers, etc, and get distracted from things that are actually likely to harm you.

I generally avoid personalization of the internet but there should be a service that informs the individual.

It should be a kind of alarm system with editable preferences like topics of interest also location based warnings with ranking of information importance consisted of social component plus importance rating given from information provider.

However, these days news are bad all over the world so not reading them will truly make you happy. :)

I recommend a book by C. John Sommerville, titled 'How the News Makes Us Dumb' from 1999.

One interesting paragraph on backcover: 'news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily'.

As anyone who's tried to make or create (even just writing something about a topic) something would know, creating takes time. Now when something needs to be created daily or even hourly, you end up putting out junk.

I disagree. Without news, I wouldn't be able to determine which organizations are legit and good for humanity. Armed with that knowledge, I join the appropriate orgs (i.e. EFF), donate money, and send nasty-grams to the proper senator/congressperson when needed.

The caveat is that it's necessary to know which news is garbage and which is meaningful. Clue: meaningful news is not typically popular.

Ostensibly I gave up the daily news a few years ago when The Times [of London] put up their paywall, 4-and-a-half years ago [according to Wikipedia].

I do read a lot of tech news however and more recently have taken up reading the headlines on the local newspaper websites.

For me it's an effort to help me be more positive about life as I have struggled with negativity and sometimes intrusive thoughts.

I'm unsure whether OP's intention was to highlight HN's potential for being a well of unhappiness (as the article would suggest). However, it must be made clear that this headline does not apply to many (if not the majority) of HN posts, which are simply more than just current affairs or news; that's why I love HN — it's more than simple news.

Totally agree. Actually a few months ago, I blocked the news websites that I was used to reading. I really see news as a form of noise rather than information. Especially all those low quality sites such as the Huffington Post and so on...

Not only they don't provide quality information, but it seems to me they trigger our worst sides (jealousy, hatred...).

There is an opportunity here to create technology that will facilitate thinking instead of fragment it. Imagine a distraction-free internet. Our machines are programmed to exacerbate hyperbolic discounting, to replicate and encourage the so-called monkey mind. We much teach our machines to meditate. We must quiet their computations.

Like the old proverb goes, ignorance is bliss.

Why TV News is a Waste of Human Effort: One Example Worth a Trillion Dollars - by C.P.P. Grey

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...

http://goodnewsgopher.com

I made a news crawler that automatically filters out bad news articles using sentiment analysis.

I like to think it offers a good reprieve from all of the negative, depressing news you get inundated with from the major media.

The first "positive" news today on our site is about execution in north korea... I guess automatic filtering is not ready yet to such kind of tasks....

Happier at the moment but possibly a lot madder when you find out how terrible the future might become.

Which is an excellent opportunity to study the practical application of the valuable old saw: "What can't be cured must be endured."

This news article summarises nicely why I went on an extreme news diet over the last 4 months. I broke that streak today by reading the article on the guardian about why I shouldn't be reading the news. I couldn't resist because of the articles obvious reflexivity.

I don't watch TV news anymore, it's always same thing ever and ever: economy is bad, protests, war, that team won that game, here's the weather, a disaster just happened and thousand died and in the last 2 minutes is when they show something cheerful.

  s/journalist/commenter

Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world.

What is the motive for a newspaper to tell people not to read news? Reverse psychology?

Maybe instead of following web-native properties and cable news with 24/7 coverage, newspaper editors wish we all could go back to a daily digest (and a weekly recap with more soft news) of yesterday's events.

I know I do, sometimes.

Strictly speaking it's not "the newspaper" saying this, but an op-ed contributor:

> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

Newspapers don't necessarily agree with the views they publish – though presumably they found this an interesting piece regardless.

Well they are just appealing to a kind of Internet hipster that will likely continue reading them anyway.

Nobody sees that this is just an advertisement for the essay?

Why would a news outlet suggest that news is bad for you. Thanks to hacker news, the article will get thousands of extra reads and the guardian is raking in the cash!!!

I understand the author's point, but as a long time SF resident, I would say local news is very important to me. Many of my day to day decisions are dictated by what I read in the news each morning.

It's pretty ridiculous to make a blanket statement like "News is bad for you", which is akin to saying "Food is bad for you". Certain food/news is definitely bad for you, especially in large/excessive quantities, but that doesn't mean we don't need it.

The amount of bad food/news in the world has increased exponentially in recent history due to the ease and low cost of production and distribution.

But like we've seen with food, the more unhealthy options proliferate, the more of a premium there is for e.g. home-cooked, organic meals. I like to think that Hacker News, on most days, is my source of healthy and nourishing news, and it's up to me to discern and sift through the junk that might occasionally get mixed in.

While it is wise not to believe everything we read in the news, it does not follow that there is nothing we can trust. The key may be to have a healthy skepticism, while keeping an open mind.

I should have not read this news... i feel i little bad already

Yeah, ignorance is bliss, but, while the premise is fundamentally flawed, I'll direct you to Idiocracy about what happens with an uneducated populace.

That's a fucking work of fiction.

I'll second this.

The world isn't in great state, so watching keeping up on whats going on is by definition somewhat depressing.

Its important for me in my "democracy" to keep up with whats going on a bit so that I can make a somewhat informed decision come election time.

Pssst. Here's what idiocratic actually means :-) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+idiocratic&oq=defin...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054

News is also highly addictive, I've tried to kick the habit since I read the original article a while back but its been nearly impossible.

This article together with Snowden revelations, makes me think that the Guardian is probably on of the last news sources that can be trusted.

What is hilarious is that this article was Number 1 on Pocket Hits Best of 2013.

A reading app's top read article was an article about giving up reading.

This is exactly why I wrote NoNews.

You can check it out at http://www.nonews.info/

I'd rather be uninformed than misinformed!

I'm with you on this. Upworthy is my news source of choice.

News has its uses but at the end of the day its usually negative. Simple as that. Live happy, live longer ;)

because of the fact that we discovered the news that news is bad on hacker news, I think (hacker) news is actually cool. This should make another news. Too much news for the day or may be its the lambdas on my screen: lambda f: (lambda x: x(x))(lambda y: f(lambda v: y(y)(v)))

Just stick to reading HN. If outside news is significantly important, then it'll reach HN too.

That's only (arguably) true for issues of national or global importance. It is also important to be an informed citizen and voter on state and local issues, and many local news sources are woefully inadequate. Many states and towns have local referendums and elections held at times of no national election, counting on apathy, ignorance and low turnout to be able to more easily sway the vote.

... But if you only read HN ... Let's say that news is really as bad as everyone is saying, that must mean that people are basically mindless and necessarily believe everything simply because they consume it ... Ok, but if that's case and you only consume HN comments and believe the general echo chamber ... I think you will end up with a bizarre conception of the real world ...

I would have read this article, but according to the title... I probably shouldn't.

not all articles can be classified as "news"

Excellent point. I've been debating with my gf a lot lately about the diff. b/t "information" and "observations." I find many articles are simply observations... like molecules in bloodstream, they float around, but only rarely combine into anything worthwhile, as compared to controlled chemical reactions in which ideas and structures combine meaningfully.

"Why I've stopped [perfectly normal thing] and you should too!"

News is bad for you, except for this bit of news explaining how news is bad.

good one! But I assume its hard to completely banish news. It comes everywhere, on Facebook and daily routines.

Way to devalue yourself, The Guardian.

tl;dr Ignorance is bliss. :)

I am often frustrated by news and think much of it is worth ignoring, but many of the points are not very well-supported.

"News has no explanatory power": I'm not going to argue that most mainstream news is even that good, but to suggest that "the accumulation of facts" is inconsistent with forming deeper knowledge is too sweeping. Readers of news can observe patterns, which hopefully they will check against more in-depth research.

Much of news' task to not the "how?" but the "what?" and on that measure, it does a decent, if inconsistent job: http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/.

"News is toxic to your body": The author cites a case study involving the limbic system that doesn't mention media or news at all. It may well be that "Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid" but do they do so at noticeable or unhealthy levels? I'm not convinced.

"News increases cognitive errors": News is not an ideal way of challenging biases, but it seems much better than not reading news and getting information about filtered through friends with similar biases to you. (Reading carefully filtered news and books is probably best of all.)

"News inhibits thinking": This section only applies if you read news intermittently and let notifications interrupt you. Concentrating on a newspaper (or news site) for 30 minutes would not have the same effect. But continually leaving work for chatting co-workers would.

"News works like a drug": This section is one of the most plausible, but once again, it doesn't cite any evidence. Cal Newport has a similar line of reasoning, but he actually has research to back it up: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/06/10/is-allowing-your-child.... (It's about Facebook, but the same principle of distracting activities ruining focus applies.)

"News wastes time": This is all about habits and boundaries. Like "News inhibits thinking," this problem could emerge with any activity engaged in on a whim during working hours.

"News kills creativity": The theory that younger mathematicians are more productive is actually unfounded. See http://www.slate.com/articles/life/do_the_math/2003/05/is_ma... or http://privacyink.org/pdf/myth.pdf. And this last part is pure argument by anecdote:

"I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs."

The points about most news being irrelevant to day-to-day life and story bias are worth pondering, but otherwise this article overreaches. It is a series of interesting conjectures about the effect of news, but often presumes a certain way of reading or watching news. The evidence for each point is slim. I'm forced to conclude his warnings of "panicky" news with "no explanatory power" are hypocritical.

theguardian.com excepted, of course.

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.

This is an amazingly bad example. Most news sources would be leading the torch-and-pitchfork brigade to either the relevant road authority or the architect's office.

I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie

There is a vast gulf between 'news junkie' and 'don't watch news'. The author may also want to broaden his social circle, because I'm aware of a few. I also find it weird that 'physician' and 'scientist' are classified as 'truly creative minds' - I've known quite a few of each, and it's a terrible assumption.

The article is an example of poor quality news - consuming it without thought is indeed bad for you. Full points for irony, I guess.

Exactly, most are proceeding as if the OP is correct while neglecting that the basic example is completely wrong.

It isn't new per se, which supposed to be just accurate reporting of the recent events and facts, but that unprecedented flow of unimaginable nonsense, propaganda, brain-washing, manipulations, lies and mere stupidity no mind could cope with. It is just unnecessary stress (especially from modern "dramatic" framing of third-rate media) we do not have any adaptation for. So, just switching off a TV and stopping reading nonsense (about Bitcoin or Docker) is really a relief. It is like giving up reading /b/ dramatically reduces the likelihood of developing ulcers.)

The problem is that every fool nowadays could write a blog post or a comment which would be indexed by a search engine, adding a bit to the total waste.

Modern media is a good way to make yourself neurotic. Fear sells and misery sells. Everything else is not of interest.

Of course. The news are depressing in the declining empire of the USA, how not to get depressed watching them? It's not like things are going into the right direction and each year is better than the previous one. The things goes in wrong direction and things are worse every year than they used to be. And pretending it is not happening by just simply turning off the news is exactly what NSA and the USG want you to do.

I agree on this because most of the news I hear today are bad news..

I do not believe that news itself is bad for you. Reading about horrors and then doing nothing to follow-up is bad for you. But these days I do not have to do that. I am not helpless. I can see the Philippines being destroyed and donate money, donate time, talk to people I know who are from there or who are there now. This is true of any event. We are ruined by inaction, not by information.

I can consume any and all news and have it be beneficial to me. Not because I now know facts, but because I can understand each of the stories as a glimpse into the lives and processes of other people in all disciplines and all walks of life. In doing so I can create equality where, in my own mind at the least, it may not have already existed.

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