> Others say that sure, most of the stuff in the news isn’t of use, but occasionally you’ll come across some story that will lead you to actually change what you’ve been working on. But really, how plausible is this? Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
Most people I know who I would class as common, though I do not mean this in a demeaning or derogatory way, watch the unfiltered mass news daily or at least weekly—like Aaron described. They'll get home from work and turn on the 5PM news or have the radio going. Yet these people are common in that they work a 9-5 job they often complain about, they seek to buy a bigger TV and have a family holiday once a year or two.
They know a hell of a lot more than others about current events but effect little change, it seems, in their own lives or those around them. If the majority of people watch the news regularly, why isn't there more change? If the TV was off, perhaps people would be outside a little bit more? Maybe us Westerners would know more about our local area than we do about popular topic x in foreign country y.
Others who have agreed with you also seemed to have had their own comments already answered by Aaron and here have had others quote those parts back to them.
Couple of bigger anecdotes;
- Watergate. A president's criminal behaviour was dug up by a newspaper, forcing him to resign.
- Vietnam war coverage forced the US to reconsider their attitudes to weapons with high collateral damage, conscription and large scale land wars in general.
"With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant."
This isn't really an argument against Aaron's position, because it is Aaron's position. News shapes your perception of culture and The World, which is a negative because it does so in a harmful way.
With this in mind, I agree with him — I benefit more from comprehensive articles describing long-term developments than from the latest events in some affair that affects me way too little for these details to matter to me. This is not to say that the happenings in faraway countries are something I ought not to know about, however, a short summary after the events have passed would usually suffice.
In the Essay Aaron isn't talking about just the concept of being informed about the world, but rather the up to the minute 24/7 generalist news stuff.
It seems like most major events have books written about them later. There were good books written about the Iraq war, for example.
I also think you could learn a lot more about culture by reading non-fiction books then by watching the news. I don't think I learn anything about culture from the news, other then which celebrities people are paying attention too these days.
I'm sure this plaid a role in him being so productive.
But I do think its my obligation to read the news. Even if it makes me less productive. Without the news I would have never learned about Aarons hack and his trial. Of course, just knowing the news is not enough. One has to act. In the case of Aaron, we didn't act.
Maybe it depends on how you define "news". Everything I know about Aaron Swartz, I know from following links I encountered here. True, this is a "news" site, but it's filtered news; I think that's an important point. The problem with "mainstream" news media is not just that they're bad at reporting; they're also bad at filtering, because their filter criterion is what will sell papers/get more viewers, rather than what information is genuinely of value to the most readers.
Here we filter for karma..
I don't think that it's a matter of productivity. I don;t read news because it presents me with a bunch of inactionable information-- I can't -do- anything about any of the stories that I read in the news and so there's no use building up impotent rage about those things.
I'm actually pretty informed about "the news" but I don't read any newspaper sites unless I get links to them, and I certainly don't watch TV news.
Part of the problem with that is some people might end up getting all their news from websites that feature crazy conspiracy theory stuff, like Alex Jones or whatever.
Let's say you knew of Aaron's plight. Would this news have changed your life for the better by you getting this knowledge the day it happened?
I didn't know about Aaron until all the articles started popping up here. Only curiosity drove me to find out the story, no real need or purpose.
Because that would be relevant.
Twitter did not exist then, so I think it is obvious to the people who read this website how a tag like that would be there now.
For one thing this places enormous trust in the guide-writers. For another it enormously oversimplifies the topics on which the guides would touch.
Instead of looking into the details and explaining Romney's bogus tax plan, they just invite a republican and democrat on to yell at each-other to stay "ballanced"
To become a truly informed voter, not relying on others' summary explanations, would be more than a full-time career.
Amassing that is lot of work and a number of years. But it's worth doing in its own right. And from there, yeah, you needn't rely on others' summaries.
tl;dr Critical thinking is good for you!
I think there is a case for the similarity between the slow stream of aleatory snippets that characterize the websites like the New York Times and the way we receive information concerning our everyday lives. The way we get information in our lives is certainly granular, contains much noise, and is primarily observation. Novels are not granular with little noise. Philosophy is explanation and we may miss out on the initial gather steps. Although it would be fun to phrase this a testable hypothesis.
I think its a different kind of critical thinking.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Journalists are people who know little of anything writing about everything.
"...I start up out of dreams and am disturbed, trembling at every message, with my own peace of mind depending upon letters not my own. Someone has arrived from Rome. 'If only there is no bad news!' But how can anything bad for you happen in a place, if you are not there? Someone arrives from Greece. 'If only there is no bad news!' In this way for you every place can cause misfortune. Isn't it enough for you to be miserable where you are? Must you needs be miserable even beyond the seas, and by letter?"
"Tell me, I pray, how fares the human race: if new roofs be risen in the ancient cities, whose empire it is that now holds sway in the world, if any still survive, snared in the error of demons."[1]
It epitomizes the futility of "news:" even if you live in a cave for many years (decades), as long as you know a bit about human nature and history, you know the news--just not the names. Like the OP, I find news pointless and go long periods without it.
[1] R. Dobelli. Avoid News. Aug 2010. --> http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...
[2] C. A. Johnson. The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. O’Reilly, 2012.
i myself am conflicted about the news. i agree with most of the negative points both by OP and the above; but i also feel i actually do learn something from the news, esp. as i have a relatively organized note-taking system, file and reference articles above a certain threshold of interest in bibdesk, etc.
i think the reason i learn something is that i take the 5 secs to take a screenshot or copy-paste the relevant snippets of information in my system. over time, you can see interesting patterns. sometimes, i run across a reference to some other, deeper source of information (presumably the background material the high-level news article was based on), and file a to-do to check it out in my task manager. usually i wouldn't have thought of this source or reference if i hadn't seen it cited in the news. last but not least, just scanning the headlines and summaries can give you a sense of what the hivemind of "the market" (or "the public") is preoccupied with at the moment.
so, at least to me, it's not all bad and yet i agree that it often feels like a waste of time and mental energy. i haven't figured out a solution yet but completely quitting the news is not going to cut it for me.
Personally, as devil's advocate, reading the reports of yet another intelligent young person being pressured and victimized by the sickly allied commercial/government capitalist establishment (of their own country), it redoubles my stance that current era government lacks any honest sense of democracy; we desperately need to claw back the power of nations (and business) against the individual. (Assange is in some senses leading the charge here, and doing a good job!)
My point though is that sometimes news helps contribute to general impressions like this. I think that can be as valuable as the concrete relevant new life-actionable information that Aaron points out correctly is usually missing from news.
In short I agree with Aaron, but there are counter-points. (I haven't watched/read news regularly since pretty much ever... but consider myself reasonably informed on the issues behind the issues, ie. structure of government, general state of society in different parts of the world, methods of oppression. But that knowledge comes from the hacking community and travel (eg. Tunisia during revolution, many years living in China, some time in US&UK, Europe, most of Asia, etc.) not from mainstream news.)
Does anyone here still read news on a daily basis? If so, why?
The people who fall for that stuff always seem to be uninformed about current events or get it only from warped sources. You can extrapolate that to nazis or communism or wherever but the bottom line is an uninformed populace is easy pickings for ambitious bad guys.
Being in the tech field, we're trained daily to evaluate competing, languages, and technologies not only on their own merits, but how closely they relate to our way of thinking. Most importantly, we tend to be willing to accept this change.
Since no longer being immersed in news, I spend time reading thins of value that either make me feel good, or something that I can apply for the betterment of myself or others. When elections come about, I do my research, cast a vote, and perhaps contact the office of the elected when news trickles down to me about a bill I want input on.
What's left are two kinds of stories - actual "news", by which I mean events that are more unusual and important; the kind of content that will be history in the future. This... feels like it affects me; I would prefer to read the history books about it, but they're not written yet, and I want to know now while there's still time to do something about it. If I'm going to change the world, even at the very limited level of making a product that makes some people's lives easier, that will probably be made possible because of some new piece of information; waiting until it's accepted wisdom is too late.
The other kind is features that are "still true", that aren't particularly time-sensitive. Things I could just as well read a book about, indeed. But my experience is that short essays are much better than books, to the extent that many of my favourite "books" are nothing more than collections of essays or newspaper columns. Likewise in fiction (and one thing that drives my choice of magazine is that it includes fiction), short stories are often more compelling and impactful than long ones.
As a general rule, I find that for every thousand pages of news copy, one can usually distill about thirty pages of useful facts (the rest being redundant, speculative, filler, or otherwise unimportant).
But he was right. I feel much better about life when I don't read the news - and I'm typically far more productive during those periods when I manage to abstain.
Pick a historical event (say, the assassination which kicked off WW1). Read news in chronological order, as it came out. See how different things seem at any point in time vs. how they look retrospectively a century later.
I could have learned more about python or read a good book about an important subject. News is like junkfood for the mind. Very short topics that are not relevant to my life.
Sometimes I read articles about rape or other injustice and those topics just infuriate me, but I'm totally powerless. News exhaust me.
It has no value for me whatsoever. I can't recall that I ever made any important decision based on it.
This article is so true. When journalist write about a topic you know a lot about, there are often so many errors, that you wonder how many errors there are in topics you don't know about.
If you read the news as a hobby, sure, be my guest. But that's something else.
Let us look at the front page of today’s New
York Times....there is a story about
Republicans feuding among themselves.... a
photo of soldiers in Iraq. A stock exchange
chief must return $100M... a concern about
some doctors over-selling a nerve testing
system... a threat from China against North
Korea... a report that violence in Iraq is
rising. And there is concern about virtual
science classes replacing real ones.
None of these stories have relevance to my
life. Reading them may be enjoyable, but it’s
an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no
impact on my actions one way or another.
I absolutely agree that most news is immaterial. That said, having lived over twice Aaron's age when he wrote this essay, what I've found is that sometimes the news does affect me, occasionally directly. Not terribly often, but I've had bosses nominated to government office by presidents, companies I work for turn up in major fraud investigations, former colleagues sentenced to Federal prison, acquaintances convicted of murder. Understanding economic patterns can help guide decisions and actions. Even weather and traffic can be useful at times.
This doesn't mean that Fox News blaring in the corner is the best way to assimilate this information. Even selecting more fair and balanced (to say nothing of appropriate and informative) sources, I find myself switching from voice to music (increasingly classical) simply to avoid driving myself to distraction.
But a brief, well-curated, reliable news source can be both broadening and useful. Key is to let it serve, not drive you. It need not be a daily habit (though it often is).
I've also had numerous inspirations from "softer" programming via NPR and similar outlets -- culture, arts, and science programming can re-frame or contextualize problems I'm working on, and remind me that there are worlds outside my own experience (check your biases, always a first source of errors).
http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...
But some say perception is reality, so maybe it's smart to be in the know from time to time.