> For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others. Depends on the crowd. In my experience, that's true with only 10% of the p

> For starters, being informed makes for more interesting conversations with others. Depends on the crowd. In my experience, that's true with only 10% of the people I know. Most of them are more interested in having an opinion than understanding what is going. When I expand the circle to the population in general, it probably drops to about 2% of the population. > If you stick to just the news, that's one thing, but if you then go deeper into the topic (what is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia?) then you get invaluable context. As a former news junkie, I agree - with the caveat that to get to what I call the minimum threshold of deep understanding will take many, many hours.[1] You have to seek out many different interpretations, sources, etc. It's a very active thing. If you spend merely an hour a day on the news, you won't get there (or perhaps you'll only get "there" for a topic or two). At that point, you start doing a cost-benefit analysis, as I had to. And then you realize that in the universe of things you could be doing, there are plenty of things that give you a better cost/benefit ratio. > In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story Strong disagree. For many (most?) issues, if you can itemize only two sides to the story, you have a very narrow picture of what is going on. [1] No, definitely just reading the Economist will not do. The quest for reducing news sources to just 1-2 quality sources is a flawed one, and you'll always have a skewed view of the world that way.