I'm a fan of extremely selective news following - having tested, it makes me much happier and has very little negative effect - but it comes with an important c

I'm a fan of extremely selective news following - having tested, it makes me much happier and has very little negative effect - but it comes with an important corollary: if you're going to avoid a topic, it's very important to also understand that means you don't know much about it. I make rather a point of saying "I don't know much about that" when the topic of current affairs that I'm not following come up. Then again, that's partially because when I do want to know about something, I tend to deep-dive on it (https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit). And it's largely because many of my friends are spectacularly highly informed on anything they're likely to comment on, and so any time I do slip and attempt to sound informed on something I'm not, I have about a 50% chance of sounding like a complete idiot. So this may be much easier to do in my social circle.