5 ms·

> Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that.. allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter

> Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that.. allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. That's what got me to stop keeping up to date with most news a few years ago and I've been happier for it. Being more charitable on why news is important though, news serves as modern day gossip, and gossip may play a key role in holding human societies together. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne9ae8/gossip-may-have-played-a-role-in-human-survival https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne9ae8/gossip-may-have-pl...

rodion_89 7y ago
It's an avenue for social coordination. The benefit of having a hive mind is that you get to have a hive.
aklemm 7y ago
A lot of news stories in the past year have given me definitive direction in terms of how to spend my time politically. How to vote, which meetings to go to (redistricting, canvassing, etc.) More generally, I think they’ve all contributed to my mental models of the world.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  I wouldn't consider those to be matters affecting your life, career or business. They're really just interacting the news, like a hobby. Without the news, you wouldn't be interested in those things, and as a bonus, you wouldn't have the common (ie fairly useless) yet distorted mental models of the world that it gives people. I have a more concrete example. Around the year 2000 I finished a computer science degree and was doing postgraduate in another subject. But it was getting boring and I decided to quit. My professor asked what I'd do next. I told him the plan I'd had all along - fall back on my CS degree and get a job as a programmer. What I didn't know, because I didn't read the news, was that the dot com crash had just happened and you couldn't get a job as a programmer. So I didn't, and spent a year or two unemployed.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Doesn't your example show how disadvantaged you were because you didn't keep up with the news? It surely affected your livelihood. I guess OP doesn't need the news to figure out political candidates' positions.. or does s/he, since most political websites are just lies and empty promises. Choosing between e.g. the pro-environment or pro-coal candidate will surely have an effect on our lives in 20 years' time. Or one who wants to deploy a police state and harass all non-whites, or all "hippie weed smoker" types, etc..
    - 0db532a0 7y ago
      He gave one example of where following news that directly affects your livelihood is useful. This is one of the reasons I’m on HN. The incessant NYTimes, Guardian and medium.com brain rot really do push me away though.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Well I'll give a counter example. After the dot com crash and the offshoring hype, I was discouraged from getting a job in programming and so I didn't until much, much later. And if you look at the number of CS grads by year you'll note there was a significant dip in number of grads after the dot com crash and it took more than a decade for the numbers to recover.
    - jeegsy 7y ago
      The fact that the news might be necessary to obtain such info strikes me as a bug not a feature. We shouldn't need media(tion) between would-be politicians and citizenry. Perhaps quaint and impractical now, but I wish we still lived in an era where politicians literally went from town to town and yelled their pitches directly to citizens in the town square.
      - lopmotr 7y ago
        I don't see the harm in just reading what politicians promise. My city recently had a local election. Each candidate got to write a paragraph about themselves. I read them all looking for a few key points that I felt were important, and came up with a shortlist. Then excluded a few because of less important things until I had enough candidates (6) to vote for. Pretty easy. No news required. I purposely tried to ignore their advertisements in the street that were uniformly saying "Vote for me because no reason but look at my face!"
DanielleMolloy 7y ago
I had to truly realize that content creators need to optimize towards squeezing as much screen (life) time as possible out of me. And they started doing this openly, ignoring their moral doubts (see reviews for the ‘classic’ “Hooked”). Most web news is shallow distraction, aiming at emotionalising and validating since it seems more addictive then, and I realized I stay sufficiently up-to-date without actively accessing it. I still listen to news radio occasionally before sleep.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Which "Hooked" are you referring to? There are several. Author / producer? There's a film, though ... I don't think you had that in mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooked_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooked_(film) And numerous books: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=ti%3Ahooked https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=ti%3Ah...
  - jonah 7y ago
    Likely "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products"[1] by Nir Eyal [1] https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/ https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Thanks, seems likely.
    - DanielleMolloy 7y ago
      Yes, this one. Slightly off topic: His latest book is about avoiding distractions, featuring advice like “tell yourself that you have to burn a 100$ bill if you don’t do it”. His Twitter profile counts 54k tweets and 211k likes. Seems like his advice for app development backfired on him.
tempsy 7y ago
Isn't there a whole chapter devoted to that in Sapiens?
- chillacy 7y ago
  Yup, that's where I first encountered the idea.
austhrow743 7y ago
I wish there was an email list/rss feed specifically for people that only want news for the gossip value. Only the really high level stuff that everyone is talking about. Written as if the reader lacks the context of having been following all the other news on the issue. If it's a story that's divisive then it breaks talking points down by sides. Just everything you need to be able to pretend like you give a shit and empathise with your in group. I don't mean a weekly summary. They have way too much shit in them and the format doesn't make sense because every week isn't equally as interesting. Ten huge things that make you look like an idiot for not knowing about don't happen every week. One just happens every so often. Send me an email then. About that one topic. Nothing happened? Don't send anything.
GordonS 7y ago
I also stopped reading/listening/watching mainstream news a couple of years ago, and I'm glad I did. Almost all news is extremely negative - I tired of being bombarded with images of war and famine, squabbling politicians, and celebrity body-shaming. The worst of it was the futility of it - what purpose did this serve other than to anger and depress me and push me towards a particular political narrative? I can't stop the USA bombing hospitals, terrorists bombing whoever, plagues or famines; I can't fix our broken political system or prevent mass-surveillance. I can't ignore news entirely of course - I still read HN, still see snippets on Twitter, still hear conversations etc. But stopping purposely consuming mainstream news is honestly one of the best choices I've ever made.

rodion_89 7y ago

It's an avenue for social coordination. The benefit of having a hive mind is that you get to have a hive.

aklemm 7y ago

A lot of news stories in the past year have given me definitive direction in terms of how to spend my time politically. How to vote, which meetings to go to (redistricting, canvassing, etc.) More generally, I think they’ve all contributed to my mental models of the world.

lopmotr 7y ago
I wouldn't consider those to be matters affecting your life, career or business. They're really just interacting the news, like a hobby. Without the news, you wouldn't be interested in those things, and as a bonus, you wouldn't have the common (ie fairly useless) yet distorted mental models of the world that it gives people. I have a more concrete example. Around the year 2000 I finished a computer science degree and was doing postgraduate in another subject. But it was getting boring and I decided to quit. My professor asked what I'd do next. I told him the plan I'd had all along - fall back on my CS degree and get a job as a programmer. What I didn't know, because I didn't read the news, was that the dot com crash had just happened and you couldn't get a job as a programmer. So I didn't, and spent a year or two unemployed.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Doesn't your example show how disadvantaged you were because you didn't keep up with the news? It surely affected your livelihood. I guess OP doesn't need the news to figure out political candidates' positions.. or does s/he, since most political websites are just lies and empty promises. Choosing between e.g. the pro-environment or pro-coal candidate will surely have an effect on our lives in 20 years' time. Or one who wants to deploy a police state and harass all non-whites, or all "hippie weed smoker" types, etc..
  - 0db532a0 7y ago
    He gave one example of where following news that directly affects your livelihood is useful. This is one of the reasons I’m on HN. The incessant NYTimes, Guardian and medium.com brain rot really do push me away though.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Well I'll give a counter example. After the dot com crash and the offshoring hype, I was discouraged from getting a job in programming and so I didn't until much, much later. And if you look at the number of CS grads by year you'll note there was a significant dip in number of grads after the dot com crash and it took more than a decade for the numbers to recover.
  - jeegsy 7y ago
    The fact that the news might be necessary to obtain such info strikes me as a bug not a feature. We shouldn't need media(tion) between would-be politicians and citizenry. Perhaps quaint and impractical now, but I wish we still lived in an era where politicians literally went from town to town and yelled their pitches directly to citizens in the town square.
    - lopmotr 7y ago
      I don't see the harm in just reading what politicians promise. My city recently had a local election. Each candidate got to write a paragraph about themselves. I read them all looking for a few key points that I felt were important, and came up with a shortlist. Then excluded a few because of less important things until I had enough candidates (6) to vote for. Pretty easy. No news required. I purposely tried to ignore their advertisements in the street that were uniformly saying "Vote for me because no reason but look at my face!"

DanielleMolloy 7y ago

I had to truly realize that content creators need to optimize towards squeezing as much screen (life) time as possible out of me. And they started doing this openly, ignoring their moral doubts (see reviews for the ‘classic’ “Hooked”). Most web news is shallow distraction, aiming at emotionalising and validating since it seems more addictive then, and I realized I stay sufficiently up-to-date without actively accessing it. I still listen to news radio occasionally before sleep.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Which "Hooked" are you referring to? There are several. Author / producer? There's a film, though ... I don't think you had that in mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooked_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooked_(film) And numerous books: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=ti%3Ahooked https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=ti%3Ah...
- jonah 7y ago
  Likely "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products"[1] by Nir Eyal [1] https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/ https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Thanks, seems likely.
  - DanielleMolloy 7y ago
    Yes, this one. Slightly off topic: His latest book is about avoiding distractions, featuring advice like “tell yourself that you have to burn a 100$ bill if you don’t do it”. His Twitter profile counts 54k tweets and 211k likes. Seems like his advice for app development backfired on him.

tempsy 7y ago

Isn't there a whole chapter devoted to that in Sapiens?

chillacy 7y ago
Yup, that's where I first encountered the idea.

austhrow743 7y ago

I wish there was an email list/rss feed specifically for people that only want news for the gossip value. Only the really high level stuff that everyone is talking about. Written as if the reader lacks the context of having been following all the other news on the issue. If it's a story that's divisive then it breaks talking points down by sides. Just everything you need to be able to pretend like you give a shit and empathise with your in group. I don't mean a weekly summary. They have way too much shit in them and the format doesn't make sense because every week isn't equally as interesting. Ten huge things that make you look like an idiot for not knowing about don't happen every week. One just happens every so often. Send me an email then. About that one topic. Nothing happened? Don't send anything.

GordonS 7y ago

I also stopped reading/listening/watching mainstream news a couple of years ago, and I'm glad I did. Almost all news is extremely negative - I tired of being bombarded with images of war and famine, squabbling politicians, and celebrity body-shaming. The worst of it was the futility of it - what purpose did this serve other than to anger and depress me and push me towards a particular political narrative? I can't stop the USA bombing hospitals, terrorists bombing whoever, plagues or famines; I can't fix our broken political system or prevent mass-surveillance. I can't ignore news entirely of course - I still read HN, still see snippets on Twitter, still hear conversations etc. But stopping purposely consuming mainstream news is honestly one of the best choices I've ever made.