[joslin01]

That signal to noise quote is actually great, and one of the reasons why the late Aaron Schwartz refused to read the news. He said in one of his essays it's far more valuable to read books, and basically explained in more words, the signal to noise problem.

[zerostar07]

can you explain how the logic is not flawed? If you are consuming 50% SNR news, it will be 50% regardless of whether you read once a day or once an hour

[majewsky]

For example, let's say you watch TV news each evening. There's a political scandal going on which is featured prominently every night for a whole week as developments go on.

A lot of what is said will be redundant because each report needs to repeat the basics to be able to stand on its own. For a returning viewer, that's not new information, ergo noise.

The journalists and experts may spend time speculating about what happens next. This information will be outdated the next day as new developments take place, so it's noise for me unless the speculation provides value for me between the broadcast and the next day.

I stopped watching TV news on a regular basis, and switched to reading a weekly newspaper for precisely this reason. With a few days of distance from the original event, everyone can catch their breath and take a step back to put the story into the bigger picture.

Now after 6 years, I've cancelled my newspaper subscription in order to read more books, so I'm deliberately zooming out even more.

[zerostar07]

hindsight is 20/20. but still that does not explain the flawed logic here

[quadrangle]

The logic is: have patience, reject neophilism, take things in with all the benefits of 20/20 hindsight by reading the best from the past year or month or whatever instead of whatever is new right now.

[0xADADA]

NAILED IT

[quadrangle]

The argument is NOT that news is 50% SNR, the argument is that BOOKS are 50% SNR. Effectively, an edited collection of the news over the course of a year has a low SNR compared to that of following the constant stream of instant-news.

The point was expressed badly, but it's about the way that the average quality of new-stuff is a lot lower than the average quality of a curated set of high-quality stuff from a time period.

It's like how you'll see better movies picking out the best movies from all of movie history versus picking even the best of whatever happens to be the newest.

[zerostar07]

My comment was about the logic. And in any case books are not news. It's apples to oranges. Sure they have great information, but it's useless if it's way past its actionable date.

[quadrangle]

Most news isn't actionable.

Anyway, it's like the difference between checking the top voted stuff here at HN versus the newest stuff.

There's also a strange social dilemma here. In order for the curated stuff to have more value and lower SNR, responsible people need to be looking at the newest submissions. So, it wouldn't work if everyone rejected the neophilism, all of us wanting someone else to do the curation while we wait.

A better argument would be that the people who do the curation (the journalists, book authors, voters on submissions etc.) should aim for a higher SNR and stop publishing or promoting low-value stuff. Unfortunately, there's a conflict of interest. It's more profitable to play up whatever random latest story than to cancel or shorten the news report on a slow-news-day…