Succinctly put, Gell-Mann amnesia is the best reason to scale back on news. Everyone has their bailiwick of expertise. Mine happens to be northeast Asian matte

Succinctly put, Gell-Mann amnesia is the best reason to scale back on news. Everyone has their bailiwick of expertise. Mine happens to be northeast Asian matters, having lived there decades after growing up in the US, speaking and reading the three main languages (albeit to different degrees of proficiency), and teaching university Asian history classes, half in English, half in the local language. The problem is that only very, very rarely did I ever read or hear something in the English-language news about China, Japan, or Korea that I found enlightening or even mostly fair. It was all superficial pablum, often highly misleading. So, I can only conclude the same might be said for other topics about which I am generally clueless.