14 ms·

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier (2013)

267 points by DeathArrow 3y ago

lusus_naturae 3y ago
Sure, but if there are injustices and abuses against humanity that happen, one should be aware--we can't afford to pretend that bad things don't happen.
- tremon 3y ago
  Why is that the only other option? Why can't we just acknowledge that bad things happen without having to know the details of every bad thing?
  - wussboy 3y ago
    And is that awareness creating any useful action?
    - tremon 3y ago
      Are you suggesting that protests in e.g. Iraq against a book burning in Sweden are useful actions? That violent rioting in e.g. Marseille is a useful action against police misconduct in Paris? I don't see many links between awareness of the details of something that happens far away from me and the usefulness of my actions.
      - falcolas 3y ago
        There are plenty of injustices happening locally against which you can take meaningful action.
        pgeorgi 3y ago
        It's quite unlikely that these local injustices appear in the news that you consume: local news are on life support, and everything else has a scope that massively surpassed your locality, whatever that might be.
        falcolas 3y ago
        That's an issue which can be solved. Consume more location appropriate news. Social media (ironically, when considering what kind of media is bad for you) can also provide decent local news information. Maybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.
    - dumpsterlid 3y ago
      [dead]
    - VSerge 3y ago
      Yes, and recent examples show it: - News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens. - News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine. - another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.
scotty79 3y ago
Didn't I just read a piece of news?
- ben_w 3y ago
  I was about to suggest it was an option piece, which is IMO worse, as news has to attempt to be reasonable while opinions just masquerade with the same reputability. But then I scrolled to the bottom, and realised it's even worse than an option piece, it's a long-form advert: > This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
  - switch007 3y ago
    The guardian does that type of advertising of books etc all the time and it annoys me greatly. They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      Could you explain exactly what is wrong with it? If the article stands on it's own, why shouldn't it be published if it's part of a book?
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        Well for one, the article reads like a summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, a book published in 1985. This indicates that the book advertised by this article doesn't add anything original, novel or interesting to the world.
      - switch007 3y ago
        With a headline like that, I expect an article citing various sources and experts, not a book summary. As it stands it's mostly an opinion piece. They have a separate section for opinion and they use a different background colour (a light orange). I don't want to invest in an article then see it cut short with an advert for the rest of the meat in the book.
the_other 3y ago
It's not the news that's bad. It's that power incentivises people to become sociopaths.
- tremon 3y ago
  That's not true. Unchecked power allows people to become sociopaths, and the more power is accumulated in a small group, the harder it is to check. It's not an automatic process, despite what those in power want you to believe.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    The only check on power that can work as intended are higher values, such as honour, generosity and justness. Written laws and regulations are a failure for ordering society. Our modern nations have hundreds of thousands of laws, which nobody can know by heart. So we have this weird situation where it supposedly is okay for rulers to abuse their power since they're not breaking any laws or regulations. Or where there's always an impeachment process going on against a ruler, for some obscure law that makes sense to nobody. There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever. Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  I think it's more of a selection bias. In most structures, it's more beneficial have emotional detachment as emotion in most cases can be exploited to adds constraints to your decision space. It's not that power holds a carrot and says, to hold me you must be a sociopath, it's that competition for power selects those lacking emotion. I'm no anthropologist but I suspect since humans evolved from small groups, emotions developed because group work was beneficial. As humanity evolved rapidly into larger societies, it's not clear that emotion in these group sizes are so beneficial for survival. At some point survival from the size of the group becomes nearly guaranteed and competing more within the group becomes a better survival strategy from an independent standpoint. These days you're far less likely to starve to death or be eaten by say a bear or lion because you live in large societies with all sorts of services and just basic proximity scares other predators away. Now the dynamic is about succeeding within the bounds of that system itself. Detaching from others and focusing on yourself tends to give you better success in that environment. Specific cases exist where you should work as a team but if you can do this without emotion and identify all these cases on a highly transactional basis, you can better optimize your own success. Frankly I think it's kind of sad because, well, I have emotion and don't like to think of the world like a sociopath but... if you want to compete, you need to more and more.
shaftoe444 3y ago
See also, "The case against news (2011)" by Bryan Caplan, https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.h.... Also, this should be marked as 2013.
deleted 3y ago
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ccpotato 3y ago
"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business" I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions. e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share. Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker). Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind. And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
  - eropple 3y ago
    > Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual. This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort. You can get pretty far just by talking to people.
PaulHoule 3y ago
When it comes to "fake news" the bad part is the "news" and not the "fake". That is, quite a bit of "news", such as Fox News' handwringing about caravans approaching the U.S.-Mexico border is primarily relevant for the emotional effect it has. By faking it you can get a certain emotional effect more reliably and without the cost and hazard of really reporting, but the emotional effect is the same.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  I'm trying to understand your point. What is fake about those caravans? Those are real people as far as I know, who are going to have a real impact on others and by others. If such a caravan was passing through your town or coming to your town, wouldn't it be odd if nobody reported on it?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    It's the sense of crisis associated with it and the continuous drumbeat about it. My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children. Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration" Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be-more-conservative-than-they-really-are-208053 https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be... but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National. --- Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.
paulvnickerson 3y ago
Plug for the Boring Report, which uses AI to strip sensationalism from news articles and present succinct, informative summaries: https://www.boringreport.org/ https://www.boringreport.org/ I am not affiliated with them.
- gAI 3y ago
  This is the future of the internet, huh? AI re-writing the web to personalize it for users.
- hnhg 3y ago
  I would second this. Their app/website helped wean me off the emotional manipulation by news media I didn't even know I was addicted to. I would recommend people try it out.
dpcan 3y ago
For me, it has now been 2.5 years since having watched any local, national or cable news. The stuff is poison. I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties. It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense. It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.
- zorlack 3y ago
  > I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news Well phew! Thankfully someone's still paying attention.
- beardedwizard 3y ago
  Ah so you don't count hackernews as news - an interesting choice. You mention tv news, but I suspect online news is what most people consume, streaming killed tv news many years ago.
  - kodah 3y ago
    I think "news" here correlates to organizations deep in the "news cycle" whereby some organization decides some goings-on of local people is a worthy national topic. HN is one or two layers removed from this; quite literally there's a crowd deciding what you see at a given moment is relative or not for consumption. This is the same effect of hearing about important events from other people and choosing to look into them further or looking into them after the topic is more settled. The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.
  - dandellion 3y ago
    Despite the name I think only about half the posts on the site are actual news. And of those many are not current news, there are many links that are months or even years old.
the_snooze 3y ago
The most relevant pieces of news to me are weather reports, those emergency alerts I get on my phone (mostly weather-related), and week-old stories. The first two are immediately useful and actionable. The last one involves topics that have clearer information and staying power.
kashunstva 3y ago
So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track. Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events. As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.
- samwillis 3y ago
  For the last few years I vary rarely followed the national news, I'm certainly happier for it. When I do, I have noticed a decline in mood. On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume. There is so much truth to "ignorance is bliss".
  - jbs55 3y ago
    [flagged]
- colpabar 3y ago
  Do people ever call you privileged? A common response I see to experiments like yours is that "it must be nice to be able to not care".
  - phito 3y ago
    They're trying to make their problem yours. If they can't stop caring about pointless things, it's their problem, not yours.
deleted 3y ago
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nsoonhui 3y ago
The irony that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out is not lost on me.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  The main point of this article has been pointed out before and is hardly novel or original. The earliest I know of is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, but unlikely to be the first. If anything, the only ironic thing about this is that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out to you.
zerof1l 3y ago
I used to read the news first thing in the morning when I woke up. Lately, I started to have zero motivation to do anything. And overall I felt a bit depressed the whole day. So I made a commitment a couple of days ago to stop reading any news before mid-day. Can't yet say how much it is helping, but overall I feel better and I'm more productive.
bhupy 3y ago
The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.
- tivert 3y ago
  > The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality. That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    And who said data can't be biased, anyway? It most often is
    - bhupy 3y ago
      To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias. The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data. A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way. The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes). Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.
xyzelement 3y ago
I used to see it as a choice between being uninformed and informed. Now I see it as uninformed and misinformed and I'll take the former. Michael Crichton nailed it with Gell Mann Amnesia[0]. I see it all over the place on topics I know well such as coverage of companies I worked at or political topics I was very well informed about. Sometimes it feels innocent - a reporter too "dumb" to get the nuance and thus missing the point, sometimes it feels deliberate - eg consistently chopping off context to create an emotional charge. Either way, I saw that the news would lead me to the wrong conclusion if I didn't already know better - and then obviously that it must be leading me to wrong conclusions on topics where I don't know. Which is most. [0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
Reading the news is certainly not good for your productivity. Similarly, being politically active is on average a waste of your time if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings. But if every able citizen follows the logic of those two facts, the country will be much worse off. Yes, I agree, its better to free-ride off the citizen-participation of other, more naive citizens than to invest your own time in improving society. But at a certain point, when everyone becomes a free-rider, the political class becomes predatory and you get a dysfunctional state. Riots. Shortages. Pollution. Failing healthcare. Invasion. Corruption. Each time the form is different but the source is citizen apathy. In other words, if you ignore the news long enough, the news will come and knock on your door.
- wussboy 3y ago
  > The news will come and knock at your door I would argue that for the vast amount of things that happen in the world, this is a good thing. Just about the right level of care and concern.
  - TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
    It is usually too late to save your house and your savings when this happens. As experienced by my ancestors who had to flee their homeland and move to America. This is why I am not politically apathetic in America. Things happen very slowly and then very quickly in a governmental collapse. By then, your savings are confiscated or inflated away before you can take action. Travel can become prohibitively expensive or forbidden. It becomes very difficult to get your family and resources out. Usually you leave penniless and arrive on foreign shores as a destitute refugee no matter what your status and expectations were in your former life and country. Engineers become taxi drivers. Scientists become house cleaners. Then you rebuild and you teach your kids that you should always prepare for the worst case and never take civil society for granted.
golemotron 3y ago
On that link I get a giant banner on top of the story that says: Support the Guardian Fund independent journalism with $5 per month Support us So the message is "We are doing something bad to you. Pay us for it." The author is careful to carve out an exception for "independent journalism" rather than news but, ironically, in a newspaper.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Does checking Rotten Tomatoes and reading an article on how the Marvel Multiverse has gone downhill, count as news?
tandav 3y ago
(2013)
makeitdouble 3y ago
Another approach is to accept news as it is: entertainment. The same way we're not looking at documentaries on Amazon frogs and arguing if watching them led to any improvements in our daily life, we shouldn't expect random news to be actionable or useful. Sure there is local and national info that is beneficial, but those can be earned in way more efficient ways on other media (for instance offical accounts on Twitter were my go-to for my local council's announcements and govs policy updates, and they also posted it on their respective PR pages). Actually I really wish we 100% stopped alluding as news and journalists as a primary source of information: press conferences and somewhat official interviews should always have a directly accessible feed of the whole thing, uncut, and distributed by the entity opening the event. Having to go through second hand reporting and selected tidbits to understand what was happening there is just nonsense.
keiferski 3y ago
These articles always miss the difference between “the news” as a concept and “the organizations providing the news.” If you keep eating at bad restaurants, does that mean food in general is bad? No. It means you need to find better restaurants or cook at home.
flappyeagle 3y ago
Question is really whether news has ever been good for you. I think it probably has — and you can basically recreate that environment by checking a major newspaper of your choice between once a day and once a week. There’s a balance between being completely uninformed about what’s happening in the world vs. refreshing twitter every 30 seconds.
traveler01 3y ago
This article is from 2013 and I can say, 10 years after the article was originally launched situation got even worse...
andyjohnson0 3y ago
The news has been making me feel increasingly sad over the last few months, and coincidentally last night I decided to do something about it. I deleted news apps from my devices, deleted news site bookmarks frm Firefox, and used LeechBlock to block the news sites that I'm likely to visit. Also blocked Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. I almost never watch broadcast tv so that doesn't need any special measures. I still get a "morning briefing" email from the Guardian, which I probably stay subscribed to, but I won't (can't) click any links. I hope to establish a routine for scanning and then deleting it. If not I'll unsubscribe. I'm considering a subscription to a dead tree weekly news summary like the Guardian Weekly - but I'd like to wait a few months first. Half-way through Day One I feel pretty good and noticeably less distracted. I'm interested to see how this goes.
secondcoming 3y ago
It’s quite amusing that these days the Guardian is one the most outrage-baity outlets out there, especially its Opinion Pieces. Complete doom and gloom.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Read books not articles. It's actually a finance tip, but is true for news.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
I would slightly disagree. Unfiltered news is bad for you. You can not have a plan or a set of plans for all things approaching you. But if you have plans and projects, some of the news is just no longer news, but actually project relevant events. And those can not be missed. So filter out what you must handle, but to have nothing at all that is raining on you, that sounds to idyllic to be true.
blaze33 3y ago
For me, I used to read or watch the news because I wanted to be informed and maybe learn some things to better understand the world we live in. After some time you start noticing the patterns: the short-termism, the over-seriousness and repetitiveness of it all coupled with usually shallow explanations and poor understanding of what happens. You can also notice how it slowly but surely starts to shape and distort your mind if you consume to much of it. And I always lamented this sad state of affairs. I know that some people involved in the news production have an agenda to push but what I failed to realize for a long time was that most people consume the news as a form of entertainment. Then they can say they know about this or that and maybe have an opinion about it but that's it. It's especially sad considering the huge influence of the media in politics but that's another story. So yeah, I still want to be informed, educated and further my understanding of the world but the news aren't so useful for that. They could be. But they're not.
anonu 3y ago
You're not the consumer of news. You are being consumed by the FUD. It's part of the business model to get you hooked.
snet0 3y ago
I often point people to "I Hate the News"[0], a 2006 blog post from Aaron Swartz. > It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system. [0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Jemm 3y ago
Maybe people shouldn't be happily ignorant. Maybe people should become upset and perhaps then they will work towards change.
sandworm101 3y ago
Ignorance is certainly bliss. Living a naïve life of detached privilege is great fun, so long as you are surrounded by people to take care of the nasty details. Don't follow the news. Don't learn about environmental problems. Don't get angry at local businesses when they do bad things. Don't feel bad when a racist cop does something horrible. Don't vote. Don't enlist. Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. Other people will guard the door as you watch cat videos. The real joke is that 90% of the people I meet who "don't read the news" actually do. They have just turned off realworld news, mostly politics. They still know all about Hollywood and the latest fashion trends.
- unmole 3y ago
  > Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. One would presumably need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption. So, they are likely the very people who are keeping the world from falling apart. The professional activists on the other hand...
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption. Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Even Marge Simpson has a trust fund setup by her relatives. And mutual funds, family income, real estate appreciation, pensions ... I'd say that there are large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Their role in society is to consume, and occasionally vote.
    - unmole 3y ago
      > Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Define very large. And isn't the fraction of people who live off passive income the more relevant measure? > Even Marge Simpson I'm sorry, your example is a cartoon character? > large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Again, define large.
Dritzzka 3y ago
This can be applied with social media. This past year I deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. I can honestly say, it has improved my overall mental health, and I now find myself learning more computer things with my time.
nottorp 3y ago
What's "news"? I mean they're right, but all "content" generated in the name of "engagement" is bad for your mental health. If it's labeled as news or friend/influencer updates, it's the same.
DHPersonal 3y ago
Whenever I think that newspapers may not be worth supporting, I think back on all the times that reporters have broken important stories of corruption in religious, political, and business sectors that have revealed the real harm that have come to so many victims. The eventual justice that can come from breaking those stories offer good reasons to support the news, even if some stories in between are duds.
tweetle_beetle 3y ago
I often think the test of the usefulness of consuming news is whether you can explain it to someone else in any more detail than a soundbite. If you can only regurgitate the headline, you don't really understand it yourself and can't have a conversation about it - what was the point? Sometimes having an opinion about a news story masquerades as understanding it, but this is quickly exposed.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I've noticed a concerning amount of post-truth BS around here. Don't trust journalists, don't trust your government or institutions, the news is bad, do your own research, etc. Yuck!
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Yea, and those so called "scientists" and their crank "germ theory". It's a double edged sword.
agumonkey 3y ago
Time scales will make you realize how most of current news are really allergic reactions. Every week there's a new hot topic, lots of questions asked, lots of worries.. and then lots of nothing. - greece dying - srilanka dying - venezuela collapsing - argentina wiped - lebanon - syria .. it goes on and on you listen to it, think a lot, and a month later you forgot, busy thinking about the new alert. A year down the road you read about whatever country and realize all that was just noise.
- mint2 3y ago
  All those places seem far off and distant to a lot of people… just “noise”. In all of those cases those things dismissed as noise were the sounds of millions of peoples lives being torn apart. But yes far away and distant - oh unless one’s relatives were fleeing their soon to be bombed homes like my Syrian American coworker. To be able to ignore those events is only for the lucky - but can (for now) doesn’t mean should. Even the lucky should not ignore them. Also I say “for now”, because in most cases the far off events quickly influence local events - many of those are directly effecting American border communities, and also national politics through a nationalistic platform by a party.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    greece is not far from me, it's not necessarily distance, to me it's just news medias that are just shallow amplifiers (sensationalism)
- cwkoss 3y ago
  I feel like almost every international news story can probably be traced back to some corporate interest: somebody is profiting based on the public being aware of/believing that news story.
xwdv 3y ago
Certain types of news are more like cultural/societal events and stories that are worth following just to have some topic to bring up with other people. Stuff like a submarine implosion, or a 9/11, or an OJ Simpson trial. These are unique once in a lifetime events that give you some social currency. Repetitive news like mass shootings or political BS is just noise, and quickly loses its novelty overtime. What results is you just gradually feel worse and more cynical over time without learning anything new or interesting.
Zetice 3y ago
If I concede the fact that I enjoy knowing what's going on around me, does that make it less bad for me? This article (and these comments) seem to be focusing on some kind of "value", but to me the knowledge is the end, not the means. Knowing stuff is cool, y'all.
turzmo 3y ago
My mother, I love her, but all of her worldview is based off of the news. No social life, no hobbies, no books, no real experience. It’s amazing, but understandable, how she perceives risk. Cars get in crashes. Flights are always delayed. Big cities are dangerous. The news has done its job keeping her engaged but she is no better for it
DeathArrow 3y ago
Because the news tends to focus on negative events, one of the things you probably do in the morning is read about the most distressing occurrences that took place worldwide in the past 24 hours. This can give you the impression that the world is a sad and dangerous place, but it's actually a problem of limited sampling. Although this phenomenon is not new—the saying "if it bleeds, it leads" has been around as long as newspapers have existed—there is a new aspect to it due to the constant exposure we have today. Instead of simply reading the morning paper or watching the news in the evening, many people now compulsively check for the latest atrocities every few minutes. They also receive forwarded articles from well-meaning friends, which further incentivizes sensationalist media to produce an endless stream of emotionally and mentally toxic content. The media tends to exaggerate minor flaws and inefficiencies in our otherwise remarkable modern civilization, presenting them as existential disasters and oppressive systems. Even the relatively minor inconveniences of life in the 21st century are portrayed as hardships comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor combined. Consequently, some of the most privileged and safest individuals in human history are led to perceive themselves constantly as threatened victims engaged in a desperate battle against an oppressive regime. They literally fear for their lives while walking the streets, despite the fact that, by any rational historical standard, we live in a nearly utopian society. :)
lkbm 3y ago
A lot of us have seen the rage machine polarize someone into partisan insanity. I like to think I'm resistant to this, but I've seen it happen to people who are probably smarter than me. I'd say it's more common with the elderly, but I'm not really sure that's true—there are plenty of Tankies and retvrn crazies in their twenties. News in its current form is clearly an infohazard. It may be useful to have an awareness of what's going on in the world, but if you find yourself thinking "the other side" are all evil or stupid, you're headed down the same path as so many others who have let the culture war detach them from reality. Take a break. Reassess. Arguing on the Internet is addicting. Anger is addicting. Turn it off and go have fun with your friends, or build something. If you want to stay aware of what's going on, reading a summary on Wikipedia will give you better information than watching an endless cycle of "look at this bad/stupid person!" videos on Twitter or Facebook. Honestly, if you just read Wikipedia summaries (or other "calm" summaries) you'll end up better informed than the people who criticize you for burying your head in the sand. Don't let them bully you into joining their anger dopamine frenzy.
- Zetice 3y ago
  You can try to avoid bias and “infohazards” but you’ll be unable to completely eliminate them. Better to live with the tools to disarm the hazard than spend your life hiding from anything “exciting”.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    The intent is not to hide from them or completely eliminate them, but to notice when you're being affected and seeking out more and more. Recognizing their effects and reduce exposure when you notice them taking over is one of the main tools.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      Learning how to freely take in the content without being meaningfully effected is another of the main tools.
      - 3y ago
solardev 3y ago
I miss the old Google News that would let you customize which topics float to the top and deemphasize most other noise with the exception of major headlines. Then an update a few years ago made the algorithm much more recommendation and ads and controversy/engagement driven, and my beloved collection of science, nature, local, and tech news turned into nothing more than a constant stream of culture wars, international sports, and celebrity gossip. I stopped paying attention after that. I would gladly pay for a service that curates news about the topics I care about, and nothing more. I especially don't want to know what of of braindead vitriol the talking heads are shouting at each other this week. Just give me the boring wire service stuff and leave out the sensationalist blogspam headlines, please...
thenerdhead 3y ago
This article from 95' on the news is excellent: https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth > It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.
neotoy 3y ago
Curation is bad, news is neutral.
innocentoldguy 3y ago
I gave up reading the news about six months ago and decided to focus on acts of service instead. Within three weeks, my outlook on the world turned much more positive and my depression vanished.
fantasticshower 3y ago
I'm reminded of Stephen Covey's Circle of Concern (everything you give you attention to) and the Circle of Influence (inside the CoC, everything you could have an effect on). He says effective people focus their energy on their Circle of Influence. Many people waste their time giving their attention to things they can't reasonably control, e.g. other people reactions, the news, national sports.
Roark66 3y ago
Well, yes sensationalised news, full of emotional baggage is bad for mental wellbeing. However, I think completely opting out of news is a rather extreme choice. Having some information what is happening in your country, and in the world is good to feel a level of connectedness to it. Then there are practical reasons. Not knowing the news you might miss a major tax change, or an opportunity for some state benefit you might be entitled to (a low interest loan for first homeowners, a subsidy for an electric car or a PV setup). Then there are elections. How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? (this only applies to places where new parties pop up and dissapear every voting cycle, in places with more static selection of political forces this is less of a concern).
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway. I find it hard to resist glancing at aggregate news headlines, despite most of it being of no use to me or deliberately misleading. I find I don't have much of an emotional reaction to it, but maybe that's skepticism at work.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    >Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway. This is very much country depended I guess. Here in Poland if you only tuned in right before an election you'd miss a huge amount of crucial context.
- npsimons 3y ago
  > How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? You do know that in most countries, how representatives vote is public? See https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes for example.
ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
I've tried making this point to my father, with little success. He is someone who very clearly struggles with anxiety, and has an incredibly unhealthy news consumption habit -- its news on the radio on the way to work, lots of newspaper reading at work (he runs his own small business), followed by constant cable news in the evening. He can't turn it off. As best I can tell, he struggles to consume longer form (especially written content), and I don't know that he'd be able to tell me the name of the last book he's read. He's an incredibly intelligent man, but I can't help but feel he's doing himself a huge disservice with his habit. But, alas, I am always met with "but I need to be informed" retort, despite my many objections to it. Anyone experience something similar with their parents and have any advice?
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Stop trying. It's entertainment. He probably tried to get you to stop playing video games (or whatever you liked wasting time on) with little success.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  My advice is: 1) Keep at it, don't give up. Make your arguments in small doses over and over again until eventually the information assimilates. 2) Look for something he can replace the habits with and facilitate those activities for him.
- justnotworthit 3y ago
  Go about it indirectly: Keep your eye out for hobbies you can suggest. If he gets interested in something new, he'll have to make tradeoffs with his time. If turning off news = being bored (in his mind), it's not so appealing. But if he's excited about... woodworking, dancing, painting, piano, horror films... he'll automatically be pulled away from news.
oblib 3y ago
Back in the 1980s there was a TV channel in Los Angeles that had a "News" programs that would start off with all the murders, rapes, car crashes, etc. in LA, then they had all of those in the State of California, then they went on to all the tragedies in the U.S., and then they went on to entire world. I'd get some food on the way home from work and sit and eat it while watching the "News" At the end of those three 1/2 hour programs I felt like shit. After a few months of that I finally realized consuming all that horrific news was causing me to be pretty severely depressed. What led to that was a horrific deadly car crash in Africa that they showed at the end of their "World News". I realized that my own life was going pretty well and I needed to keep that in mind and be thankful. So I quit consuming all that tragedy everyday. A few years later "Fox Entertainment Group" bought that TV station and in the years after they transitioned from "horrific news" to "political news" that is focused on "outrage". We can see now how that's very addictive for some folks. Their current outrage of the day is "Trans" folks and they will keep promoting that as long as their viewers tune in. After a bit they'll move on to a new "outrage of the day". A good example of that is "Bumpstocks". FOX News and their viewers screamed about their right to have those for a few months, and then FOX News moved on to a new "outrage". A few months later Trump banned bumpstocks and I didn't see a single peep of outrage from Trump supporters or FOX News. I made a point to ask some of those on Facebook about that and they all said the same thing, "I don't care". Truth is, just like that deadly car crash in Africa, trans folks have no affect on me or anyone who's not "trans" at all. And FOX News will move on to a new "outrage of the day" and their viewers will forget about Trans folks as soon as their given a new "outrage of the day" to be mad and scream about. They are addicted to "outrage" and FOX News (and others) supply it. But if you turn that bullshit off and count your blessings you'll detox and be a lot happier.
twelve40 3y ago
What about Netflix, did they do a study on that one? How is binging on say "The Last of Us", which is also disturbing and almost life-like, from say binging on Covid articles trying to understand the real-life phenomenon and where the hell it was taking us at the time. * I agree that binging on anything is unhealthy and tabloid news about "what the man in the falling car felt" (their example) are stupid, but first, not all news are tabloid-style news, second, other entertainment options sometimes turn out not too much better.
jayant_kaushik 3y ago
What might strike a balance for most is a weekly summary of most important news from around the world + daily local news. For this I use the section called “The World this week” in The Economist through their rss(https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml) and for local news I’ve subscribed to a popular local newspaper physical copy that I read in the morning with a cup of tea. If I feel like digging deeper into a news piece from either of the two, I’ll just google it to read long form articles on it.
t0bia_s 3y ago
I can confirm. I stopped reading news, especially politics, during covid hysteria and my mental helath rise up. Anecdotal evidence: Having news filtered by my friends gives me better perspective to actual manipulation narrative. Some trends are completely out of real problems that people have. Eventually you can see, how distraction through news works.
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
Previous discussions 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244

267 points by DeathArrow 3y ago

Sure, but if there are injustices and abuses against humanity that happen, one should be aware--we can't afford to pretend that bad things don't happen.

tremon 3y ago
Why is that the only other option? Why can't we just acknowledge that bad things happen without having to know the details of every bad thing?
- wussboy 3y ago
  And is that awareness creating any useful action?
  - tremon 3y ago
    Are you suggesting that protests in e.g. Iraq against a book burning in Sweden are useful actions? That violent rioting in e.g. Marseille is a useful action against police misconduct in Paris? I don't see many links between awareness of the details of something that happens far away from me and the usefulness of my actions.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      There are plenty of injustices happening locally against which you can take meaningful action.
      - pgeorgi 3y ago
        It's quite unlikely that these local injustices appear in the news that you consume: local news are on life support, and everything else has a scope that massively surpassed your locality, whatever that might be.
        falcolas 3y ago
        That's an issue which can be solved. Consume more location appropriate news. Social media (ironically, when considering what kind of media is bad for you) can also provide decent local news information. Maybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    [dead]
  - VSerge 3y ago
    Yes, and recent examples show it: - News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens. - News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine. - another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.

scotty79 3y ago

Didn't I just read a piece of news?

ben_w 3y ago
I was about to suggest it was an option piece, which is IMO worse, as news has to attempt to be reasonable while opinions just masquerade with the same reputability. But then I scrolled to the bottom, and realised it's even worse than an option piece, it's a long-form advert: > This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
- switch007 3y ago
  The guardian does that type of advertising of books etc all the time and it annoys me greatly. They should have more integrity and at least put the notice at the top
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Could you explain exactly what is wrong with it? If the article stands on it's own, why shouldn't it be published if it's part of a book?
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Well for one, the article reads like a summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, a book published in 1985. This indicates that the book advertised by this article doesn't add anything original, novel or interesting to the world.
    - switch007 3y ago
      With a headline like that, I expect an article citing various sources and experts, not a book summary. As it stands it's mostly an opinion piece. They have a separate section for opinion and they use a different background colour (a light orange). I don't want to invest in an article then see it cut short with an advert for the rest of the meat in the book.

the_other 3y ago

It's not the news that's bad. It's that power incentivises people to become sociopaths.

tremon 3y ago
That's not true. Unchecked power allows people to become sociopaths, and the more power is accumulated in a small group, the harder it is to check. It's not an automatic process, despite what those in power want you to believe.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  The only check on power that can work as intended are higher values, such as honour, generosity and justness. Written laws and regulations are a failure for ordering society. Our modern nations have hundreds of thousands of laws, which nobody can know by heart. So we have this weird situation where it supposedly is okay for rulers to abuse their power since they're not breaking any laws or regulations. Or where there's always an impeachment process going on against a ruler, for some obscure law that makes sense to nobody. There is a false idea that judges will keep check on politicians, but the high judges are some of the most corrupt psychopaths a society can bring forth, as it has been since forever. Now if the ruler or rulers act without honour, that is something that is obvious for anybody to see and know by heart. If they act greedy, that is obvious for anybody. It they are unjust - even by keeping the law by circumventing it - that is obvious for anybody. When these higher values are ingrained in a society, they become powerful, and the ruler has to bend to them. But there's a long way to go, since the large mass of the population is currently in a low state.
Frost1x 3y ago
I think it's more of a selection bias. In most structures, it's more beneficial have emotional detachment as emotion in most cases can be exploited to adds constraints to your decision space. It's not that power holds a carrot and says, to hold me you must be a sociopath, it's that competition for power selects those lacking emotion. I'm no anthropologist but I suspect since humans evolved from small groups, emotions developed because group work was beneficial. As humanity evolved rapidly into larger societies, it's not clear that emotion in these group sizes are so beneficial for survival. At some point survival from the size of the group becomes nearly guaranteed and competing more within the group becomes a better survival strategy from an independent standpoint. These days you're far less likely to starve to death or be eaten by say a bear or lion because you live in large societies with all sorts of services and just basic proximity scares other predators away. Now the dynamic is about succeeding within the bounds of that system itself. Detaching from others and focusing on yourself tends to give you better success in that environment. Specific cases exist where you should work as a team but if you can do this without emotion and identify all these cases on a highly transactional basis, you can better optimize your own success. Frankly I think it's kind of sad because, well, I have emotion and don't like to think of the world like a sociopath but... if you want to compete, you need to more and more.

shaftoe444 3y ago

See also, "The case against news (2011)" by Bryan Caplan, https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.h.... Also, this should be marked as 2013.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ccpotato 3y ago

"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business" I'd say quite a bit actually. It's helped me make better investment decisions. e.g. news following tech industry let me get Nvidia at 160 a share. Not to mention things like entertainment and sport news are useful for making small talk (I like to try to be an accommodating co-worker). Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Real question is it worth consuming and checking all day? Hell no.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Exactly. It's perhaps difficult to claim "better" when it says "allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life", but the news definitely influence the vote. And the press knows it, so this article must be a bit blind. And there are people who can claim "oh politics is not a serious matter, it never affects my life", I'll say I used to believe that (i.e. that the two major parties have the same major policies), but even the smallest difference can have a profound impact in your life. For me the example is that a very small increase in the budget allocation for university scholarships when the socialists (in the european sense) got into power (many decades ago) allowed me to continue in university when otherwise I'd have dropped out.
brigadier132 3y ago
> Plus it keeps me informed/shapes my perception of my Government and how I intend to vote. Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day? Politics and politicians are not that complicated, you have a few options a few times a year. It takes an hour or less of research to determine who to vote for. Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual.
- eropple 3y ago
  > Outside of elections you are pretty impotent as an individual. This is untrue, in most parts of America at least; there are more levels of government that affect you than national ones and I find that folks who make this claim generally aren't aware how to effect change or are unwilling to expend the effort. You can get pretty far just by talking to people.

PaulHoule 3y ago

When it comes to "fake news" the bad part is the "news" and not the "fake". That is, quite a bit of "news", such as Fox News' handwringing about caravans approaching the U.S.-Mexico border is primarily relevant for the emotional effect it has. By faking it you can get a certain emotional effect more reliably and without the cost and hazard of really reporting, but the emotional effect is the same.

carlosjobim 3y ago
I'm trying to understand your point. What is fake about those caravans? Those are real people as far as I know, who are going to have a real impact on others and by others. If such a caravan was passing through your town or coming to your town, wouldn't it be odd if nobody reported on it?
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It's the sense of crisis associated with it and the continuous drumbeat about it. My Uncle Nick immigrated to the U.S. together with much of his family including his mother, his brother, cousins, etc. They wound up around Binghamton NY and did very well in this country as did their children. Today he watches Fox News and it's breathless coverage of "chain migration" and doesn't make the connection that his family is a case of "chain migration" Immigration is quite interesting because it's case where popular opinion is solidly to the right of both elite opinion and where elites think the public is https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be-more-conservative-than-they-really-are-208053 https://theconversation.com/politicians-believe-voters-to-be... but also that people's support or lack of support for immigration is frequently the opposite of where their "bread is buttered". Somebody retired like Uncle Nick benefits from a growing labor pool which can help take care of them directly and also pays taxes and generates economic activity to support social programs and private pension plan values. People like that tend to hate immigration because they know they'll be dying in a world different than the one they were born in. On the other hand, young college-educated Americans are enthusiastic about it but if they thought critically about it they might conclude they're getting screwed because they're competing with people who can get a college education for much less than them. Overall politicians are constantly getting blindsided by the appeal anti-immigration policies have on people both when it is taken up by somebody like Donald Trump and when they drive support for parties like AfD and the Rassemblement National. --- Again, if you were trying to build an automated filter for pernicious "fake news" such a thing would wind up detecting emotional tones and structural motifs that are common to fake news as the process of "fact checking" is much more difficult as it involves comparing multiple sources and doing very problematic logical inference. If you held real news to the highest possible standard (e.g. in logical inference one bad apple ruins the whole batch) I think you'd find a very high fraction of articles are "wrong" in some way. Hateful, angry and hostile content is highly viral on platforms like Twitter and Mastodon and is harmful whether or not it is factually true.

paulvnickerson 3y ago

Plug for the Boring Report, which uses AI to strip sensationalism from news articles and present succinct, informative summaries: https://www.boringreport.org/ https://www.boringreport.org/ I am not affiliated with them.

gAI 3y ago
This is the future of the internet, huh? AI re-writing the web to personalize it for users.
hnhg 3y ago
I would second this. Their app/website helped wean me off the emotional manipulation by news media I didn't even know I was addicted to. I would recommend people try it out.

dpcan 3y ago

For me, it has now been 2.5 years since having watched any local, national or cable news. The stuff is poison. I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties. It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense. It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.

zorlack 3y ago
> I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news Well phew! Thankfully someone's still paying attention.
beardedwizard 3y ago
Ah so you don't count hackernews as news - an interesting choice. You mention tv news, but I suspect online news is what most people consume, streaming killed tv news many years ago.
- kodah 3y ago
  I think "news" here correlates to organizations deep in the "news cycle" whereby some organization decides some goings-on of local people is a worthy national topic. HN is one or two layers removed from this; quite literally there's a crowd deciding what you see at a given moment is relative or not for consumption. This is the same effect of hearing about important events from other people and choosing to look into them further or looking into them after the topic is more settled. The real problem these users are describing is separation from the news cycle where most elements in the cycle are overstated or irrelevant to most users but are put in front of them anyway with very "this is important" language.
- dandellion 3y ago
  Despite the name I think only about half the posts on the site are actual news. And of those many are not current news, there are many links that are months or even years old.

the_snooze 3y ago

The most relevant pieces of news to me are weather reports, those emergency alerts I get on my phone (mostly weather-related), and week-old stories. The first two are immediately useful and actionable. The last one involves topics that have clearer information and staying power.

kashunstva 3y ago

So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track. Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events. As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.

samwillis 3y ago
For the last few years I vary rarely followed the national news, I'm certainly happier for it. When I do, I have noticed a decline in mood. On "actionable" news, the only thing that really impacts me is interest rates. But even then I'm three years out from having to consider that, so happily remaining as ignorant as possible - which I suppose isn't massively so due to the volume. There is so much truth to "ignorance is bliss".
- jbs55 3y ago
  [flagged]
colpabar 3y ago
Do people ever call you privileged? A common response I see to experiments like yours is that "it must be nice to be able to not care".
- phito 3y ago
  They're trying to make their problem yours. If they can't stop caring about pointless things, it's their problem, not yours.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nsoonhui 3y ago

The irony that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out is not lost on me.

_Algernon_ 3y ago
The main point of this article has been pointed out before and is hardly novel or original. The earliest I know of is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, but unlikely to be the first. If anything, the only ironic thing about this is that it takes a prominent news organization to point this out to you.

zerof1l 3y ago

I used to read the news first thing in the morning when I woke up. Lately, I started to have zero motivation to do anything. And overall I felt a bit depressed the whole day. So I made a commitment a couple of days ago to stop reading any news before mid-day. Can't yet say how much it is helping, but overall I feel better and I'm more productive.

bhupy 3y ago

The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

tivert 3y ago
> The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality. That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  And who said data can't be biased, anyway? It most often is
  - bhupy 3y ago
    To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias. The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data. A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way. The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes). Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.

xyzelement 3y ago

I used to see it as a choice between being uninformed and informed. Now I see it as uninformed and misinformed and I'll take the former. Michael Crichton nailed it with Gell Mann Amnesia[0]. I see it all over the place on topics I know well such as coverage of companies I worked at or political topics I was very well informed about. Sometimes it feels innocent - a reporter too "dumb" to get the nuance and thus missing the point, sometimes it feels deliberate - eg consistently chopping off context to create an emotional charge. Either way, I saw that the news would lead me to the wrong conclusion if I didn't already know better - and then obviously that it must be leading me to wrong conclusions on topics where I don't know. Which is most. [0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

TheMagicHorsey 3y ago

Reading the news is certainly not good for your productivity. Similarly, being politically active is on average a waste of your time if your goal is to maximize lifetime earnings. But if every able citizen follows the logic of those two facts, the country will be much worse off. Yes, I agree, its better to free-ride off the citizen-participation of other, more naive citizens than to invest your own time in improving society. But at a certain point, when everyone becomes a free-rider, the political class becomes predatory and you get a dysfunctional state. Riots. Shortages. Pollution. Failing healthcare. Invasion. Corruption. Each time the form is different but the source is citizen apathy. In other words, if you ignore the news long enough, the news will come and knock on your door.

wussboy 3y ago
> The news will come and knock at your door I would argue that for the vast amount of things that happen in the world, this is a good thing. Just about the right level of care and concern.
- TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
  It is usually too late to save your house and your savings when this happens. As experienced by my ancestors who had to flee their homeland and move to America. This is why I am not politically apathetic in America. Things happen very slowly and then very quickly in a governmental collapse. By then, your savings are confiscated or inflated away before you can take action. Travel can become prohibitively expensive or forbidden. It becomes very difficult to get your family and resources out. Usually you leave penniless and arrive on foreign shores as a destitute refugee no matter what your status and expectations were in your former life and country. Engineers become taxi drivers. Scientists become house cleaners. Then you rebuild and you teach your kids that you should always prepare for the worst case and never take civil society for granted.

golemotron 3y ago

On that link I get a giant banner on top of the story that says: Support the Guardian Fund independent journalism with $5 per month Support us So the message is "We are doing something bad to you. Pay us for it." The author is careful to carve out an exception for "independent journalism" rather than news but, ironically, in a newspaper.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Does checking Rotten Tomatoes and reading an article on how the Marvel Multiverse has gone downhill, count as news?

tandav 3y ago

(2013)

makeitdouble 3y ago

Another approach is to accept news as it is: entertainment. The same way we're not looking at documentaries on Amazon frogs and arguing if watching them led to any improvements in our daily life, we shouldn't expect random news to be actionable or useful. Sure there is local and national info that is beneficial, but those can be earned in way more efficient ways on other media (for instance offical accounts on Twitter were my go-to for my local council's announcements and govs policy updates, and they also posted it on their respective PR pages). Actually I really wish we 100% stopped alluding as news and journalists as a primary source of information: press conferences and somewhat official interviews should always have a directly accessible feed of the whole thing, uncut, and distributed by the entity opening the event. Having to go through second hand reporting and selected tidbits to understand what was happening there is just nonsense.

keiferski 3y ago

These articles always miss the difference between “the news” as a concept and “the organizations providing the news.” If you keep eating at bad restaurants, does that mean food in general is bad? No. It means you need to find better restaurants or cook at home.

flappyeagle 3y ago

Question is really whether news has ever been good for you. I think it probably has — and you can basically recreate that environment by checking a major newspaper of your choice between once a day and once a week. There’s a balance between being completely uninformed about what’s happening in the world vs. refreshing twitter every 30 seconds.

traveler01 3y ago

This article is from 2013 and I can say, 10 years after the article was originally launched situation got even worse...

andyjohnson0 3y ago

The news has been making me feel increasingly sad over the last few months, and coincidentally last night I decided to do something about it. I deleted news apps from my devices, deleted news site bookmarks frm Firefox, and used LeechBlock to block the news sites that I'm likely to visit. Also blocked Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. I almost never watch broadcast tv so that doesn't need any special measures. I still get a "morning briefing" email from the Guardian, which I probably stay subscribed to, but I won't (can't) click any links. I hope to establish a routine for scanning and then deleting it. If not I'll unsubscribe. I'm considering a subscription to a dead tree weekly news summary like the Guardian Weekly - but I'd like to wait a few months first. Half-way through Day One I feel pretty good and noticeably less distracted. I'm interested to see how this goes.

secondcoming 3y ago

It’s quite amusing that these days the Guardian is one the most outrage-baity outlets out there, especially its Opinion Pieces. Complete doom and gloom.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Read books not articles. It's actually a finance tip, but is true for news.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

I would slightly disagree. Unfiltered news is bad for you. You can not have a plan or a set of plans for all things approaching you. But if you have plans and projects, some of the news is just no longer news, but actually project relevant events. And those can not be missed. So filter out what you must handle, but to have nothing at all that is raining on you, that sounds to idyllic to be true.

blaze33 3y ago

For me, I used to read or watch the news because I wanted to be informed and maybe learn some things to better understand the world we live in. After some time you start noticing the patterns: the short-termism, the over-seriousness and repetitiveness of it all coupled with usually shallow explanations and poor understanding of what happens. You can also notice how it slowly but surely starts to shape and distort your mind if you consume to much of it. And I always lamented this sad state of affairs. I know that some people involved in the news production have an agenda to push but what I failed to realize for a long time was that most people consume the news as a form of entertainment. Then they can say they know about this or that and maybe have an opinion about it but that's it. It's especially sad considering the huge influence of the media in politics but that's another story. So yeah, I still want to be informed, educated and further my understanding of the world but the news aren't so useful for that. They could be. But they're not.

anonu 3y ago

You're not the consumer of news. You are being consumed by the FUD. It's part of the business model to get you hooked.

snet0 3y ago

I often point people to "I Hate the News"[0], a 2006 blog post from Aaron Swartz. > It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system. [0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Jemm 3y ago

Maybe people shouldn't be happily ignorant. Maybe people should become upset and perhaps then they will work towards change.

sandworm101 3y ago

Ignorance is certainly bliss. Living a naïve life of detached privilege is great fun, so long as you are surrounded by people to take care of the nasty details. Don't follow the news. Don't learn about environmental problems. Don't get angry at local businesses when they do bad things. Don't feel bad when a racist cop does something horrible. Don't vote. Don't enlist. Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. Other people will guard the door as you watch cat videos. The real joke is that 90% of the people I meet who "don't read the news" actually do. They have just turned off realworld news, mostly politics. They still know all about Hollywood and the latest fashion trends.

unmole 3y ago
> Just passively consume and spend. Let other people keep the world from falling apart around you. One would presumably need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption. So, they are likely the very people who are keeping the world from falling apart. The professional activists on the other hand...
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> need to be creating something of value to be able to afford the consumption. Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Even Marge Simpson has a trust fund setup by her relatives. And mutual funds, family income, real estate appreciation, pensions ... I'd say that there are large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Their role in society is to consume, and occasionally vote.
  - unmole 3y ago
    > Why? A very large percentage of income is "passive". Define very large. And isn't the fraction of people who live off passive income the more relevant measure? > Even Marge Simpson I'm sorry, your example is a cartoon character? > large numbers of relatively wealthy people don't actually have jobs that require work. Again, define large.

Dritzzka 3y ago

This can be applied with social media. This past year I deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. I can honestly say, it has improved my overall mental health, and I now find myself learning more computer things with my time.

nottorp 3y ago

What's "news"? I mean they're right, but all "content" generated in the name of "engagement" is bad for your mental health. If it's labeled as news or friend/influencer updates, it's the same.

DHPersonal 3y ago

Whenever I think that newspapers may not be worth supporting, I think back on all the times that reporters have broken important stories of corruption in religious, political, and business sectors that have revealed the real harm that have come to so many victims. The eventual justice that can come from breaking those stories offer good reasons to support the news, even if some stories in between are duds.

tweetle_beetle 3y ago

I often think the test of the usefulness of consuming news is whether you can explain it to someone else in any more detail than a soundbite. If you can only regurgitate the headline, you don't really understand it yourself and can't have a conversation about it - what was the point? Sometimes having an opinion about a news story masquerades as understanding it, but this is quickly exposed.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I've noticed a concerning amount of post-truth BS around here. Don't trust journalists, don't trust your government or institutions, the news is bad, do your own research, etc. Yuck!

JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
[flagged]
- hooverd 3y ago
  Yea, and those so called "scientists" and their crank "germ theory". It's a double edged sword.

agumonkey 3y ago

Time scales will make you realize how most of current news are really allergic reactions. Every week there's a new hot topic, lots of questions asked, lots of worries.. and then lots of nothing. - greece dying - srilanka dying - venezuela collapsing - argentina wiped - lebanon - syria .. it goes on and on you listen to it, think a lot, and a month later you forgot, busy thinking about the new alert. A year down the road you read about whatever country and realize all that was just noise.

mint2 3y ago
All those places seem far off and distant to a lot of people… just “noise”. In all of those cases those things dismissed as noise were the sounds of millions of peoples lives being torn apart. But yes far away and distant - oh unless one’s relatives were fleeing their soon to be bombed homes like my Syrian American coworker. To be able to ignore those events is only for the lucky - but can (for now) doesn’t mean should. Even the lucky should not ignore them. Also I say “for now”, because in most cases the far off events quickly influence local events - many of those are directly effecting American border communities, and also national politics through a nationalistic platform by a party.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  greece is not far from me, it's not necessarily distance, to me it's just news medias that are just shallow amplifiers (sensationalism)
cwkoss 3y ago
I feel like almost every international news story can probably be traced back to some corporate interest: somebody is profiting based on the public being aware of/believing that news story.

xwdv 3y ago

Certain types of news are more like cultural/societal events and stories that are worth following just to have some topic to bring up with other people. Stuff like a submarine implosion, or a 9/11, or an OJ Simpson trial. These are unique once in a lifetime events that give you some social currency. Repetitive news like mass shootings or political BS is just noise, and quickly loses its novelty overtime. What results is you just gradually feel worse and more cynical over time without learning anything new or interesting.

Zetice 3y ago

If I concede the fact that I enjoy knowing what's going on around me, does that make it less bad for me? This article (and these comments) seem to be focusing on some kind of "value", but to me the knowledge is the end, not the means. Knowing stuff is cool, y'all.

turzmo 3y ago

My mother, I love her, but all of her worldview is based off of the news. No social life, no hobbies, no books, no real experience. It’s amazing, but understandable, how she perceives risk. Cars get in crashes. Flights are always delayed. Big cities are dangerous. The news has done its job keeping her engaged but she is no better for it

DeathArrow 3y ago

Because the news tends to focus on negative events, one of the things you probably do in the morning is read about the most distressing occurrences that took place worldwide in the past 24 hours. This can give you the impression that the world is a sad and dangerous place, but it's actually a problem of limited sampling. Although this phenomenon is not new—the saying "if it bleeds, it leads" has been around as long as newspapers have existed—there is a new aspect to it due to the constant exposure we have today. Instead of simply reading the morning paper or watching the news in the evening, many people now compulsively check for the latest atrocities every few minutes. They also receive forwarded articles from well-meaning friends, which further incentivizes sensationalist media to produce an endless stream of emotionally and mentally toxic content. The media tends to exaggerate minor flaws and inefficiencies in our otherwise remarkable modern civilization, presenting them as existential disasters and oppressive systems. Even the relatively minor inconveniences of life in the 21st century are portrayed as hardships comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor combined. Consequently, some of the most privileged and safest individuals in human history are led to perceive themselves constantly as threatened victims engaged in a desperate battle against an oppressive regime. They literally fear for their lives while walking the streets, despite the fact that, by any rational historical standard, we live in a nearly utopian society. :)

lkbm 3y ago

A lot of us have seen the rage machine polarize someone into partisan insanity. I like to think I'm resistant to this, but I've seen it happen to people who are probably smarter than me. I'd say it's more common with the elderly, but I'm not really sure that's true—there are plenty of Tankies and retvrn crazies in their twenties. News in its current form is clearly an infohazard. It may be useful to have an awareness of what's going on in the world, but if you find yourself thinking "the other side" are all evil or stupid, you're headed down the same path as so many others who have let the culture war detach them from reality. Take a break. Reassess. Arguing on the Internet is addicting. Anger is addicting. Turn it off and go have fun with your friends, or build something. If you want to stay aware of what's going on, reading a summary on Wikipedia will give you better information than watching an endless cycle of "look at this bad/stupid person!" videos on Twitter or Facebook. Honestly, if you just read Wikipedia summaries (or other "calm" summaries) you'll end up better informed than the people who criticize you for burying your head in the sand. Don't let them bully you into joining their anger dopamine frenzy.

Zetice 3y ago
You can try to avoid bias and “infohazards” but you’ll be unable to completely eliminate them. Better to live with the tools to disarm the hazard than spend your life hiding from anything “exciting”.
- lkbm 3y ago
  The intent is not to hide from them or completely eliminate them, but to notice when you're being affected and seeking out more and more. Recognizing their effects and reduce exposure when you notice them taking over is one of the main tools.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    Learning how to freely take in the content without being meaningfully effected is another of the main tools.
    - 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

I miss the old Google News that would let you customize which topics float to the top and deemphasize most other noise with the exception of major headlines. Then an update a few years ago made the algorithm much more recommendation and ads and controversy/engagement driven, and my beloved collection of science, nature, local, and tech news turned into nothing more than a constant stream of culture wars, international sports, and celebrity gossip. I stopped paying attention after that. I would gladly pay for a service that curates news about the topics I care about, and nothing more. I especially don't want to know what of of braindead vitriol the talking heads are shouting at each other this week. Just give me the boring wire service stuff and leave out the sensationalist blogspam headlines, please...

thenerdhead 3y ago

This article from 95' on the news is excellent: https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth > It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.

neotoy 3y ago

Curation is bad, news is neutral.

innocentoldguy 3y ago

I gave up reading the news about six months ago and decided to focus on acts of service instead. Within three weeks, my outlook on the world turned much more positive and my depression vanished.

fantasticshower 3y ago

I'm reminded of Stephen Covey's Circle of Concern (everything you give you attention to) and the Circle of Influence (inside the CoC, everything you could have an effect on). He says effective people focus their energy on their Circle of Influence. Many people waste their time giving their attention to things they can't reasonably control, e.g. other people reactions, the news, national sports.

Roark66 3y ago

Well, yes sensationalised news, full of emotional baggage is bad for mental wellbeing. However, I think completely opting out of news is a rather extreme choice. Having some information what is happening in your country, and in the world is good to feel a level of connectedness to it. Then there are practical reasons. Not knowing the news you might miss a major tax change, or an opportunity for some state benefit you might be entitled to (a low interest loan for first homeowners, a subsidy for an electric car or a PV setup). Then there are elections. How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? (this only applies to places where new parties pop up and dissapear every voting cycle, in places with more static selection of political forces this is less of a concern).

slothtrop 3y ago
> How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway. I find it hard to resist glancing at aggregate news headlines, despite most of it being of no use to me or deliberately misleading. I find I don't have much of an emotional reaction to it, but maybe that's skepticism at work.
- Roark66 3y ago
  >Presumably by catching up on big-ticket issues right before an election, rather than shallowly consuming every piece of rage-bait. I expect that retrospectives are more accurate anyway. This is very much country depended I guess. Here in Poland if you only tuned in right before an election you'd miss a huge amount of crucial context.
npsimons 3y ago
> How is one supposed to cast an informed vote without following the news? You do know that in most countries, how representatives vote is public? See https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes for example.

ChicagoBoy11 3y ago

I've tried making this point to my father, with little success. He is someone who very clearly struggles with anxiety, and has an incredibly unhealthy news consumption habit -- its news on the radio on the way to work, lots of newspaper reading at work (he runs his own small business), followed by constant cable news in the evening. He can't turn it off. As best I can tell, he struggles to consume longer form (especially written content), and I don't know that he'd be able to tell me the name of the last book he's read. He's an incredibly intelligent man, but I can't help but feel he's doing himself a huge disservice with his habit. But, alas, I am always met with "but I need to be informed" retort, despite my many objections to it. Anyone experience something similar with their parents and have any advice?

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Stop trying. It's entertainment. He probably tried to get you to stop playing video games (or whatever you liked wasting time on) with little success.
deleted 3y ago
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forgotmypw17 3y ago
My advice is: 1) Keep at it, don't give up. Make your arguments in small doses over and over again until eventually the information assimilates. 2) Look for something he can replace the habits with and facilitate those activities for him.
justnotworthit 3y ago
Go about it indirectly: Keep your eye out for hobbies you can suggest. If he gets interested in something new, he'll have to make tradeoffs with his time. If turning off news = being bored (in his mind), it's not so appealing. But if he's excited about... woodworking, dancing, painting, piano, horror films... he'll automatically be pulled away from news.

oblib 3y ago

Back in the 1980s there was a TV channel in Los Angeles that had a "News" programs that would start off with all the murders, rapes, car crashes, etc. in LA, then they had all of those in the State of California, then they went on to all the tragedies in the U.S., and then they went on to entire world. I'd get some food on the way home from work and sit and eat it while watching the "News" At the end of those three 1/2 hour programs I felt like shit. After a few months of that I finally realized consuming all that horrific news was causing me to be pretty severely depressed. What led to that was a horrific deadly car crash in Africa that they showed at the end of their "World News". I realized that my own life was going pretty well and I needed to keep that in mind and be thankful. So I quit consuming all that tragedy everyday. A few years later "Fox Entertainment Group" bought that TV station and in the years after they transitioned from "horrific news" to "political news" that is focused on "outrage". We can see now how that's very addictive for some folks. Their current outrage of the day is "Trans" folks and they will keep promoting that as long as their viewers tune in. After a bit they'll move on to a new "outrage of the day". A good example of that is "Bumpstocks". FOX News and their viewers screamed about their right to have those for a few months, and then FOX News moved on to a new "outrage". A few months later Trump banned bumpstocks and I didn't see a single peep of outrage from Trump supporters or FOX News. I made a point to ask some of those on Facebook about that and they all said the same thing, "I don't care". Truth is, just like that deadly car crash in Africa, trans folks have no affect on me or anyone who's not "trans" at all. And FOX News will move on to a new "outrage of the day" and their viewers will forget about Trans folks as soon as their given a new "outrage of the day" to be mad and scream about. They are addicted to "outrage" and FOX News (and others) supply it. But if you turn that bullshit off and count your blessings you'll detox and be a lot happier.

twelve40 3y ago

What about Netflix, did they do a study on that one? How is binging on say "The Last of Us", which is also disturbing and almost life-like, from say binging on Covid articles trying to understand the real-life phenomenon and where the hell it was taking us at the time. * I agree that binging on anything is unhealthy and tabloid news about "what the man in the falling car felt" (their example) are stupid, but first, not all news are tabloid-style news, second, other entertainment options sometimes turn out not too much better.

jayant_kaushik 3y ago

What might strike a balance for most is a weekly summary of most important news from around the world + daily local news. For this I use the section called “The World this week” in The Economist through their rss(https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml) and for local news I’ve subscribed to a popular local newspaper physical copy that I read in the morning with a cup of tea. If I feel like digging deeper into a news piece from either of the two, I’ll just google it to read long form articles on it.

t0bia_s 3y ago

I can confirm. I stopped reading news, especially politics, during covid hysteria and my mental helath rise up. Anecdotal evidence: Having news filtered by my friends gives me better perspective to actual manipulation narrative. Some trends are completely out of real problems that people have. Eventually you can see, how distraction through news works.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

Previous discussions 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244