6 ms·

“If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. By the time

“If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. By the time you “hear about it everywhere” because it’s important, it has already been twisted and distorted, and given the party-line spin. Which is a valid choice, of course - but you should be aware of that, and — if you care about facts rather than narrative - ignore the stuff when you hear about it as well.

anon9001 6y ago
Even for people paying attention, it's hard to follow all the spin and understand which organizations are pushing which ideas and why. The US now has tens of millions of citizens that believe the election was stolen. I think they're mostly just "normal" people who have tuned out and now can't tell which way is up. The reason I pay attention is because following news daily is actually less cognitive load than trying to catch up when a significant plot twist happens that might impact me.
- amurthy1 6y ago
  I think this is a good take, most news doesn't directly affect you but is necessary context to make sense of the news that is relevant to your life
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> “If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. No. It only means you're using your social networks (both Internet and meatspace ones) as an importance filter. It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption. The way I follow the principle is: if I hear about something and it crosses the threshold of importance, I hit multiple different news pages simultaneously, as well as smaller communities, to ingest multiple points of view and hopefully get a relatively low-bias picture of events. But when I don't have a specific important thing to look for, I don't read the news sites at all. BTW. I gave up on news ~14 years ago, after realizing that following news stories every evening was causing me great amounts of stress. Every day, I felt the country or the world was about to go down in flames. Well, turns out here we are, 14 years later, and nothing of such proportions ever happened. I'm also reminded of someone on HN (can't remember the handle) who says they're reading the news every day - just not the current news, only one week's old news. Even taking it as a mental experiment is a good reminder that 90%+ of stuff on the news is utterly irrelevant and unimportant.
- beagle3 6y ago
  It has nothing to do with social networks - the same thing was true 20, 30 and 40 years ago. Remember the McDonalds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case ? Everything you'd "just hear about it" without looking into the details would lead you to believe that the US justice system is ridiculous - this case was mocked everywhere (in news, in film, in popular culture) and occasionally still is. > It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption. While you are technically correct, I've personally known many (about 20 or so) people who have stopped reading the news with the "if it's important I'll hear about it" mentality, and all of them except one never bother with active investigations into almost anything. You might be different, but in my experience that would be the outlier among the "I'll hear about it" crowd. Now, you might also claim that Liebeck vs McDonalds doesn't cross your "threshold of importance". Personally, my own threshold of importance and credibility is constantly re-adjusted based on the differing accounts of actual events. > just not the current news, only one week's old news. Well, that's an interesting experiment. One week might be fine, but I find that e.g. one year is not (e.g. one year in the Assange case it was becoming really hard to get informed about anything other than the US Department of State angle, except if you listened to Alex Jones style people -- which is generally an exercise in futility; whereas while things were happening, there were many angles). Further, I've noticed how even science history gets whitewashed. Over 20 years, the narrative of the conflict between Linus Pauling and Dan Shechtman went from easy to find descriptions of "Pauling publicly ridiculed and undermined Shechtman with all his scientific weight, and only after Pauling died (and as a result of him no longer fighting against that) was Shechtman's advances to crystalography accepted" to "Pauling had a standard scientific disagreement with Shechtman that was eventually resolved in Shechtman's favor, but that happened only after Pauling died and without any relation to it". Robin Warren and Barbara McClintock had similar stories that have since been whitewashed. Again, this is over a 20-50 year period, and might not even cross your threshold of "importance", but I know that if I just waited to "hear about it" I wouldn't know anything of these stories, and they do cross my threshold. EDIT: a word.
Orou 6y ago
> you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything The point of not reading regular news is for it to filter out what you hear about, not the specifics of those things. It's hard to put a spin on basic facts like "there was a shooting" or "there was a plane crash". If it's important enough for me to hear about it, I can then decide if it's important enough to warrant actually researching the details of independently. There are some more niche topics that I maintain an active interest in. Outside of that, I don't see the point in trying to be "informed" about every last thing on the face of the earth.
war1025 6y ago
> means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. The past few years have illustrated that following the news is in most cases choosing to believe the corporate spin on an event, because "news" in the US is literally run by enormous corporations that have a vested interest in you believing what they say and coming back for more.

anon9001 6y ago

Even for people paying attention, it's hard to follow all the spin and understand which organizations are pushing which ideas and why. The US now has tens of millions of citizens that believe the election was stolen. I think they're mostly just "normal" people who have tuned out and now can't tell which way is up. The reason I pay attention is because following news daily is actually less cognitive load than trying to catch up when a significant plot twist happens that might impact me.

amurthy1 6y ago
I think this is a good take, most news doesn't directly affect you but is necessary context to make sense of the news that is relevant to your life

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> “If something is actually important you’ll hear about it” basically means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. No. It only means you're using your social networks (both Internet and meatspace ones) as an importance filter. It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption. The way I follow the principle is: if I hear about something and it crosses the threshold of importance, I hit multiple different news pages simultaneously, as well as smaller communities, to ingest multiple points of view and hopefully get a relatively low-bias picture of events. But when I don't have a specific important thing to look for, I don't read the news sites at all. BTW. I gave up on news ~14 years ago, after realizing that following news stories every evening was causing me great amounts of stress. Every day, I felt the country or the world was about to go down in flames. Well, turns out here we are, 14 years later, and nothing of such proportions ever happened. I'm also reminded of someone on HN (can't remember the handle) who says they're reading the news every day - just not the current news, only one week's old news. Even taking it as a mental experiment is a good reminder that 90%+ of stuff on the news is utterly irrelevant and unimportant.

beagle3 6y ago
It has nothing to do with social networks - the same thing was true 20, 30 and 40 years ago. Remember the McDonalds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_coffee_case ? Everything you'd "just hear about it" without looking into the details would lead you to believe that the US justice system is ridiculous - this case was mocked everywhere (in news, in film, in popular culture) and occasionally still is. > It doesn't mean you have to form your worldview around the first piece of information that reaches you passively. It's about being deliberate about news consumption. While you are technically correct, I've personally known many (about 20 or so) people who have stopped reading the news with the "if it's important I'll hear about it" mentality, and all of them except one never bother with active investigations into almost anything. You might be different, but in my experience that would be the outlier among the "I'll hear about it" crowd. Now, you might also claim that Liebeck vs McDonalds doesn't cross your "threshold of importance". Personally, my own threshold of importance and credibility is constantly re-adjusted based on the differing accounts of actual events. > just not the current news, only one week's old news. Well, that's an interesting experiment. One week might be fine, but I find that e.g. one year is not (e.g. one year in the Assange case it was becoming really hard to get informed about anything other than the US Department of State angle, except if you listened to Alex Jones style people -- which is generally an exercise in futility; whereas while things were happening, there were many angles). Further, I've noticed how even science history gets whitewashed. Over 20 years, the narrative of the conflict between Linus Pauling and Dan Shechtman went from easy to find descriptions of "Pauling publicly ridiculed and undermined Shechtman with all his scientific weight, and only after Pauling died (and as a result of him no longer fighting against that) was Shechtman's advances to crystalography accepted" to "Pauling had a standard scientific disagreement with Shechtman that was eventually resolved in Shechtman's favor, but that happened only after Pauling died and without any relation to it". Robin Warren and Barbara McClintock had similar stories that have since been whitewashed. Again, this is over a 20-50 year period, and might not even cross your threshold of "importance", but I know that if I just waited to "hear about it" I wouldn't know anything of these stories, and they do cross my threshold. EDIT: a word.

Orou 6y ago

> you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything The point of not reading regular news is for it to filter out what you hear about, not the specifics of those things. It's hard to put a spin on basic facts like "there was a shooting" or "there was a plane crash". If it's important enough for me to hear about it, I can then decide if it's important enough to warrant actually researching the details of independently. There are some more niche topics that I maintain an active interest in. Outside of that, I don't see the point in trying to be "informed" about every last thing on the face of the earth.

war1025 6y ago

> means you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything. The past few years have illustrated that following the news is in most cases choosing to believe the corporate spin on an event, because "news" in the US is literally run by enormous corporations that have a vested interest in you believing what they say and coming back for more.