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Things You Notice When You Quit the News

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Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#241

Post by robryan »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #148
blhack wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a fe…

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cau…

You see this all the time with startup news. Read a mainstream article about a startup you know personally.

Sure the main details are all there, but the small details are changed/ omitted to fit the mould of the story the author had in mind.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#242

Post by robryan »

nether wrote: post #170
alistproducer2 wrote: post #118

This is incredibly relevant to me rn. I recently cut the cord and quit FB. I legitimately do feel much happier. My FB feed was just a stream of things to get pissed about and MSNBC was just filling my head with other people's opinions. Here's my daily routine: skim thehill.com, politico.com, reddit.com/r/news for headlines zerohedge.com when I want to see what's going on in right-wing land newsblok.com if I want to s…

You quit FB so that you could read a shitload more of news?

The news they want to see, not whatever news the Facebook algorithm is feeding them.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#245

Post by uppermcleod »

I was on my way to get riled up at "all the stupid shit" on google news (or if that failed, RT) when I decided to stop by HN first...

I lived in London for 10 years and could never understand why people would read the free tabloids given out in the mornings on the way in and out of the stations. Surely the fact that theyre free is a red flag. During the 2009 financial Crisis I was living in italy and my tv had few English channels (I had no internet access at home(!!!)) and so I watched a significant amount of CNN. This was my first real exposure to continuous US style TV news and it caused me a significant amount of stress due to the nature of my work. However, watching that news provided me with little other than anxiety - it is a strange kind of entertainment, a bit like a horror movie or a thriller or a rollercoaster.

I worked for a large news organisation in London which published tabloids and non-tabloids, where I had free subs to all their papers - I never read any of them and was even less likely to having knowledge of how they are put together.

So, with the italy exception I was mostly no-news most of my life. Something has happened to me lately though - I like to find news articles which are clearly biased, let myself get worked up, find other publications which confirm it, get a bit more worked up, take a break and remember it's all a load of crap. I'm turning into a bored old man. I suppose this is one reason people read those free tabloids on the London tube - it is much easier to stimulate an emotional reaction when something is "real". And if you have an emotional response, it must be meaningful, right??? RIGHT?!!?

I would like to thank OP for putting me on the path to recovery this morning. The first step is the hardest...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#246

Post by Dylan16807 »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #148
blhack wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources. This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?" I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a fe…

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cau…

>read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate

This was not stated. The opposite was implied in GP's case.

It's relevant to mention this, but it is emphatically not what was being described.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#247

Post by varjag »

eigenvector wrote: post #235
zmb_ wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the opposite. And I'm definitely not blind to the Gell-Mann Amnesia, I notice it on Wikipedia all the time. I've noticed that in The Economist the articles about my field of technology, work, and my small home country, have been accurate to the point that I suspect they have had experts in the field involved in creating them. That gives me confidence in the articles about issues I'm not intimately fa…

Interesting. My own area of knowledge is renewable energy, a topic which appears with moderate frequency in TE. I would say 8/10 articles are merely repackaging reports published by major global consultancies like McKinsey, Navigant, etc. that I had seen two or three months earlier through my employer (a large multinational energy company). I would not say the information is not correct, but it hardly insightful and…

Well that's why it's not called The Technologist I guess :) It's hard to expect non-specialist publication to write anything non-trite to an expert in the field, but just not botching up the basic facts is often refreshing.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#248

Post by vog »

jokoon wrote: post #240

I've always thought that reading the news is only informing you of the very recent events, but by doing so, you lose the context of what is really important, which is the opposite of how history works. One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography. I often watch a german/french short TV show called "Le dessous des cartes" (translates to "Under the Maps"). Th…

> I've always thought that reading the news is only informing you of the very recent events

[...]

> One way to be better informed would be to read a daily digest of world history and contemporary geography

Wow, this is really strange. It seems you are so bombarded by minutely news, that daily news appear slow and well-thought to you?

A weekly summary is more than enough for most events. Let the dust settle. Give the journalists (and Wikipedians) some time to do their research and investigation. Same for politicians, firefighter, scientists, lawyers, judges or whoever is also involved.

The first days after and important event are full of false claims, mostly by accident, simply because nobody really knows. No earler than a week later (sometimes it takes a month or more!) the facts and non-facts are mostly separated. But then, nobody cares anymore.

If you delay the "news", you get to know from the event, but also get a well-informed picture, without the useless crap of the first minutes, hours and days after the event.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#249

Post by cmarschner »

Media has an important function for society, that of creating an "agora", a place where society comes together. In essence, it is an information processing system - given that we surpassed the range of 400-or-so people societies where everybody knows everybody else, how can the individual get enough information so that she can function to serve the society? In the case of western societies this means for example being able to vote, or get voted for. An ill-informed, egotistical individual might become a danger for society as a whole, like we are seeing in current US politics and the discussion about the "post factual" society. The term itself hints towards a failure of the media system. And to that end, the filter bubbles of social networkd have a huge responsibility in it. Being informed means that one has to be confronted with inconvenient truths and become part of the quest to resolve them through argument and reason. Given that we now have unprecedented means to filter out diverging opinions, we as technologists have a new responsibility for this that we are not living up to. It might have to take a catastrophe first to hand off the power of making decisions here - eg new policies - that force social media companies to optimize for other metrics than just "engagement" to live up to this responsibility. Chanced are the catastrophe is just unfolding in front of our eyes.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#250

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

adrienne wrote: post #130
copperx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist is a good weekly review; the stories are very short but the information density is high.

The Economist is a good review, but it's laughable that so many people think it answers for "not particularly ideological". Capitalism is an ideology - albeit one basically invisible to Hacker News members - and the Economist has that one in spades.

School of Agnelli and Rotschild (proprietors), the "dulce et decorum est pro libertate mori" sort.

(This freedom stuff has to be dosed carefully: owners moving themselves or their stuff, fine and dandy. Cattle moving around unsupervised or mouthing off, not good.)

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