5 ms·

IMHO, a lot of what is in the OP is correct, but I conclude that a more nuanced view is important. Yes, I have long wanted, and still want, to know what is imp

by graycat 10y ago

IMHO, a lot of what is in the OP is correct, but I conclude that a more nuanced view is important. Yes, I have long wanted, and still want, to know what is important, both to me personally and more generally, about what is going on in the world so still make efforts to be so "informed". Then, over time, I went through much of the negative views about news in the OP: (1) One summer while in college, I was with my parents in DC and read The Washington Post, a lot of it, everyday and at the end of the summer concluded that I'd learned next to nothing and 99 44/100% had just wasted time. (2) Later, one day I counted and found that, in trying to be informed, I was getting 22 print periodicals, concluded that even the 22 were not telling me much of value, and cut way back. (3) I happened to notice in an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that then, too, apparently the movie makers believed that their audience would accept that the news was junk information. (4) I have left over from the past three quite good TV sets and with my phone and Internet service have some TV service for no extra charge. Still, I have no TV set connected to a cable or any other source and haven't watched TV in years with one exception: I tried to watch the first Republican debate on TV; mostly that was a flop. I watched the debate later on the Internet and got and read a transcript -- much better. For the mainstream media, say AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Boston Globe, LAT, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, Slate, Salon, Huffpo, Business Insider, and more, I have a triage: (i) I am willing to glance at the headlines if only to see what nonsense the MSM is pushing onto the public now. And if there really is a big story, say, a nuke exploded somewhere, then I will want to know and likely that will be in the headlines. Also I get some lessons by example in, say, PR nonsense from some experts in getting attention from even usually next to nothing in meaningful content! Like in the remark about writing news stories of the reporter in the original version of the movie The Thing, if the real story is not good, then he "will make it good". So, the news distorting the truth is an old story. I also learn about "the common man in the street" -- from the fact that millions of people watch that stuff -- maybe the most important thing can learn from watching the news is about people from the fact that each day hundreds of millions of people pay attention to that stuff! (ii) Any article written by a reporter or news organization, e.g., AP, I nearly always refuse to take seriously or even read at all anymore. From my huge sample of such articles I did read in the past, I assume that such an article fails even common high school term paper writing standards for meaningful, trustworthy content and that it is likely some or all of uninformed, misinformed, biased, and deliberately distorted, fabricated, or lying. I say that such articles are (borrowing from the Bogart movie The Maltese Falcon), with bitter contempt, by newsies and nearly always refuse to read them or, if read them for some special reason, flatly refuse to take the content at face value. (iii) I am eager to pay attention to news stories on topics I'm interested in and signed by people with high credibility. Mostly for such an article, I keep a copy on my computer with a reference to the source and with an abstract and an entry in an index. I believe that staying "informed" is important: E.g., here in the US we just had an election for POTUS. IMHO, the two main candidates were very different and promised significantly different, better/worse, results for the US and even my own life. So, first, I tried to say informed and, to some extent, more superficial than I would like, did. And by watching the campaigns, the candidates, and the reactions of the newsies and citizens, I did get some education in such things -- I got some more insight into people, personalities, politics, e.g., stuff I didn't learn much about studying mathematics! And, second, I got involved by practicing my writing and posting on-line -- so, I tried to do better as a US citizen. So, sure, now I get essentially all my news from the Internet. One important approach is to use HN as a filter to find more important content. Here at HN, often there are references to articles at the NYT. Unless such articles appear to be signed by people with credibility and independent of the NYT, I flatly, automatically refuse to read them. I have, maybe with one exception a decade, zip, zilch, and zero respect for anything the NYT thinks or believes. The Internet permits a news organization, maybe just some one person, to reach nearly everyone who might be interested in content from that person. From that fact, I am guessing that the Internet -- that does permit deeper presentations of information -- is the key to an irresistible, radical transformation of public understanding and effectiveness in the US democracy. So, net, with some nuance, I disagree with some of the OP and conclude that the news and staying informed, are important.

p10_user 10y ago
Is there a reason you decided to single out the NYT at the end of your post? Is it due to its frequency of its reference here on HN? I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. I've thought of doing something similar but, like many things, have never gotten around to it.
- graycat 10y ago
  At the end I might have said the NYT and the rest of the MSM. But the NYT has pretenses, e.g., the highly self-esteemed NYT, and most of the MSM has little more face claim to validity than a pitch by a salesman of rusty used cars. But the NYT is to me the worst of the sores on my back side from the media. I recently sent a carefully drafted letter to the publisher of the NYT explaining my complaints with his work and saying his paper was "dead to me". It is. I would applaud the many links at HN to seemingly interesting NYT stories except, as I explained, I no longer can take seriously anything published by the NYT that is not signed by someone with their own credibility and independent of the NYT. As I explained to the NYT publisher: His paper has long tried to mislead me; I hate that; and they can't do it anymore because I just won't read their articles. I won't do it. It's over for me. I won't let myself pay any attention to their stuff. I have no more patience with their deceptions. I have better alternatives. Life is too short to do more mud wrestling with NYT nonsense; it's better just to ignore it. It's kaput for me. I can't know what the NYT has in mind for me, if anything, but I know I don't want it. Much the same for the rest of the MSM that, however, has been claimed, used to follow the NYT as their highly esteemed, revered leader. Memo To: The NYT and MSM Subject: The Internet Body: The Internet is here! Now even just one person alone can publish for 100 million readers without even a square inch of paper or a single drop of ink. Might want to think about the consequences of that situation. Possible consequences: Lots of fragmentation of the media business with something for everyone and next to nothing for everyone -- that is, for each reader, there is at least one good publication, and there is no single publication for all or even nearly all the readers. Anger a reader, e.g., can anger some readers by misleading them, and they can be gone in a single click. > I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. For me, the keys are: (1) Good exploitation of the hierarchical file system on my computer, HPFS on Windows. (2) A good text editor that has a powerful macro language (KEdit). (3) A dirt simple way to jump to (go to) the more heavily used parts of the hierarchical file system tree -- a command line macro G <token> where there is an environment variable of the form <token>.MARK (set from a file a maintain with my editor when a console window opens) with value the tree name of the a particular heavily used part of the tree. E.g., I can type G ASP thus make current a file system directory with such information on some hundreds of references on Microsoft's ASP.NET software for building Web pages. For the software for my startup, I have now well over 5000 articles of technical documentation, and I can find and get to each one quickly. Indeed, commonly my source code comments have my file system tree names of relevant documentation, and one keystroke in my editor invokes a macro that displays the documentation. Right, the editor macro reads and parses the line with the tree name, keeps the tree name, and discards the comment delimiters, right, with the comment delimiter tokens determined from the file type. Then some more command line scripts and editor macros make it easy to grab and save content and abstract and index it. There is one more in a sense above all the rest: I have a little command line script FACTS that basically just uses the editor to open a file FACTS.DAT (the script does check to see if the file is already open and, if so, does not open it again and instead un-hides it and raises it to the top of the Z-order). Then this file has little notes, often as short as a Tweet. Each note has, right, some key words. Usually there are links as Internet URLs or local file system tree names. So, there are phone numbers, e-mail addresses, user IDs, passwords, street addresses, open hours of businesses, just things I want to remember, etc. What is astounding is (1) how useful it is and (2) how few bytes it has. So, since 9/2/2005, the file has 2,128,672 bytes and 3811 entries, e.g., an average of about one entry a day. It is shocking what an effective memory aid that little thing is and even suggests that maybe real AI will need much less memory than one might guess. So, right, I have a few, simple editor macros to help me use that file, and with only the 2,128,672 bytes the simplest, least efficient text search and select works fine.

by graycat 10y ago

p10_user 10y ago

Is there a reason you decided to single out the NYT at the end of your post? Is it due to its frequency of its reference here on HN? I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. I've thought of doing something similar but, like many things, have never gotten around to it.

graycat 10y ago
At the end I might have said the NYT and the rest of the MSM. But the NYT has pretenses, e.g., the highly self-esteemed NYT, and most of the MSM has little more face claim to validity than a pitch by a salesman of rusty used cars. But the NYT is to me the worst of the sores on my back side from the media. I recently sent a carefully drafted letter to the publisher of the NYT explaining my complaints with his work and saying his paper was "dead to me". It is. I would applaud the many links at HN to seemingly interesting NYT stories except, as I explained, I no longer can take seriously anything published by the NYT that is not signed by someone with their own credibility and independent of the NYT. As I explained to the NYT publisher: His paper has long tried to mislead me; I hate that; and they can't do it anymore because I just won't read their articles. I won't do it. It's over for me. I won't let myself pay any attention to their stuff. I have no more patience with their deceptions. I have better alternatives. Life is too short to do more mud wrestling with NYT nonsense; it's better just to ignore it. It's kaput for me. I can't know what the NYT has in mind for me, if anything, but I know I don't want it. Much the same for the rest of the MSM that, however, has been claimed, used to follow the NYT as their highly esteemed, revered leader. Memo To: The NYT and MSM Subject: The Internet Body: The Internet is here! Now even just one person alone can publish for 100 million readers without even a square inch of paper or a single drop of ink. Might want to think about the consequences of that situation. Possible consequences: Lots of fragmentation of the media business with something for everyone and next to nothing for everyone -- that is, for each reader, there is at least one good publication, and there is no single publication for all or even nearly all the readers. Anger a reader, e.g., can anger some readers by misleading them, and they can be gone in a single click. > I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful. For me, the keys are: (1) Good exploitation of the hierarchical file system on my computer, HPFS on Windows. (2) A good text editor that has a powerful macro language (KEdit). (3) A dirt simple way to jump to (go to) the more heavily used parts of the hierarchical file system tree -- a command line macro G <token> where there is an environment variable of the form <token>.MARK (set from a file a maintain with my editor when a console window opens) with value the tree name of the a particular heavily used part of the tree. E.g., I can type G ASP thus make current a file system directory with such information on some hundreds of references on Microsoft's ASP.NET software for building Web pages. For the software for my startup, I have now well over 5000 articles of technical documentation, and I can find and get to each one quickly. Indeed, commonly my source code comments have my file system tree names of relevant documentation, and one keystroke in my editor invokes a macro that displays the documentation. Right, the editor macro reads and parses the line with the tree name, keeps the tree name, and discards the comment delimiters, right, with the comment delimiter tokens determined from the file type. Then some more command line scripts and editor macros make it easy to grab and save content and abstract and index it. There is one more in a sense above all the rest: I have a little command line script FACTS that basically just uses the editor to open a file FACTS.DAT (the script does check to see if the file is already open and, if so, does not open it again and instead un-hides it and raises it to the top of the Z-order). Then this file has little notes, often as short as a Tweet. Each note has, right, some key words. Usually there are links as Internet URLs or local file system tree names. So, there are phone numbers, e-mail addresses, user IDs, passwords, street addresses, open hours of businesses, just things I want to remember, etc. What is astounding is (1) how useful it is and (2) how few bytes it has. So, since 9/2/2005, the file has 2,128,672 bytes and 3811 entries, e.g., an average of about one entry a day. It is shocking what an effective memory aid that little thing is and even suggests that maybe real AI will need much less memory than one might guess. So, right, I have a few, simple editor macros to help me use that file, and with only the 2,128,672 bytes the simplest, least efficient text search and select works fine.