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Did You Hear We Got Osama?

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Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#11

Post by choxi »

mvkel wrote: post #3

Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions. If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not. Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring perso…

haha, that's fascinating -- I can appreciate that some perspectives don't form correctly until you're older.

i'd like to mention that i wasn't really writing this from the perspective of productivity. i think it's a wellness thing to fade out noise.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#12

Post by zalew »

rsinger9 wrote: post #5

How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news? For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to? The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.

> how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?

If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#13

Post by mdc »

This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#14

Post by Zirro »

Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this.

"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."

It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.

Thank you for making me realize it.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#15

Post by celoyd »

rsinger9 wrote: post #5

How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news? For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to? The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.

Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot.

Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.

(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#16

Post by zalew »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #10

I changed my habits a few months ago after reading http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage . I'm really happy I did that. "RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites" I have 6-7 feeds in my Reeder.app and check them weekly. (Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928

I ditched rss readers a long time ago and refuse to use any service with an 'unread' counter except email.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#17

Post by pork »

zalew wrote: post #12
rsinger9 wrote: post #5

How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news? For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to? The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.

> how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to? If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?

Sure you can! Like everything else, you have to pick your sources. I go with NYT and the IHT for "American" sources, and the BBC and Al Jaz, and then occassionally the local newspapers if I'm bored. NYT is quite decent, IMO, although obviously far from perfect.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#18

Post by andrewflnr »

tristan_louis wrote: post #7

Let me be the contrarian here. If you limit yourself to a few content sources, you won't be able to make the leaps that come out of having access to information outside those sources and will eventually fall prey to group-think. Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.

I agree. Good creative output requires at least some degree of good creative input (especially, IMHO, in more artistic endeavors like creative writing). You need other people's ideas to help expand your own, even as you try to escape from their boxes. Yet, if you spend all your time doing that, you'll never reap the benefits.

I'm yet to find the balance.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#19

Post by rcthompson »

mvkel wrote: post #3

Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions. If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not. Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring perso…

I don't think your point is at odds with the OP. Even though the OP essentially advocates cutting out all new sources from your life at the end of the article, the real point of the article is to disabuse you of the illusion that these news sources are contributing to your productivity. So, if you want to keep up with the news so you can participate in water cooler discussions and build your social network[1], that's fine. But if you are spending large fractions of your time reading news because you think it will somehow improve your productivity, or even make you more informed, you're fooling yourself.

[1] I mean your actual social network, in the sense we all used that term before Facebook came along.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#20

Post by peterwwillis »

It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read.

HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.

I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.

Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:

  * Microsoft unveils new, more window-like logo for Windows 8
  * Robin Thicke Arrested for Pot Possession
  * The mostly good and sometimes bad Top 10 moments of Tim Wakefield's Red Sox career
  * [John] Glenn worries the US is ceding its space leadership
  * Ohio AG DeWine switches from Romney to Santorum
  * Identity Theft Tops IRS's 2012 "Dirty Dozen" Tax Scams
  * GOP candidates fighting over Michigan
  * Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, dies at 43
  * FDA Still Wary of Diet Pill's Side Effects
I don't want noise, but sometimes I need noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.
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