> “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.
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.