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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

#321

Post by chris_wot »

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…

It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error.

It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#322

Post by concinds »

andrewflnr wrote: post #273
agumonkey wrote: post #271

What seals the deal about news is that for the vast majority mainstream medias are both late and innacurate[1] compared to just reading from upstream sources (medicine, technology, economy, geopolitical events). Also now twitter and the like are taking the night spot. Anything happening then won't be covered by most medias, or in a hurry which means they'll be as crude as a twitter feed. Lots of wasted "brain" time.…

What's a good "upstream" for geopolitics?

Stratfor is the FT of geopolitics. Specialized press, much better than mainstream media with its mediocrity bias (sensationalism).

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#323

Post by ivanhoe »

To me this is a bit like throwing out all the mirrors from your house because you don't like your new haircut. You can ignore all the news, but the world producing those news will still be out there, exactly the same (good/bad/evil) and you'll still have to live in it. Keeping your eyes shut can help your inner peace, but it will not stop outside problems from hitting you in the face just as hard as anyone else. Except that you will not see them coming...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#324

Post by hrxn »

jomohke wrote: post #179
hrxn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [..] There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic. In my opinion, in some cases like this, the lengthy thousands word articles are often much worse.

Can you give an example? I suspect you're referring to the same short-term ones the author is deriding, not the journalistic kind that take time to research and prepare.

Not a specific one, I meant more generally. My point is that length alone isn't a reliable indicator for (journalistic) quality.

It is, to some extend. Long articles, with obvious effort for research etc., are more likely to be better than short pieces that for the most part are just commentary, on average at least.

But this is not a causational relationship. I've read long essays where you could easily tell the tremendous amount of work put into them, but then I did some research on my own and found out that the premisses are extremely dubious. And so the whole thing just collapses..

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#325

Post by boggydepot »

Related, a documentary film by John Pilger about the news we get:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glnYs7Fz0SM

As for the "concern" topic. I believe it's an evidence that you have to do something about it. But first, one must seek out the truth just as Socrates advised us millennias ago. Living comfortably is just not possible in an unexamined life because we are by nature rational beings. You can probably ignore, as they say, ignorance is bliss, but only until it hits.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#326

Post by hrxn »

sean_patel wrote: post #198
hrxn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But.. but what happened to "refugees welcome"?

> But.. but what happened to "refugees welcome"? It died around the same time German women were molested by the dozens during New Year in Hamburg by newly arrived high-testosterone male refugees from war-torn Syria and parts of Africa (via Greece)

Yes, Hamburg as well, but I think Cologne definitely had the bigger impact :)

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#327

Post by rndgermandude »

leephillips wrote: post #86
gnarbarian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole FUD campaign regarding "Fake News" is comically hypocritical in my opinion. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article calling them out for it: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactur... Edit: Ironically, that post was doing great until it got flagged. Edit 2: It has been unflagged Edit 3: Flagged again.

Greenwald's "excellent" piece is itself fake news. It deliberately misrepresents the reporting done by Kurt Eichenwald about the leaked emails. We know it's deliberate because he's distorted the story the same way in the past and it's been pointed out to him. Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false, but showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russia…

Eichenwald claims on live TV the email in question was "manipulated" by Russia. Just watch the video that Eichenwald himself embedded in his article (at 01:49).

> There are two possibilities: One is that both the Russians and Donald Trump were tricked into believing of a manipulated email or the Russians manipulated it and Donald Trump fell for it

Greenwald counters emails were not doctored/manipulated and that saying they are is "Fake News" itself.

Greenwald is actually right: The emails were not manipulated as far as we know, and there is strong circumstantial evidence that there was no manipulation (e.g. thanks to gmail DKIM signatures).

The quote taken from the email that Trump and RT/Sputnik attributed to Blumenthal was indeed misattributed and actually a quote from an Eichenwald piece that Blumenthal merely copied in full into his email. That criticism is very valid, but that misrepresentation by Trump and/or RT/Sputnik does not make the email itself "manipulated".

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#328

Post by agumonkey »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #292
andrewflnr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good "upstream" for geopolitics?

Very hard to find, because it's not a hard factual area like medicine. Take a page from anthropologists and look for a variety of primary sources, or sources that do good analysis albeit with known (or explicit) bias. Personally, for anything international and important I like to mix BBC (known bias), Al Jazeera International (different known bias), and Economist (explicit bias, in-depth analysis). Your tastes may di…

And somehow politics ~= news. That was the first meaning of journalism, relating politics.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#329

Post by jonathanstrange »

masondixon wrote: post #302
jonathanstrange wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Ignoring bad news for the sake of feeling a bit better surely isn't a sign of being adult and mature. However, I also believe that TV news and constant news checking are unnecessary and can make you depressed. You can easily get a wrong perception of mankind in general and the stupidity of other people by consuming too much news. This happened to me recently with news about Trump and the composition of his n…

News companies all have owners and management. I think it is important to be informed about who the owners of newspapers are, and what their political views are, because ultimately the owner will hire and fire the Chief Editor who sets the tone for the paper. It is also important to know what the Chief Editor's political views are too. Its important to ask yourself why you trust a certain news outlet.

I disagree with you (a lot, actually). You can never trust just one news outlet alone, but only ever several news outlets+reputed press agencies. That doesn't mean that you need to compulsively check all of them constantly, though, and that was my whole point. If there is some real news to share, all newspapers will quickly jump on it anyway, which a quick comparison will easily confirm.

You can read any reputable well-established newspaper in the world whose language you understand and be well-informed enough for anything except for making particular business decisions. It doesn't matter at all whether the newspaper is right wing and conservative or liberal and progressive. That's because they report the same daily news which is based on the same reality, and any newspaper worth reading clearly distinguishes between opinion and news. I've compared many newspapers during my lifetime, and the only differences between them in the news sections is in the selection (what goes to front, what's on page 3) and some bias in the presentation, and neither small differences in the selection nor any bias in the presentation is of much relevance to any adult with a brain of his own.

The tone of the paper is vastly irrelevant for its news contents, it only influences whether you personally like editorials and invited opinions or not, and these are not news, of course.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#330

Post by TH3R3LL1K »

bshimmin wrote: post #261

I can't really get onboard with this. A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right. But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all…

I'm going to disagree with you. I live in a country where the local politics always floods the news. There is always a corruption charge against the president or some other politician. I find it very repetitive. Nothing is new.

I'm a technology enthusiast, so I would rather read articles on that.

I also feel much happier when not informed about the politics about my country.

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