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> media-driven neuroticism—a love of change for its own sake, or neomania, a love of new things. Ultimately, neomania together with the media has a negative eff

> media-driven neuroticism—a love of change for its own sake, or neomania, a love of new things. Ultimately, neomania together with the media has a negative effect on our moods, which isn’t surprising considering most of what makes the daily news is negative. This leaves us feeling powerless, like the world is falling apart. So we turn to social media to witness the (seemingly) beautiful lives of celebrities, and the romantic and exciting lives of our friends and family. But this ends up driving the compulsion to compare our own lives with those of the people we see on social media, creating feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and jealousy. > The more media we consume, the more noise we get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal.) If we consume the news on a yearly basis (in the form of books), we can assume about half of what we consume is signal, and the rest noise (randomness). If we increase our frequency to a daily intake, the composition would increase to about 95% noise, and only 5% signal. If we increase our intake to an hourly frequency (as those who follow the stock market or heavy social media users do) the composition increases to 99.5% noise and 0.5% signal. This is roughly 200% more noise than signal, more toxic noise to both misdirect and distract, and has negative effects on our mood. It seems it's not just hyperbole, it's plain falacious bullshit. Sorry i did not read it all.

called_it 8y ago
That seems fine to me, and you freaking out about it to me says something negative about you, not about the article.
joslin01 8y ago
That signal to noise quote is actually great, and one of the reasons why the late Aaron Schwartz refused to read the news. He said in one of his essays it's far more valuable to read books, and basically explained in more words, the signal to noise problem.
- zerostar07 8y ago
  can you explain how the logic is not flawed? If you are consuming 50% SNR news, it will be 50% regardless of whether you read once a day or once an hour
  - majewsky 8y ago
    For example, let's say you watch TV news each evening. There's a political scandal going on which is featured prominently every night for a whole week as developments go on. A lot of what is said will be redundant because each report needs to repeat the basics to be able to stand on its own. For a returning viewer, that's not new information, ergo noise. The journalists and experts may spend time speculating about what happens next. This information will be outdated the next day as new developments take place, so it's noise for me unless the speculation provides value for me between the broadcast and the next day. I stopped watching TV news on a regular basis, and switched to reading a weekly newspaper for precisely this reason. With a few days of distance from the original event, everyone can catch their breath and take a step back to put the story into the bigger picture. Now after 6 years, I've cancelled my newspaper subscription in order to read more books, so I'm deliberately zooming out even more.
    - zerostar07 8y ago
      hindsight is 20/20. but still that does not explain the flawed logic here
      - quadrangle 8y ago
        The logic is: have patience, reject neophilism, take things in with all the benefits of 20/20 hindsight by reading the best from the past year or month or whatever instead of whatever is new right now.
    - 0xADADA 8y ago
      NAILED IT
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    The argument is NOT that news is 50% SNR, the argument is that BOOKS are 50% SNR. Effectively, an edited collection of the news over the course of a year has a low SNR compared to that of following the constant stream of instant-news. The point was expressed badly, but it's about the way that the average quality of new-stuff is a lot lower than the average quality of a curated set of high-quality stuff from a time period. It's like how you'll see better movies picking out the best movies from all of movie history versus picking even the best of whatever happens to be the newest.
0xADADA 8y ago
> it's plain falacious bullshit. fallacious

called_it 8y ago

That seems fine to me, and you freaking out about it to me says something negative about you, not about the article.

joslin01 8y ago

That signal to noise quote is actually great, and one of the reasons why the late Aaron Schwartz refused to read the news. He said in one of his essays it's far more valuable to read books, and basically explained in more words, the signal to noise problem.

zerostar07 8y ago
can you explain how the logic is not flawed? If you are consuming 50% SNR news, it will be 50% regardless of whether you read once a day or once an hour
- majewsky 8y ago
  For example, let's say you watch TV news each evening. There's a political scandal going on which is featured prominently every night for a whole week as developments go on. A lot of what is said will be redundant because each report needs to repeat the basics to be able to stand on its own. For a returning viewer, that's not new information, ergo noise. The journalists and experts may spend time speculating about what happens next. This information will be outdated the next day as new developments take place, so it's noise for me unless the speculation provides value for me between the broadcast and the next day. I stopped watching TV news on a regular basis, and switched to reading a weekly newspaper for precisely this reason. With a few days of distance from the original event, everyone can catch their breath and take a step back to put the story into the bigger picture. Now after 6 years, I've cancelled my newspaper subscription in order to read more books, so I'm deliberately zooming out even more.
  - zerostar07 8y ago
    hindsight is 20/20. but still that does not explain the flawed logic here
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      The logic is: have patience, reject neophilism, take things in with all the benefits of 20/20 hindsight by reading the best from the past year or month or whatever instead of whatever is new right now.
  - 0xADADA 8y ago
    NAILED IT
- quadrangle 8y ago
  The argument is NOT that news is 50% SNR, the argument is that BOOKS are 50% SNR. Effectively, an edited collection of the news over the course of a year has a low SNR compared to that of following the constant stream of instant-news. The point was expressed badly, but it's about the way that the average quality of new-stuff is a lot lower than the average quality of a curated set of high-quality stuff from a time period. It's like how you'll see better movies picking out the best movies from all of movie history versus picking even the best of whatever happens to be the newest.

0xADADA 8y ago

> it's plain falacious bullshit. fallacious