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>Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes th

>Good quality news can make you understand what's going on in the world so you can be at the edge when you plan for your future. Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes the point that this is largely a fallacy insofar as paying attention to news doesn't really help one predict the more important events; his extremely well informed friends were blindsided by the coup in Lebanon. I do think it biases one toward believing that since they know what happened yesterday, they are better able to predict tomorrow, but I don't see that this is obviously the case. > Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided ... If you don't have any idea on what's going on in the grand scheme of things, your decisions and opinions are likely to be shortsighted. I agree it can make you misguided, but I would also posit that paying too much attention to the news can also make you misguided. The news doesn't seem to me to pay all that much attention to the long-term and is very focused on recency (hence "new" in the name). I know you have qualified with "may" and "can" and I think I agree with the possibility, but in my experience the actual effect is the opposite. I like to say that I enjoy _history_ but despise news; it's very hard to know what in the news will be important historically and it often misses the big events. The news told us Hillary would win the election against Trump, say.

mrtksn 3y ago
It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future. Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context. For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.
thrashh 3y ago
It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it. If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source. For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight I think one could argue that perhaps keeping up with news in order to understand news is too much work but that's an entirely different issue.

mrtksn 3y ago

It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future. Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context. For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.

thrashh 3y ago

It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it. If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source. For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight I think one could argue that perhaps keeping up with news in order to understand news is too much work but that's an entirely different issue.