Stop Watching the News (2019)

News doesn't connect the collective decision-making process to politicians' actions - it connects it to what the news tells us politicians are doing and why. Effectively, it makes democracy less about rule by the people and more about rule by the press. That system is starting to break down in some countries and journalists are not happy about it.

Obligatory mention: Aaron Schwartz's "I hate the news". [0]

[0]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

> Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.

In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse.

He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.

There's a certain amount of sensationalization to get eyeballs with things like headlines, obviously, but I'd be surprised if you looked at the various news stories that caused public outrage over the course of a year, if more than a small percentage were actually mis-reported/factually incorrect when it came to mainstream news coverage by reputable organizations.

It's actually up for debate whether ego depletion is a real thing.

> Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6]

> ...

> In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33]

> A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34]

> In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5]

> Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?