Biggest quality of life benefit I've given myself in the past two months:
Turn off the news.
If something is actually important, you'll hear about it anyway. And if you don't hear about it, it wasn't actually as important as the reporters made it out to be.
Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life.
Obviously this pairs well with cutting out all the nonsense on your social media feeds.
Reddit honestly killed news for me because of the trump presidency. For years I thought he'd be removed from office. Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion to the point that many including myself just ignored it cause it would change anything.
Getting off reddit has been one of the best things in my life. Discord has helped find more positive outlets for me to waste my time.
But lastly, get a hobby that isn't just working on getting better at something. It's cool if you can do like 30 different things, but that's hard. Know your limits and budget screw around time to help unwind.
I’d rather agree with the parent. There’s something in Reddit that it consume a person worse than Twitter does. Constantly asking for righteous micro-decisions for one thing. It’s always a fight for some justice, and where there isn’t, the corporate fuels it.
No, it isn't. There are plenty of subs that just talk about their thing. justEgan is entirely correct to point out that you can avoid politics or news if you want to.
An awful lot of people do have this idea that you just have to turn the whole thing off, though. And i see a lot of people on Reddit equally incorrectly saying that about Twitter! I wonder why.
I'm not disagree with that. However reddit is trying to become a social media site when it never was that. It was always a place for people to anonymously browse. It was a superior form of slashdot really. But now they're just opting for a direction that caters to the "en-masse" crowd and not the people that genuinely care about the topic at hand. I'd say they've gotten so big they've fragmented each subreddit to be a destination of it's own.
While that's good and I'd be okay with this normally, reddit has had a decade of history showing they aren't afraid to generate a new policy to ban certain subreddits just because a minority of vocal losers want it banned.
Haha, that's one way to look at it. Seriously though, that is in fact a
positive attitude towards the content that can vastly transform the experience of the posts for the better.
It's the old question of liking something despite knowing it's (probably) fake:
Usually it doesn't hurt, and can in fact mean that literally nobody got hurt.
But there's a general tendency of such content attracting hatred:
If it does not explicitly identify itself as fictional, people don't like the idea of it being believed to be true.
It's getting harder and harder to use these platforms without having politics and news being shoved down your eyeballs.
E.g. Reddit "recommends" popular subreddits, and regularly injects top posts from them into your feed. /r/politics is one of them. Also, a lot of the big subs that you'd think are benign (like /r/science) are filled with blatantly partisan posts that are guaranteed to have hateful comments in them. E.g. There have been dozens of "science" posts there about studies that effectively equate conservatives to religious, science-denying idiots using much more "sciency" words. Even if that's not the intention, the comments inevitably go there, and you're stuck reading very non-science related comments.
Also you'll get American politics in your face on many subs, even generic topic-based ones. It's like I'm not even American, why would I want to see BLM stickies on every interest-based sub?
Or check out the top posts in /r/cringe or /r/publicfreakout. It's all related to Trump. It just gets so boring, repetitive and predictable.
This is exactly why. If I had a dollar for every "duh, orange man bad" post I could pay off all US student debt. It's just unbelievable. And if you said anything positive about trump (like hey, how about that H-1B loophole fix? that wasn't being abused by big tech) you get eviscerated, possibly even banned. And whats your appeal? To a mod that just makes up rules on a whim that aren't even part of their rules? Pretty much.
Reddit has gone out of their minds. They want people to target ads to, not a genuine community of people that care about the content they make. That's why those stickers have gone to absurd levels and they charge ridiculous prices for it. Now when I see a post, gold means nothing anymore. I don't even know whats a worthwhile post to bother reading cause half the time it's garbage group think irrational "the dems are freedom fighters!" stuff anyway.
They are not out of their minds. They are rational and can probably make more money this way. They may lose us as readers but gain a ton others who may even be more responsive to ads. I assume most of us here use ad blockers anyway so they don't make money on us.
I like reading the frontpage. But they've turned the front page into endless facebook-like memes, tik-toks, and posts that I'd read from a lesser informed individual who dropped out of college and works at mcdonalds. There's no nuance and it just appeals to a broad audience. Also the group think and excessive mods have ruined the site. Like getting banned because you're opinion doesn't 100% chime with the group? Half of /r/popular's got you covered there!
Plus banning literally everything to cater to the puritanical mommies out there is absurd. Reddit was an interesting place. Now it's kind of like how HN reacts when google creates something new where you go "Wonder how long it'll last before they kill it..."
>Turns out redditors blew unbelievably small things out of proportion to the point that many including myself just ignored it cause it would change anything.
Not sure this is right. I think Trump has actually just demolished norms at such an astonishing rate that the system can't keep up and things that 10 years would have torpedoed a campaign or a presidency now get forgotten in the 24 Hour shitshow that has been the Trump administration. Remember it wasn't that long ago that Howard Dean blew up his entire presidential campaign just by "screaming" at an event.
You can create a RES[1] filter to remove the Trump keyword, or any other of your choice.
Carefully pruning your subscribed subreddit list makes Reddit worth it. I still get value from buildapc, homeassistant, patientgamer, ipod, rugbyunion, and some others that concern other interests and hobbies.
I do agree that people shoe-horning Trump into everything is extremely annoying.
I would add that 'Reddit is Fun' is the best mobile reddit app that I've found, and allows for username, keyword, and subreddit filtering. Very, very useful.
> Reddit honestly killed news for me because of the trump presidency.
Reddit for news is like StackOverflow for programming. If come to either one already knowledgeable in the given area looking for a quick supplement, they are a boon. If you use them as a substitute for knowledge, they are harmful.
Half the time that's what I use reddit for anyway. I agree with this statement whole heartedly. Reddit just has too many eggs in one basket milking their own community for free labor at this point.
I get that but when you have morons who can make a post at a whim and equally influenced morons, they spread the media garbage like wildfire then get mad at you when you state it's false or wrong just because it doesn't support their worldview.
"Better" is a relative term, so others mistakes do make it better.
If anything, it shows that it's hysteria to scream and panic for something that's more or less business as usual, just more gaudy and with worse PR, and without sharing all the establishments bloodthirstiness for wars, invasion, and interventions.
I'd rather have self-serving deals for golf courses than the nth trillion dollar invasion...
I do think corona shows rather nicely how critical good leadership is.
We should assume that other things also had impacts for people lives.
Otherwise it would mean that a President isn't relevant at all.
While one person takes care of a self-serving deal for golf courses, the other person would sit down and educate themselves on topics like climate change, education and current education system issues etc.
I'm quite bewildered, that you actually prefer a self-serving deals over everything else he could do.
And your two options are missleading arent they? Its not a black and white topic.
>I'm quite bewildered, that you actually prefer a self-serving deals over everything else he could do
Notice that this is weasely phrasing. I didn't say I prefer it over "everything else he could do". Nor I spoke of any kind of "self-serving deal".
I literally said "I'd rather have self-serving deals for golf courses than the nth trillion dollar invasion...".
He did less invasions and wars than Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, more self-serving deals of the cheap kind, and less self-serving deals of the trillion dollar Wall Street bailout kind.
He also spoke about globalization's issues and losing jobs to China, which was not allowed to do in polite company before...
>While one person takes care of a self-serving deal for golf courses, the other person would sit down and educate themselves on topics like climate change, education and current education system issues etc.
And how did that worked out thus far, up to 2016? Wasn't the climate getting all worse, education all the worse and college more expensive under the last, say, 10+ last of your presidents?
Did any of those things got suddenly or especially bad in 2016-2020?
>Otherwise it would mean that a President isn't relevant at all.
Well, politicians are not that relevant in corporatism.
It's only when they try to do anything besides business as usual, even as lip service, that they become somewhat relevant (e.g. slow down outsourcing of jobs to China, stop the war machine and intervenionism, cater to the middle class, as opposed to the welfare-level poor and the 10%, and so on).
He certainly lied at a much higher level than other presidents, let alone any president. His volume of lies is massive. I think it’s less his delivery style and more that he also lies about so many insignificant details.
His "lying" was no different than any other corporate CEO that needs to talk like that to push people forward to a specific direction.
We can argue all day about the ethics of lying, but at the end of the day, you cant always be 100% honest about your intent to push people in a certain direction, even if it means "for the greater good."
I don’t agree with this take because it was clearly self serving most of the time and to a ridiculous extent, not an ethical gray area.
Should we start with Obama being born in Kenya? Crowd sizes? The possible criminal activity of inflating his net worth (currently under investigation)? Denying Russian interference? The debunked allegation of election fraud and dismissed lawsuits with no proof? These were not necessary for the greater good.
The parent also mentioned Presidents, not CEOs. But I’d argue he is on the high end of the lie generating spectrum for CEOs and not in good company.
Honestly, I think it's part of the solution. Too many words are spent in online arguments between two people who aren't at all open to changing their beliefs. If people are willing to admit that at the outset, everyone's time is spared.
But anyway, mrlala said "wrong", not "evil", and in this particular case, the evidence is on Trump's Twitter account for everyone to see.
I don’t think the “don’t bother responding” part is productive, but I also think we have to avoid false equivalences, pretending both sides are anywhere close in terms of how much they’ve misbehaved (not saying you’re doing that, but a lot of people are in an attempt to stay above the fray). False equivalence is how the frogs got boiled and we ended up where we are today.
The idea of "false balance" cannot be so quickly wiped away with a one liner.
Imagine the current media shit storm was being given credibility by the media by devoting half of their reporting to ways maybe Trump is right, maybe Trump did win. They would be enabling authoritarian behaviour.
Balance in reporting should be aiming to centre around objective truth. Not trying to find the mid point between one side or another's narrative.
We're not talking about the philosophical elements of politics for the most part. There are plenty of parts of government policy where there is an objective truth and one side (or even both on occasion) are trying to manipulate the narrative away from that.
To use a non-US example: Boris Johnson claiming that he is going to deliver 50000 more nurses in the NHS. Except that figure includes some 19k nurses who are already employed in the NHS.
Back to Trump: Great, but we also won the election!
Donald Trump objectively did not have the largest inaugural attendance of any president. Windmills objectively do not cause cancer. It's objectively true that we should not nuke hurricanes. You could fill pages and pages of examples of objectively false statements, not just things the left and right disagree on.
Yes, but the objectively false statements that the left and right don't disagree on are not politics.
Politics is pretty much what's left that we disagree on, that can't be settled objectively in other domains. And is an expression of people's values, like what's the right way to live a good life, is there even more than one, who's gonna get the rare exclusive things in life that we can't all get (e.g. apartments with views on Central Park or your local equivalent).
There's enough variation in these values that we can't agree on these things and they conflict. Hence, politics.
Whatever you want to call it, it's clear that the left and right disagree about actual objective facts, not merely goals or their policy agenda, and that these disagreements drive (and are driven by — the causality can run in multiple directions) political support and decision-making. Right now there's a big debate about whether there was widespread fraud in our recent election (though I would be remiss not to point out that there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence for that). That's a politicized factual dispute, the adjudication of which (by which I don't merely mean in courts or the Electoral College or what-have-you, but also in the public's perception) will have fairly profound real-world consequences for some years to come.
That is one of many recent examples of these sorts of politicized factual disputes.
Unfortunately this still misses the important point of consistent and repeated bias against Trump to the point of attempting to undermine his legitimacy by the media and political establishment ever since he was elected; it's not reasonable to suddenly assume good faith and objective analysis on their part - regardless of his own trollish culpability in that process and unpleasant history.
> consistent and repeated bias against Trump to the point of attempting to undermine his legitimacy by the media
most of what I've seen pointed to as bias is basically reporting on what he said/did, and he didn't like it. In the first month(?) Sebastian Gorka said ... "There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media ... to attack a duly elected President in the second week of his term... and until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, 'fake news.'"
The term from day one was meant to point out reporting/news that the administration didn't like, regardless of the truth of the news/facts/reporting.
There's a possibility that people are 'biased' against stuff you say because they have a 'bias' for truth, and you're lying on a regular basis. You may be correct in saying people are 'biased' against you, but that doesn't make their statements wrong, or what you say truth.
When people have that attitude, even if I otherwise agree with them, I basically just stop listening to them. It's always more nuanced than that and I haven't got the time or stress-level to deal with people who can't handle nuance.
>any other president before trump would have resigned in disgrace about 100 times
Reagan supported death squads in Latin America and didn't resign. G.W. Bush started a war based on bullshit and had people tortured and didn't resign. Every president going back years now has overseen the NSA surveillance system.
My history isn’t amazing, but let’s say they did those things. Why should USA presidents care what non-Americans (myself included!) think? I can’t vote them out, nor the Senators supporting them. (Would I even be able to sue them if they injured me with their policies?)
What matters is limited to their actions with regard to America and Americans. For the actions which led to the impeachment, for their actions during the pandemic, and for the post-Election behaviour, a normal politician would demonstrate shame. And those are just the biggest and most obvious ones.
One thing that bewildered me about reddit talking about Trump is that the amount of Non-americans that would chime in about our politics. Like why the hell do you care about my country so much? Are we a zoo to you? We equally dislike our system as much as you but we're at ground zero and understand the harsh reality of our system better than them. Why do they think our countries influence is something they should try to sway?
Because when you fabricate a war we send our young men and women there to die a pointless death as your allies. Because if you descide to use nuclear weapons its over for us, and if you descide to ignore global warming its equally over for us.
In my view, that insanity is mostly based around fabricated outrage from the media. Trump's presidency has been pretty predictable. The first person fired from his inner circle may have been newsworthy, but every subsequent firing or leak or twit should have been nothing more than a byline on page 6.
So yes, I too avoid the news (and have been for over a decade). It hasn't made my life any poorer.
Your comment reminds of something Douglas Adams once said:
>> * In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication - boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc. - we get information poured at us from all over the place and it's completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It's curious, but we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world. Then there's many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there's not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they're not very good, they will improve dramatically. *
> we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back
Well Douglas Adams is a great writer and all that but this is a massive simplification, at least in the UK [0]. There is an extensive history of public opinion being swayed by highly politicised media, also a lot of state control on what could be said. E.g. salacious gossip about the royals. There was also a lot of graphic media - essentially political cartoons - that were very highly political and intended to inflame opinion.
It's not black and white. You don't have to turn off all news to avoid the junk. There are still people who serve meaningful news; you just have to know where to look.
People mean very different things when they say news, I've found. Most of what people think of as "news" is human interest story garbage churned out as quickly as possible to get the most number of eyeballs. This category includes even a lot of supposedly reputable newspapers, unfortunately. This is great if you are looking for lunchtime gossip or just something to distract or entertain yourself with. Not so good if you want to learn something or expand your world view.
The way I see it, good news
- gives historical context,
- dives deeply,
- covers the entire globe,
- discusses incremental changes and not only big events,
- reflects on multiple perspectives,
- doesn't overemphasise human interest stories, and
- provides you with actual data.
Good news, ironically, ages well.
There are still some people that work with real news. There was a recent Ask HN about favourite magazines and journals[1], where some of the comments mentioned The Economist[2] (a long-time favourite of mine) and Delayed Gratification[3] (which I can't personally vouch for but I admire their goal.)
The Economist comes up often as a shining beacon in these discussions but everytime I read it I'm hit by a wall of aggressive neoliberalism. It may mesh better with your personal world view but it's also a propaganda over facts publication. By that I don't mean they aren't factual but rather that they are very selective in which facts to surface in order to craft a narrative that will hopefully sway the reader into thinking a certain way.
Their news reporting isn't that bad, but what is bad is the mixing of a large number of editorial pieces that do still wave a neoliberalist flag. I encourage having a look at https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2... for a decent appraisal of various sources.
My possibly better option: choose a boring news service. Deutsche Welle, for instance. You learn of important news, but it is not written in a way to make you emotionally light up like a Christmas tree.
In my opinion, DW is the best news source out there. Even on TV, the DW channel is such a pleasure to watch. Their news seem to be way more wholesome, and, instead of just providing same 'breaking news' ad nauseam, does so much more. I invariably feel more enriched after watching it.
BBC and PBS are the only others which I watch besides DW.
Mr. Money Mustache once suggested "slow news" as a way to keep up but not be involved in every little thing. His suggestion was The Economist. Any source that doesn't publish on a daily schedule should be able to provide more valuable context.
Did a similar thing over a decade ago - I don't even own a television anymore.
What I spend most of my days, weeks and months on is largely unrelated to what's happening in the world (and the news' bias towards the negative subset of that). Not following the news thus removes a lot of the sensationalist and negative stream, and saves a lot of time (including possibly worrying on what I just saw/read). If it's really important, I'll hear it anyway.
Recently, I did start a subscription on a national newspaper though, but it allows me to a) select what I read, b) skip over things I'm not interested in (even throwing away the whole paper if I don't want to read it that day). I happen to like some columnists and the variation of daily puzzles.
I did this years ago and it has made my life better and stopped me stressing about many things over which I have zero control
I used to listen to a news radio show called Morning Ireland while eating breakfast. That was the first thing to go. A few years later I tuned into it one morning, and they were pretty much saying the exact same stuff as they had been 3 years previously. This encouraged me to continue ignoring it
Shortly afterwards I was having dinner in a friend's house, and related the above, and it turned out one of the other dinner guests was (and still is) one of the presenters on Morning Ireland :/
My problem with this is really simple: You do see the scaling effect in stuff like corona or on a sunny sunday:
Suddenly everyone is going to the park.
What if suddenly everyone stops looking at news? Acting and reacting?
What if the stress i get through the news will never be necessary but what if there is another regime and we need everyone being on alert and standing up and knowing whats going on?
Yin and Yang, finding the balance in our generation is not easy. I get that, i see that, i experience it myself but while i'm sometimes ready to not care i'm worried that i might not react correctly anymore when it counts.
You can't cut out news completely, obviously you're going to hear stuff from other people or through other means. But I think cutting out almost all news media is a good choice to make.
My reasoning is this: most of the stuff in the general news is something you can do absolutely nothing about, at most it may influence your choices at election time or best case inform you about a scandal involving some company, letting you avoid doing business with them in the future.
Everything else is just noise that creates anxiety.
> Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life.
In some sense, the quoted statement is obviously right.
But in another sense, it's wrong. To cite just one particular example which is dear to my heart because I work closely with school children and students: News about the climate crisis typically originate in some far-away location. But to fight the climate crisis, we have to get organized in every single city, including the city you live in.
how exactly will "organizing" "fight" the current climate crisis? can you even outline the necessary steps individuals must take to have any real impact in this "fight" as opposed to massive institutional change
Goethe: "If one has not read the newspapers for some months & then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature."
is it me or do a lot of people seem to justify their thirst for mostly pointless and irrelevant information with the idea that all this information will somehow lead to direct action on their particular issue?
You can to learn to read the headlines without investing an emotional response in reaction to them.
This makes it much easier.
Look at it like more being curious about what kind of a world we must be in, rather than what you are supposed to feel about it (rather, what they want you to feel about it).
Also when you can plainly identify the calls to emotional action in the headlines, then you're free to ignore it; and can just take away what actual content may or may not be there.
It's a common practice to lie[0] in a headline, then correct it in the article. This makes headlines have negative informational value - you're literally more wrong about the world after scrolling quickly through a news page than you would be if you didn't.
--
[0] - Usually by omission or exaggeration, not by outright stating false facts.
Sure, well I didn't mean to imply to only read headlines; definitely dig in on stuff that seems worthy of interest.
Also, that's exactly why I added the clause "or may not be there" :) That's part of the skill when reading headlines - training to see it as a dirty filter and seeing if there are any glints in the dirt that are interesting enough to follow up on.
You can also read Reddit post headlines, particularly in /r/politics, and train yourself to ignore the ones where the headline is a statement and not actual news. Unsurprisingly, this tends to consistently come from certain fairly biased publications that appear to disproportionately surface to the top there lately (I'm looking at you Common Dreams).
Cutting out all the fluff and focusing on news helped me save time and stress.
/r/politics is basically the liberal version of /r/conservative. I go to /r/conservative to laugh at how bat shit insane they are. Then I go to /r/politics and I see the same gaslighting tactics deployed. It's really unnecessary and depressing tbh. So tribal. My personal persuasion is much closer to liberal than conservative fwiw.
“If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything.
By the time you “hear about it everywhere” because it’s important, it has already been twisted and distorted, and given the party-line spin.
Which is a valid choice, of course - but you should be aware of that, and — if you care about facts rather than narrative - ignore the stuff when you hear about it as well.
Even for people paying attention, it's hard to follow all the spin and understand which organizations are pushing which ideas and why.
The US now has tens of millions of citizens that believe the election was stolen. I think they're mostly just "normal" people who have tuned out and now can't tell which way is up.
The reason I pay attention is because following news daily is actually less cognitive load than trying to catch up when a significant plot twist happens that might impact me.
> “If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything.
No. It only means you're using your social networks (both Internet and meatspace ones) as an importance filter. It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption.
The way I follow the principle is: if I hear about something and it crosses the threshold of importance, I hit multiple different news pages simultaneously, as well as smaller communities, to ingest multiple points of view and hopefully get a relatively low-bias picture of events. But when I don't have a specific important thing to look for, I don't read the news sites at all.
BTW. I gave up on news ~14 years ago, after realizing that following news stories every evening was causing me great amounts of stress. Every day, I felt the country or the world was about to go down in flames. Well, turns out here we are, 14 years later, and nothing of such proportions ever happened.
I'm also reminded of someone on HN (can't remember the handle) who says they're reading the news every day - just not the current news, only one week's old news. Even taking it as a mental experiment is a good reminder that 90%+ of stuff on the news is utterly irrelevant and unimportant.
It has nothing to do with social networks - the same thing was true 20, 30 and 40 years ago.
Remember the McDonalds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case ? Everything you'd "just hear about it" without looking into the details would lead you to believe that the US justice system is ridiculous - this case was mocked everywhere (in news, in film, in popular culture) and occasionally still is.
> It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption.
While you are technically correct, I've personally known many (about 20 or so) people who have stopped reading the news with the "if it's important I'll hear about it" mentality, and all of them except one never bother with active investigations into almost anything. You might be different, but in my experience that would be the outlier among the "I'll hear about it" crowd.
Now, you might also claim that Liebeck vs McDonalds doesn't cross your "threshold of importance". Personally, my own threshold of importance and credibility is constantly re-adjusted based on the differing accounts of actual events.
> just not the current news, only one week's old news.
Well, that's an interesting experiment.
One week might be fine, but I find that e.g. one year is not (e.g. one year in the Assange case it was becoming really hard to get informed about anything other than the US Department of State angle, except if you listened to Alex Jones style people -- which is generally an exercise in futility; whereas while things were happening, there were many angles).
Further, I've noticed how even science history gets whitewashed. Over 20 years, the narrative of the conflict between Linus Pauling and Dan Shechtman went from easy to find descriptions of "Pauling publicly ridiculed and undermined Shechtman with all his scientific weight, and only after Pauling died (and as a result of him no longer fighting against that) was Shechtman's advances to crystalography accepted" to "Pauling had a standard scientific disagreement with Shechtman that was eventually resolved in Shechtman's favor, but that happened only after Pauling died and without any relation to it". Robin Warren and Barbara McClintock had similar stories that have since been whitewashed.
Again, this is over a 20-50 year period, and might not even cross your threshold of "importance", but I know that if I just waited to "hear about it" I wouldn't know anything of these stories, and they do cross my threshold.
> you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything
The point of not reading regular news is for it to filter out what you hear about, not the specifics of those things. It's hard to put a spin on basic facts like "there was a shooting" or "there was a plane crash". If it's important enough for me to hear about it, I can then decide if it's important enough to warrant actually researching the details of independently.
There are some more niche topics that I maintain an active interest in. Outside of that, I don't see the point in trying to be "informed" about every last thing on the face of the earth.
> means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything.
The past few years have illustrated that following the news is in most cases choosing to believe the corporate spin on an event, because "news" in the US is literally run by enormous corporations that have a vested interest in you believing what they say and coming back for more.
I highly recommend turning off all audible/vibrational alerts on your devices, allowing exceptions for channels that are only used for true emergencies.
After that, try not using your phone at all for 24 hours, laptops/desktops still allowed.
If everyone does this doesn’t it become a problem that no one is being informed? How can we vote or make decisions on trends if everyone is only reacting to major events?
But I do agree, my stress goes down when I tune out the news.
I was flicking between US election coverage on CNN and Fox and the BBC UK coverage (I don't live in the US), the contrast was stark. I could actually feel my blood pressure rising when watching the US channels, as if everyone on there was slightly panicky and had just jogged up a flight of stairs. I don't think you'd see what type of tone on non-US channels unless WWIII was literally breaking out. I couldn't imagine consuming that all the time, it must be horrendous for your mental health.
You can be informed reading the right resources once a week. Being exposed to news content isn’t the same thing as being informed. And we don’t vote daily..
I switched from reading a lot of news sites most days to picking the couple sites that I like the best and mostly only reading those. And then I read a few of the truly interesting-seeming articles that bubble up on places like this here website, etc.
Pre-internet, I would only buy one newspaper, and occasionally pick up a second when I was out if there was something eye-catching. I would also occasionally buy a magazine or two at the bookshop once or twice per month. I have tried to emulate this method again with the web, and it seems to be working.
I was never a person who would read every available newspaper and magazine before, so figured maybe I should not do the same online.
I am much happier not to face the firehose anymore.
> And then I read a few of the truly interesting-seeming articles that bubble up on places like this here website, etc.
This approach comes with an obvious sampling bias lurking. I'm not going to tell you not to do it, but it's something to be aware about. That's why I prefer to have my news curated by a small set of organisations that are more diverse and can make me inform myself on a broader set of issues than the ones I would naturally find interesting.
And if your entertainment becomes a source of stress and high blood pressure, instead of enjoyment, it's probably wise to consider doing something else.
> How can we vote or make decisions on trends if everyone is only reacting to major events?
I've seen a lot of people who decided years ago that they were never voting for Trump spend the last 5 years obsessing daily over every news article about him. None that news is going to change the way they vote. And usually they don't even remember most of the local politicians who are on their ballot. The claim that this is to be an informed voter is usually a justification for a fairly unhealthy addiction.
Disagree here. Lots of news can have profound impact on your life, if missed on time.
For instance, I never heard of the temporary +0.5% to mortgage refinancing, that lenders will have to pay to federal banks starting Dec 1st, until an article few weeks ago here. This was planned back in June, but now it is too late to act on.
Profound effect of a one-time 50bpps fee on mortgage refis between $125K and around $510K (whatever the conforming loan limit is in your area)? That’s maybe $2000 on average and that for someone who’s probably living in a $600K+ home.
How many hours would you spend watching and fretting about the news to avoid this (and similar) couple thousand dollar “profound effects”? You’d probably be better off learning to change your own brakes or do some other part of home maintenance. Financially, time-wise, and mentally.
I've never been a huge news guy. The day the election was over I quit reddit. I don't miss it at all. I use twitter and hackernews. That is it. I've saved so much time over the last few weeks.
"I start my day full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities which life has to offer. The momement I open a newspaper I am immediately dissillusioned and wrecked" Patrick Kavanagh ~1960s.
I've changed the time-of-day that I consume news/social media. I find if I do it at night before bed, it significantly limits the amount of distraction I have during the day - and often I just forget to look.
It's those little 'hacks' I use to trick myself into managing my emotional state.
After 40 years, I've found that the most effective way to manage myself is to treat myself as a toddler.
If i had done this i would miss the covid19 pandemic in france. In france in the begining it was always : "It's nothing, it will never come in france, it's just a common
influenza nothing important. Even when china contained a whole town ...
By passing one hour per day to read news i was able to predict the containment in france and to prepare myself and my familly ...
I'm with you on this. I mean, I struggle with it - Trump, CV, Brexit, etc - it's all pretty clickbaity stuff, built for hours of mindless browsing - but ultimately, what does an endless newscycle actually do to an individual?
I live in Cornwall in the UK: much of this stuff is - anger and distaste and "long distance fear" aside - completely irrelevant. I think Trump is appalling, but really, what difference does it make to me? None whatsoever. What difference can I make to whether he's in power or not? None whatsoever. What is net result of me seeing yet more news about how redundant a human being he is? I get cross, depressed, and - as per OP's article - man, I waste a bunch of time I'll never get back.
The problem I've struggled with is that there is presumably a continuum at the end of this "caring less" approach which is the "why bother voting" lassitude, and I certainly don't want to go that way. I'm still passionately left wing, passionate about helping fix inequality and the environment and so on - so news at a higher level is important. But I'm not sure the sort of rapid, breathless, clickbaity HORROR cycle does anything for anyone.
> I'm still passionately left wing, passionate about helping fix inequality and the environment and so on
What's the most effective way to gain information and insight about these topics and ways to contribute? Is it following the breaking news? Probably not. The real problems don't change hourly or daily, and information doesn't go stale. So instead of today's news, it may be better to find books on these topics, as well as recent but not that recent reports, investigative journalism, etc. - things that are not meant to be a part of a daily news cycle.
Solid information from sources like that, and refined beliefs formed thanks to it, will make you a better voter too.
Ignoring the news, and just expecting the "important" stuff to magically penetrate is a great way to live in wilful ignorance, and/or let people/governments/corporations get away with a lot of bad stuff that others around you have deemed insignificant.
I could probably name half a dozen things off the top of my head that would affect your opinion or behaviour towards various things in your daily life, that you aren't aware of because they aren't considered "important" enough.
And I guess if you're okay with indirectly supporting workplace sexual abuse, money laundering, unsustainable work and management abuse, the erosion of civil rights, and destruction of the environments, then sure, I guess it's not important.
So how is you watching the news going to solve all these last things that you mention? I also don't watch the news. Do you really think we don't know those things are happening?
News is entertainment. If you really want to get smarter, read books from people who are experts in their field.
Edit: if you do want to read a book, start with "Trust me, I'm lying". It will give you a whole new perspective on news reporting.
If something isn't actionable then is it worth taking up your attention? I agree with you that some news is worth consuming but that's only because I occasionally discuss it with friends.
I agree. If it's not actionable, then it's just adding to the doom. But not all of it is not actionable. And you definitely can't take actions based on information you don't have. Even just telling your friends about it is arguably action, because while it's not actionable to you, maybe it is to them, or maybe it's something you can take action on as a group.
Obviously finding a balance is essential, so you can be well informed and reactive, but also not drown in doom. I'll admit: it's a balance I haven't found, but I firmly believe living in a metaphorical hole isn't going to make anything better.
At the highest tier of garbage, you have cable news channels. They exist to keep you irritated and anxious because otherwise there would be nothing for them to talk to you about all day every day.
Video news in general is worse than talk / text because they can hijack your visual senses to get you worked up.
I used to listen to a lot of NPR. I always told myself they were fair and balanced and couldn't use visuals to deceive me. Over the summer, I realized that they are little better than the liberal version of conservative talk radio. Which is a shame, because I put a lot of faith in them for about a decade.
Local news papers are probably decent at a lot of things, but having known people who interact with reporters for them, local papers tend to be just as biased as anything else. They are, after all, just run by people.
I get most of my "national" news these days through either here on HN or a couple twitter feeds that seem to curate what they retweet pretty well. Local news, my friends and neighbors are plugged in to the community and we experience news in real time.
Honestly, I think for most things, you will get a better understanding of the landscape if you aren't hearing it from people who have a monetary interest in you wanting to come back for more "news" tomorrow.
And on that note, I have cut down on my twitter quite a bit as well lately.
Turn off the news.
If something is actually important, you'll hear about it anyway. And if you don't hear about it, it wasn't actually as important as the reporters made it out to be.
Plus in all likelihood the events being reported on are thousands of miles away from you and have zero impact on your daily life.
Obviously this pairs well with cutting out all the nonsense on your social media feeds.