It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?
Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. It doesn't necessarily have to be impartial too, when done properly you can gain media literacy and benefit of having a reach to the discussions.
The problem with the news lately is mostly about the way they make their money. Simply because they keep the lights on by displaying as much content as possible, they design and curate the content for improving the metrics they can objectively measure(like revenue and view counts). The second kind of problem is that sometimes they don't look in making money, but influence you and that kind of news may seem a little bit of higher quality. However, due to the sinister motives, it's actually even worse.
Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too. If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
> It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?
Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.
Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.
Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.
If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.
Information relevant to oneself, ie to the life and management of one's local and larger communities, are what will ultimately make the difference between a well-informed and enlightened citizenry able to make collective choices that result in positive outcomes, and people that base their choices on flimsy information and passing emotion.
News can be information, usually when it has a scientific and/or investigative component, and provides the person reading or watching it with a better/deeper understanding of an issue afterwards. Not all news are information however as running after readership and ratings often result in sensationalism and clickbaiting with zero or negative value. Information isn't just news either, and books, longform articles, documentaries, etc also provide very valuable inputs that help to understand how the world around us work and make better choices.
What I find disingenuous in the article shared here is that all news are treated as being basically of the empty / sensationalist / inflammatory kind. The author of the article seems also blissfully unaware that journalists provide an essential service in democracies, by scrutinizing public action as well as what is happening with the other parts of society (economic players, scientists, organizations of all kinds..). There can be no informed citizenry without ethical and well-functionning news sources. Trying to say one should seek such quality in news sources and leave aside the sensationalist partisan crap is sadly not the point the author makes, instead advocating for people to just ignore the news altogether.
Don't be naive. The citizenry doesn't make any significant choices. Western democracy is a sham. There are elections, yes, but voters are subject to large-scale manipulation, mainly through mass education and mass media. Not so much to determine who they cast their vote for, as to ensure compliance with the system itself, and its very limited set of choices. The range of acceptable opinions, and the matching political choices, are determined by the real rulers - presumably the billionaire class. Significant dissent on real issues is quickly crushed.
This is an overly cynical take. Ultimately all of the power in the US resides with the voters. Yes they are susceptible to manipulation, however they have the tools to resist the manipulation if they so choose.
It's a fallacy to think that because one person can't single-handedly change the world that change is impossible or that people in aggregate have no power. It is this fallacy that is at the center of trained helplessness.
It is the idea that if people want cleaner streets, they are incapable of sweeping them. If they want more supportive communities, they can't walk out their door and help someone.
To paraphrase, western democracies have problems, but the other systems are worse. If one accepts that democracy remains our best bet, the question becomes how to make democracy function better. This isn't just a question of what system of government, vote, decision, etc, but also of how well informed the citizenry is, and to what extent they feel empowered to be politically active. Billionaires do have an outsized power to influence in general, and in the US in particular (super PACs, etc), but other powers can act effectively against them (justice, press, NGOs and other forms of organized civic actions..). Switzerland has very frequent votes on a wide array of issues, giving citizens constant opportunities to act on the way their country / district / city operates.
At the local level a single voter can have a huge impact because there is very little participation at the smaller scale. A citizen that engages with their local rep or councilmember can effectively advocate for tangible improvements to their own life and their neighbors, and those actions (improving a public park, helping families get their children to pre-K, coaching a youth sports team, starting up an activities program for seniors etc) can provide far more genuine impact than any amount of "global" politics.
If you want the cynical angle, you can put time and money into a local politician and do way more manipulation to enrich yourself than anything large-scale.
But it really doesn't take much to stay up to speed. I'm with kashuntstva; I stopped actively consuming the news a year or two back, and I find I'm not tangibly less informed than the people I know who leave CNN turned on all day. I somehow seem to absorb everything that actually matters from the atmosphere. The only thing I really miss out on is the sensationalism, the overanalysis from people who've made a career of running their mouths, and the inaccuracies and wild speculation that inevitably comes from reporters trapped in a 24 hour hamster wheel being under constant pressure to hurry up and tell the story before they've even had a chance to piece it together.
I've been sticking to reading https://text.npr.org/ and my local PBS/NPR-affiliate's local news coverage. Yes, both are biased and lean towards the liberal end of the news spectrum, but neither seems to push modern news shock and awe tactics nearly as evidently and I feel like I'm aware enough of what's going on locally and in the world to have decent conversations in social settings.
One nice thing about not fully comprehending what's going on in the news is that in social situations you can ask others lots of questions about current events and the people you're talking to will feel very proud that they can explain things to someone else. It's a good ice breaker, at least until it gets to be all political...
I’ve never understood why we need to make these caveats. “Objective” or “just the facts” news has never existed. It’s impossible.
I’m not knocking you, I just think it’s silly you should even feel pressure to publicly acknowledge something so patently obvious, yet we both know that if you didn’t the chance is high that the first comment you’d get is a complaint about your “biased” media outlets. As if any other kind exists lol
If you don't say this, someone somewhere on the internet will accuse you of thinking your news source is perfectly unbiased, even if you never said such a thing. It's a useful caveat just to try and defuse that kind of low signal argumentation.
Understanding that unbiased reporting is a farce requires some understanding of media literacy and in my experience most people do not have that literacy nor a desire to learn about it. So the caveat is unfortunately necessary.
Yes and no. If you are set in life, know what you want and need, are able to get it, lie in stable place, fuck news, more harm than good to you, no matter how much rationale you put on it. Focus rather on learning some new skill instead if you can't just enjoy life as it comes, which is a great skill but many self-made successful people lack it completely.
If you in some unstable place, you want to move someplace else, change significant things in life, then it makes more sense to follow news, albeit it would help to curate them. But its a dopamine drug, I see otherwise very smart folks to fall prey to this completely helplessly. They even buy things like smart watches to know instantly there is some notification in phone. Of course all of these folks have higher levels of anxiety, they were there before smartwatches but those are definitely making things worse. And cycle repeats and goes deeper. For them I do hope seamless AR/VR is a thing of distant future, they will have hard time not making it into some cyberpunk version of addict.
>Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon.
I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.
I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name).
I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.
It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future.
Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context.
For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.
It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it.
If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source.
For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context.
But then the question you should be asking is, is this the best way to understand what is going on in the world? I would strongly say it isn't. If you can wait 2-3 weeks you can catch up on events much quicker by reading the relevant wikipedia entry.
> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
So much FOMO. I subscribed to and read a once-a-week article which summarizes the world events that week. Focus of the article is important catasthropes to avoid, kind of. That's enough for me.
> Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future.
The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.
You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.
I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.
I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.
The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.
The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.
It's even worse than this. When it's news about foreign territory then the media is even blatantly lying. They distort facts to make them conform to biases and to give a negative slant. Part of this is to maximize clicks, bad sensational news sells better. Part of this is bias inherent in the journalism circle. And because it's foreign territory, readers never find out they are being lied to.
re making money: the alternative to ad-revenue-through-clickbait is paywalls. Consumers have largely chosen the former.
Some have suggested that a subscription model to multiple papers (e.g. Spotify for news) would be appealing, and it might, but that doesn't immediately solve the problem of the form and content of the news. Longform article sources or retrospectives are probably the current best way to consume news.
Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. It doesn't necessarily have to be impartial too, when done properly you can gain media literacy and benefit of having a reach to the discussions.
The problem with the news lately is mostly about the way they make their money. Simply because they keep the lights on by displaying as much content as possible, they design and curate the content for improving the metrics they can objectively measure(like revenue and view counts). The second kind of problem is that sometimes they don't look in making money, but influence you and that kind of news may seem a little bit of higher quality. However, due to the sinister motives, it's actually even worse.
Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too. If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted.