"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
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
If the elected actors interfere with the news you read, you also stop being a responsible citizen. We simply never had a chance.
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.
Nowadays I read the guardian website and watch RT sometimes. But I think I'll go back to the economist soon.
Soundcloud link: http://l.economist.com/204894&t=v1g49i1qmlsq6a25ld8r6j8u40
If you just want to read The World This Week it's available online for free: http://www.economist.com/printedition/
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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 medium is partly the problem.
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.)
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.
... what if bitcoin, currently, _is_ only about the speculative aspect, and is not actually more useful with less friction?
I actually believe this renewed news spam (brought by ourselves through the internet) probably makes us all dumber as a whole, over time.
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.
Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
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.
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
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.
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.
As an example, it covers the riots breaking out in Ukraine but completely skipped that Paul Walker died..
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 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I grew up without a television - deliberate choice. My friends couldn't believe how much cool stuff I could get done because of this.
Note: I gave up my television in 2000, and I am a bit smug about it.
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.
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.
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.
Eating sweets makes people fat. You can eat what you want and live with the consequences, just the same as everyone else.
The lazy in me would actually like this in a weekly email.
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.
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.
Curiously, another HN reader expressed the same [1] feelings about HN.
● 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.
Things are not all one way or the other. The media is very imperfect, but it is not worthless.
No need to attack me.
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..
They do the same with war reporting and airplane crashes. See the knockout game reports for further reports of garbage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 !
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.
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.
"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."
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. :)
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.
The caveat is that it's necessary to know which news is garbage and which is meaningful. Clue: meaningful news is not typically popular.
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.
Not only they don't provide quality information, but it seems to me they trigger our worst sides (jealousy, hatred...).
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...
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.
s/journalist/commenter
> 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.
I know I do, sometimes.
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!!!
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.
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.
A reading app's top read article was an article about giving up reading.
"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.
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.
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.
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.