Things You Notice When You Quit the News • Hacker News Board

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#361

Post by thewarrior » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:28 PM UTC

ElonsMosque wrote: post #315

thewarrior wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the arguments here remind me of the puritanical strains of religions. For eg: I am against Wahhabi Islam. They're just like other Muslims but they take percepts that are valid in Islam and run with them to the ridiculous extreme. Same goes for cutting down on Social media or regulating your consumption of news. There is nothing to be gained by turning into a puritan. It makes you feel good about yourself for…

I agree to a certain extent on your point about puritans. However I know people that recognized they have a tendency to overdo news or social media as soon as they get a bit of it. That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse c…

That is true of sex,alcohol or food or anything else.

You could go on a "fast" , ie avoid it for a while to break a destructive dependency but avoiding entirely ?

No thanks.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#362

Post by acdha » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

Zahreddine wrote: post #202

michaelchisari wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is the first election where "spirit cooking" and "pizzagate" conspiracies were put on equal footing with foreign policy and economic positions.

When MSM pushes false/sponsored narratives to start wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya as part of "foreign policy", I can see why "pizzagate" gets equal validity.

Don't play the false equivalence game: it's part of the problem.

Pizzagate had nothing other than fever dreams.

In contrast, all of the wars you talked about were based on real things. The Iraq war was started on falsehoods but the media was reporting what government officials were saying and attributed those claims to them. They should have been more skeptical, yes, but that's a completely different level of discussion compared to a bunch of trolls and gullible people free-associating completely unfettered by reality.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#363

Post by ideonexus » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

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…

There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books.

He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?

Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#364

Post by ideonexus » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:50 PM UTC

One of the contributors of FiveThirtyEight made an observation that, along with this article, has convinced me to start filtering out the news. They were discussing what public policy initiatives we could expect from the incoming administration, and she said that she could not speculate on the subject because Donald Trump's signal-to-noise ratio in his public statements was so low as to render forecasting initiatives impossible.

That's the problem here. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low in the news in general. I've spent the whole last year reading speculation about Clinton's emails, Trump's cabinet picks, and shocking news from "anonymous sources" that turned out to be 99% noise when the final draft of the news came out. Why did I waste so many hours reading baseless speculation masquerading as authoritative information?

I'm not wasting my time on noise anymore.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#365

Post by JohnStrange » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

vog wrote: post #254

white-flame wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find realclearpolitics.com to be a broad slice of articles and videos from "both sides", as well as holding actual raw polling data when questionably sounding statistics are being bandied about. It also links to other non-political news in other areas, showing the major splash headlines. Its front page is also very information dense, so it's a lot more efficient than hitting all those sites individually. I believe…

> I find realclearpolitics.com to be a broad slice of articles and videos from "both sides" I didn't know that site and just had a look at it. I found that really disappointing! All "news" for today are about Trump and nothing else: Sunday, December 11 - Trump Honeymoon Begins: Confidence in Economy Booming | Cohen & Thomas, NYT - Why "Trump Boom" Is a Real Possibility | Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate - Here's How…

These articles don't seem to be news at all. I've seen this all the time on social media recently, many people seem to have lost the ability of distinguishing between news stories and opinion pieces/editorials. :(

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#366

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

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…

Repackaging reports and press releases (without attribution!) is major problem in news everywhere.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#367

Post by tvanantwerp » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #361

ElonsMosque wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to a certain extent on your point about puritans. However I know people that recognized they have a tendency to overdo news or social media as soon as they get a bit of it. That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse c…

That is true of sex,alcohol or food or anything else. You could go on a "fast" , ie avoid it for a while to break a destructive dependency but avoiding entirely ? No thanks.

For some people, those things take over their lives in a horribly destructive way. Not everyone has the disposition to have "just a bit" of these things and no more. If you've got an addiction to something that's sucking the life out of you, avoiding it entirely makes a lot of sense to me.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#368

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

siberianbear wrote: post #203

colordrops wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist also has a fairly evident political agenda.

Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind. In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist…

I think you've moved to the right, or this is another case of "reality having a leftwing bias". Or perhaps issues not reducing clearly to left/right.

The Economist were always Mill/Smith liberals, in favour of free trade, light but effective regulation, against the War on Drugs, pro-migration etc. They have a strong tendency to recommend economic liberalism regardless of what the problem is. These days the "right" have moved to "illiberal" positions - restricting free trade and migration. That may be what you're seeing.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#369

Post by ldev » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

cyberferret wrote: post #70

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of…

>I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all.

You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#370

Post by trgn » Mon, Dec 12, 2016, 2:22 PM UTC

jcoffland wrote: post #181

cyberferret wrote: post #70

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of…

> I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.

ha yes! I don't have a TV but waste hours on the internet instead. Streaming shows, skimming think pieces and their comment sections (that's a form of masochism), clicking through listicles with funny pictures (that's a form of retardation). It's bad in different way. The only advantage I think is that the internet is not "loud", fewer pundits yelling, or bit narrators yapping in that childish cadence. It's a huge time-suck nonetheless.