3 ms·

It seems like a weird time to post this article to HN. Aren't we all living through an extremely good example of why paying attention to the news pays off? Gene

by mshron 6y ago

It seems like a weird time to post this article to HN. Aren't we all living through an extremely good example of why paying attention to the news pays off? Generally speaking, people I know who read the news prepared for SARS-CoV-2 by mid-February, and those who were disconnected from the news were caught off guard a month later when everything shut down. One thing I will happily grant is that _watching_ the news is a terrible idea. TV twists everything into being frivolous entertainment, regardless of the topic. Newspapers aren't much better. Too short a time horizon, too much blow-by-blow, meaning no time for context and low signal to noise. I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance. Authors have time to write up background and provide context, and little blips and false starts get smoothed over by the passage of time.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
People I know who read the news were prepared in mid-February, but they're now extraordinarily neurotic. One of them won't allow visits from even his girlfriend and expects that American manufacturing will collapse within a few months; another doesn't plan to visit restaurants or stores until 2021. They're the ones who I most want to shake and say, hey, it won't hurt you to stop seeking out bad news.
- mshron 6y ago
  Yeah, people can take things too far. There are definitely safe ways to go to a store, if the store is taking precautions. I'm not so sure about indoor restaurants right now in the US, but I guess you could make a case for it. On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.
hirundo 6y ago
I learned about the risk from individuals on twitter long before mass media took it seriously. A news channel is a pre curated collection of editors and reporters. I don't think many do a good job of it, due to my ideosyncracies and their incentives. I find it much better to curate my own channel from around the web ... like HN. Modern tech makes it easy.
- mshron 6y ago
  Fair, but I think for the purposes of this article, social media accounts (could be friends or corporations) that talk about breaking events would also count as "the news". Both in the plusses and the minuses! Upside, you're more aware of what's going on. Downside, you still can't do anything about it. Only faster. In a lot of ways, current-events Twitter is more like cable news than it is like reading a weekly. All hot takes, no time for context. But like you said, for idiosyncratic folks, the "lifestyle" content is going to be much more relevant on Twitter than on CNN.
shadowprofile77 6y ago
On the other hand many people (I can think of a number of them from my personal circle of acquaintances alone) learned to be terrified of the virus to a wholly unreasonable and panicked degree that doesn't even let them rationally consider risks vs. benefits in going out for a bit of exercise or to buy needed groceries. This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things. Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID. Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases. This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.
- cellar_door 6y ago
  Agree. And there's actually empirical data to back that up: individuals dramatically overestimate the infectiousness and fatality rate of COVID-19 relative to expert opinion. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27245.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w27245.pdf
Trasmatta 6y ago
I'm dubious of this claim that those paying attention to the news were those best prepared for COVID. The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February. I feel like the people that were "prepared" were those listening to certain experts sounding the alarm. Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? The best you could have done was to have gotten your shopping in during mid to late February before the panic buying started. And even then, most goods weren't that hard to come by. The other thing would have been having a good emergency fund, to prepare for the economic turmoil and potential job losses. But that's something you would have needed to prepare for much, much earlier, and should be something everyone does, regardless of their news intake. > I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance I agree on this. Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?
- mshron 6y ago
  > The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February. I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic. > Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier. > Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well? The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form. When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
mrfusion 6y ago
The news said it wasn’t a big deal until March. And if you need the news to tell you about a pandemic maybe it really isn’t one.

by mshron 6y ago

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

People I know who read the news were prepared in mid-February, but they're now extraordinarily neurotic. One of them won't allow visits from even his girlfriend and expects that American manufacturing will collapse within a few months; another doesn't plan to visit restaurants or stores until 2021. They're the ones who I most want to shake and say, hey, it won't hurt you to stop seeking out bad news.

mshron 6y ago
Yeah, people can take things too far. There are definitely safe ways to go to a store, if the store is taking precautions. I'm not so sure about indoor restaurants right now in the US, but I guess you could make a case for it. On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.

hirundo 6y ago

I learned about the risk from individuals on twitter long before mass media took it seriously. A news channel is a pre curated collection of editors and reporters. I don't think many do a good job of it, due to my ideosyncracies and their incentives. I find it much better to curate my own channel from around the web ... like HN. Modern tech makes it easy.

mshron 6y ago
Fair, but I think for the purposes of this article, social media accounts (could be friends or corporations) that talk about breaking events would also count as "the news". Both in the plusses and the minuses! Upside, you're more aware of what's going on. Downside, you still can't do anything about it. Only faster. In a lot of ways, current-events Twitter is more like cable news than it is like reading a weekly. All hot takes, no time for context. But like you said, for idiosyncratic folks, the "lifestyle" content is going to be much more relevant on Twitter than on CNN.

shadowprofile77 6y ago

On the other hand many people (I can think of a number of them from my personal circle of acquaintances alone) learned to be terrified of the virus to a wholly unreasonable and panicked degree that doesn't even let them rationally consider risks vs. benefits in going out for a bit of exercise or to buy needed groceries. This happened because of the news, frequently reporting tentative theories and information about worse case scenarios or extremes as if both were given and much more common things. Just one example: A piece of recent WaPo reporting whose headline very clearly implied that a whole wave of deaths among young children was being caused by "strange symptoms" of COVID. Then when one actually read the piece, a slow admission that they were talking about only a very small number of cases out of thousands of pediatric COVID cases. This is just one example, and considering how many users of social media don't even bother to read news pieces, instead simply sharing them among their friends because the titles sounded scary, it's irresponsible nonsense for a major news outlet to phrase its headlines with so much hyperbole.

cellar_door 6y ago
Agree. And there's actually empirical data to back that up: individuals dramatically overestimate the infectiousness and fatality rate of COVID-19 relative to expert opinion. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27245.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w27245.pdf

Trasmatta 6y ago

I'm dubious of this claim that those paying attention to the news were those best prepared for COVID. The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February. I feel like the people that were "prepared" were those listening to certain experts sounding the alarm. Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? The best you could have done was to have gotten your shopping in during mid to late February before the panic buying started. And even then, most goods weren't that hard to come by. The other thing would have been having a good emergency fund, to prepare for the economic turmoil and potential job losses. But that's something you would have needed to prepare for much, much earlier, and should be something everyone does, regardless of their news intake. > I find that weekly and monthly magazines strike a better balance I agree on this. Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?

mshron 6y ago
> The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February. I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic. > Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare? For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier. > Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well? The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form. When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.
- Trasmatta 6y ago

mrfusion 6y ago

The news said it wasn’t a big deal until March. And if you need the news to tell you about a pandemic maybe it really isn’t one.