[dryanau]

It's alright for one person to think this way, but if everyone did we'd be in a bit of trouble as a society. I think the reality is in the middle anyway, i.e. very few people are desperately gripped to each and every story, and if you think you're supposed to care about every story then you're missing the point of the news. Chances are enough people will care about each story to make it worthwhile running, even when many (or most) people don't care. If you're picking up the paper and literally zero stories affect you, well okay then! But you'd be in the minority. For most people there's something in there worth knowing. Even if it's not every single day. Most people benefit from knowing something about what's happening at least weekly. In hindsight this is a really odd article.

[kortilla]

> For most people there's something in there worth knowing.

Your distribution is way off.

If we’re talking national US news like the NYT or WaPo reports on, there is actually worth knowing. The only value it provides is “sounding informed” at a party.

It has a huge negative downside too. It’s some watered down biased version of what’s going on in the world that fits narratives of the editors, with barely any relationship to reality.

National news is absolutely propaganda-loaded trash that serves a severely negative value for society overall.

Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.

[Shared404]

> Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

Local news isn't immune either.

E: Apparently I posted twice when I tried to edit the Youtube link to the main site. Deleted the dupe.

[xboxnolifes]

Exactly. Nobody should be watching 24/7 news, but you also probably shouldn't be avoiding every news publication ever.

10 minutes a day skimming your news sources of choice for topics relevant to you combined with hearing things from your friends/family/coworkers goes a long way.

[kortilla]

10 mins a day is still way too much. It’s 99.99% absofuckinguseless.

I say this as someone who read it for decades. It’s all caricatures of the truth designed to push some other narrative.

Every single time I thought I was informed and chatted with someone who had even a small notional bit of first hand information, it became immediately apparent how I was both extremely ignorant and how my false sense of knowledge made it worse.

[bigger_inside]

Exactly. I'm a researcher, and there are maybe two or three things I know a lot about, and some things where I understand, structurally, how they function.

Literally everything on the news about these things is horrible. It either dumbs something down to the point where it supports aggressive misunderstandings, or highlights an element that serves to support some public (misguided) preconception, or it deletes structural context to the point where the thing said isn't per se wrong, but without that context, it's certain to be misunderstood.

I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed once (on more of a "lighthearted" subject, nothing controversial). The journalists twisted my words to make them conform to some feelgood complete misconception, reflecting the things "people like to read about themselves" and how we, in our late modern hyperindividualist societies, imagine the world works: it's all about you in the end! Nope.

The news is a commercial enterprise; its purpose, classically, is to sell your stereotypes back to you. Today, in polarized society, it's there to sell one segment's stereotypes back to that segment while maximally riling up other segments, thus creating engagement through battle. And no, "Publicly funded" ones aren't any better at it, they operate in the same space.

[xboxnolifes]

10 minutes is roughly 5 minutes of skimming through everything and 5 minutes reading the single thing that you might care about. It's definitely not too much. Some days you can even skip the last 5 minutes if nothing that you care about has happened.

[kortilla]

It’s not the time lost that provided negative value. It was the false sense of “being informed”.

[EA-3167]

Some people should definitely think that way though, specifically people prone to depression, suicide, and so on. If you're grappling with dark thoughts, the news is a pretty nasty hole to fall down. Aaron was sadly one of those people who probably was right that the news wasn't for him.

[Barrin92]

avoidance behavior is a bad response to mental issues. Even if it works temporarily, in the long run it shrinks your world and reduces your confidence. It's why people with panic disorders are taught to confront stressors and learn to adapt, not lock themselves in their house.

Regarding the news, a practical issue is of course that it doesn't always work. If you're privileged, self-employed or what have you, you can dodge a lot of issues for a while, but not always. Aaron himself ironically and sadly enough found himself at the center of the news years after he wrote this. That the news is just what happens to other people is an adolescent idea that will at some point be shattered.

I've got a lot of Ukrainian friends who did a lot of coding out of a bunker the last year and a half, and over there nobody has ever told me they stopped reading the NYT and their issues went away. That's most of the world, the news is real, only very few people are so removed they can just ignore the world for decades.

[Kye]

Reading the NYT would make me less informed on the issues that affect me and people I care about.[0][1] That's the point, I think. "The News" most people consume is a pale imitation of information. A version of this article with 10 years of growth might modify the suggestion toward finding better sources of information. Less New York Times, Fox News, and MSNBC. More ProPublica, NewsHour, and advocacy orgs staffed with people who are actually qualified to speak on the subject.

[0] https://glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgtbq-a...

[1] https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-cal...

[unmole]

> advocacy orgs staffed with people

who don't even have to pretend to be neutral.

[kragen]

your criticism could hardly be worse directed

the article does recommend finding better sources of information

> to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. ...

> Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.

the article also links to harper's weekly review

he also regularly posted reviews on his blog of the books he found to be good sources of information (as well as some he didn't); in 02006 he read 120 books http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2006 and in 02007 he read 70 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2007. many of his other blog posts were about one or another such book

a couple years later i worked with aaron on watchdog.net, an effort to collate and make easily available politically relevant information on politicians; we got a lot of information online and well organized, but voters didn't really care, and other people were doing a better job of providing that information

aaron was easily in the top 0.1% of the world population when it came to helping people find better sources of information

[lmm]

Like the joke about airports, if you've never missed hearing about an important event then you're paying too much attention to news. There's a level that's worth following, but most people read far more news than is worthwhile.

[NovaDudely]

There is the nightly news broadcast, it goes for 1 hour - so 1/16th of your waking life. Maybe about 10-15% of that hour is anything of actual interest/importance.

[strken]

I'm not sure this is true. Social networks, as in the underlying human phenomenon of communicating with other people, do a phenomenal job of spreading information.

Consider personally important news: some combination of ground-shaking global events, plus stories specific to one's interests, plus some local news. We hear about these things anyway! I heard about the war in Ukraine from friends and acquaintances before seeing it in a newspaper, with less waffling and including links to more in-depth analysis. I hear about human interest stories that actually interest me, weird bits of software/archeology/gaming/ecology/literature/sports/local stuff, instead of random articles about any old thing. I'm more up to date on local gossip than the actual media sometimes, since people who are unwilling to answer a reporter's questions are happy to just have a chat. The most serious news eventually ends up on HN in one form or another, which is at least an industry-specific link aggregator with less whiplash.

Probably there's news I need to know, and weekly might be an okay compromise, but even monthly or quarterly news would be supplemented by people telling me things.

[mistermann]

One advantage of this approach is that it largely short circuits the ability of the various power players and organizations to direct your attention to where they want it when they want it, as well as reduces the chance of you getting your story from a doctored version. I think any approach that messes with potential behind the scenes coordination is just good old-fashioned risk management.

[chongli]

There’s a lot in the news that’s breaking one day and gone the next. I think people in general consume too much news, rather than too little.

We might be better off getting news out of our lives and just having some kind of alert system for events that are relevant to our lives.