13 ms·

Generational. Younger generations get their unhinged "takes" from Twitter and podcasts.

diogenescynic 4y ago
I wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed seem worse because people are often unable to reject or form a new idea once they latch onto something.
- adamdusty 4y ago
  What's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it comes to "news"?
  - u2077 4y ago
    I agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called “news” when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer falling and the world is (mostly) fine. Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      Most news is local. If it doesn't impact YOU, then it's always fine, the world is fine. I'm sure that if you are in Ukraine, turning off the TV doesn't mean that the world is fine when you look outside and see bombs falling on the building next door. I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family. In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered. It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
      - brimble 4y ago
        > I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family. I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
        ModernMech 4y ago
        > I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        brimble 4y ago
        How much time does one need to spend on distant news to know enough of it for that purpose, though? If you've got a whole lot of refugees heading to your city, local news will cover it. Otherwise, knowing the basics seems like plenty to me, unless you're just interested in it for entertainment's sake.
        philistine 4y ago
        I feel that is so privileged of you to say that. You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe, and have done so unopposed by any equal force for over 30 years. Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
  - layer8 4y ago
    If you never follow news (or haven’t for a decade or longer), it’s difficult to get a read on what is going on in the world or in your country, politically. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it means you don’t really understand the environment you live in. Getting a better understanding is my main motivation for following the news. Mind you, I’m not in the US and for the most part don’t follow US news outlets.
    - adamdusty 4y ago
      I don't watch or read news, and I feel pretty knowledgeable about my environment. I feel that if I actually engage in my community I am much more plugged in to my environment than if I try to read about it on the news.
      - layer8 4y ago
        By “environment” I don’t mean the local community, but the general social, political and economic mechanics on the nation scale and planet scale. I.e. how the human world you’re living in works and evolves, which in turn has local repercussions.
        adamdusty 4y ago
        > By “environment” I don’t mean the local community Neither do I. If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.
        layer8 4y ago
        Ah, so you actually do follow the news! I wasn’t particular about the medium.
  - Lendal 4y ago
    The benefit of living in a non-democracy is that you don't need to be informed. You can spend all your time on making money and spending money, and that's your life. No worries. But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh? Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
    - SllX 4y ago
      > But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”. People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions. So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
  - diogenescynic 4y ago
    That's my point. The "news" is now Maddow or Hannity or Tucker or some other equally wrong talking head. I've stopped watching news altogether and noticed I don't feel like I've missed out on anything.
- matwood 4y ago
  What does informed mean here? People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do. https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    People who watch no news score better than those who watch Fox News - people who watched literally any other source of news, including the Daily Show were more informed than the 'no news' people.
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      The interesting thing about the data in the study is that people who identify as Republicans scored higher than people who identified as Democrats, while at the same time, people who watched Fox news scored lower.
      - bentcorner 4y ago
        Where is that data available? The study I found [1] does not provide a pivot by solely by ideology, only ideology+media source. [1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/
  - diogenescynic 4y ago
    >People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do. I was actually referring to exactly this.
- brimble 4y ago
  Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. Even the days of the morning paper and evening TV news program were probably a bit much, as far as non-local news goes anyway, let alone today's constant torrent of news, between the horrible 24/7 news channels and the Internet.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences. To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar. Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
    - javajosh 4y ago
      Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false. People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation. The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  The point of the news is to promote a narrative. They choose what to cover, and what to not cover. There is no way to do news that is free from ideological bias. And in large, corporatized media, the ideological focus is often driven by a single person, or very few people. The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here. People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    I’ve found the best sources of news tend to be finance/business focused because the readership generally wants to know what actually happened so they can make business decisions and they can’t make those decisions if the news is heavily biased one way or the other. There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.
- zeruch 4y ago
  misinformed is worse, if only because in many cases those who are misinformed WANT to be that way, and ergo don't care about facts or reality, just their normative preferences. uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  I’m a software engineer, and one chestnut I’ve heard (and subscribe to) is “Missing documentation is better than incorrect documentation, because the latter can lead you astray in serious ways.” I think this same logic applies to news as well, for the reason you describe. Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

I wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed seem worse because people are often unable to reject or form a new idea once they latch onto something.

adamdusty 4y ago
What's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it comes to "news"?
- u2077 4y ago
  I agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called “news” when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer falling and the world is (mostly) fine. Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Most news is local. If it doesn't impact YOU, then it's always fine, the world is fine. I'm sure that if you are in Ukraine, turning off the TV doesn't mean that the world is fine when you look outside and see bombs falling on the building next door. I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family. In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered. It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
    - brimble 4y ago
      > I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family. I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        > I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        brimble 4y ago
        How much time does one need to spend on distant news to know enough of it for that purpose, though? If you've got a whole lot of refugees heading to your city, local news will cover it. Otherwise, knowing the basics seems like plenty to me, unless you're just interested in it for entertainment's sake.
      - philistine 4y ago
        I feel that is so privileged of you to say that. You have a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the world when you're American, because the federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole globe, and have done so unopposed by any equal force for over 30 years. Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
- layer8 4y ago
  If you never follow news (or haven’t for a decade or longer), it’s difficult to get a read on what is going on in the world or in your country, politically. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it means you don’t really understand the environment you live in. Getting a better understanding is my main motivation for following the news. Mind you, I’m not in the US and for the most part don’t follow US news outlets.
  - adamdusty 4y ago
    I don't watch or read news, and I feel pretty knowledgeable about my environment. I feel that if I actually engage in my community I am much more plugged in to my environment than if I try to read about it on the news.
    - layer8 4y ago
      By “environment” I don’t mean the local community, but the general social, political and economic mechanics on the nation scale and planet scale. I.e. how the human world you’re living in works and evolves, which in turn has local repercussions.
      - adamdusty 4y ago
        > By “environment” I don’t mean the local community Neither do I. If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.
        layer8 4y ago
        Ah, so you actually do follow the news! I wasn’t particular about the medium.
- Lendal 4y ago
  The benefit of living in a non-democracy is that you don't need to be informed. You can spend all your time on making money and spending money, and that's your life. No worries. But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh? Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
  - SllX 4y ago
    > But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”. People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions. So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  That's my point. The "news" is now Maddow or Hannity or Tucker or some other equally wrong talking head. I've stopped watching news altogether and noticed I don't feel like I've missed out on anything.
matwood 4y ago
What does informed mean here? People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do. https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  People who watch no news score better than those who watch Fox News - people who watched literally any other source of news, including the Daily Show were more informed than the 'no news' people.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    The interesting thing about the data in the study is that people who identify as Republicans scored higher than people who identified as Democrats, while at the same time, people who watched Fox news scored lower.
    - bentcorner 4y ago
      Where is that data available? The study I found [1] does not provide a pivot by solely by ideology, only ideology+media source. [1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  >People who watch no news often score better in current events than those that do. I was actually referring to exactly this.
brimble 4y ago
Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. Even the days of the morning paper and evening TV news program were probably a bit much, as far as non-local news goes anyway, let alone today's constant torrent of news, between the horrible 24/7 news channels and the Internet.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading classics and textbooks in political science, economics, and history. I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with those proportions. Those things offer important perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been abolished for more than a century. The past is the past and this is the present: there are some commonalities but also a lot of important differences. To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is similar. Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Your post is based on the hypothesis that more information is better. We've done the experiment, and it's false. People's perspectives are not deepened by more information, but made more shallow. In large part this is because the information they get is mostly second order, information about other people's reactions, or even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used to preempt and override people's own reactions, often with something extreme, which drives engagement, which represents value for the corporation. The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative lawyers who consider it their duty to use every rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't use those same techniques in our lives, or are even familiar with the techniques, and so we're left vulnerable to them.
deltarholamda 4y ago
The point of the news is to promote a narrative. They choose what to cover, and what to not cover. There is no way to do news that is free from ideological bias. And in large, corporatized media, the ideological focus is often driven by a single person, or very few people. The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're misinformed," applies here. People love to do comparisons to this or that news organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever. It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment platforms that sell ads.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  I’ve found the best sources of news tend to be finance/business focused because the readership generally wants to know what actually happened so they can make business decisions and they can’t make those decisions if the news is heavily biased one way or the other. There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts and they write for a global audience.
zeruch 4y ago
misinformed is worse, if only because in many cases those who are misinformed WANT to be that way, and ergo don't care about facts or reality, just their normative preferences. uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is aggressively annoying.
toomanyrichies 4y ago
I’m a software engineer, and one chestnut I’ve heard (and subscribe to) is “Missing documentation is better than incorrect documentation, because the latter can lead you astray in serious ways.” I think this same logic applies to news as well, for the reason you describe. Added to which, the news is a business model which increasingly earns its living off manufacturing outrage (not by making its viewers more informed and worldly). The same can’t be said of history books, which is why I agree with one of my sibling commenters here, who recommends swapping most news with reading history.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]