[nonethewiser]

I stopped all social media a while ago. Unless you consider hackernews, reddit, etc. social media. I always considered these news aggregators/forums as different but I digress.

I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.

For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.

[glenstein]

It does raise a question if there's such a thing as a "minimum effective dose" of news consumption, and diminishing returns at certain thresholds of consumption. For instance, is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?

[nonethewiser]

That is a good question and I had the same thought while constructing it. Almost like stock market diversification. You can represent the entire market pretty well with just a handful of stocks.

However, this seems like an overwhelmingly NO:

>is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?

The NYT, and pretty much all publications, reflect a singular editorial perspective. I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.

[glenstein]

>I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.

Probably a convo for a different place and time, but strong disagree here. Calibrating relative to political polarization is relativism, and I'm not a relativist.

[nonethewiser]

Nor am I. I think we have a misunderstanding on the goal. My goal is to get a wide range of perspectives.

How did you interpret the goal? Perhaps the widest range of topics? Most closely aligned editorial viewpoint?

[glenstein]

I interpret the goal as being interested in truth. An approach to truth that identifies it with diversity of viewpoints is epistemological relativism. Instead you should look for things like strong journalistic practices and institutional track record.