Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did You Hear We Got Osama?

roshfu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 212 posts

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#21

Post by rcthompson »

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.

One of the OP's points is that most "news" sources are not actually informative, but rather just another form of entertainment. That is, they tell you things that your brain latches on to and wants to hear about, not things that you actually need to hear about. How do you respond to that?

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#22

Post by mvkel »

choxi wrote: post #11
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.

Gotcha; I definitely hear where you're coming from and admit my lifestyle could use an audit in this regard.

My first step was keeping my iPhone out of the bed room :)

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#23

Post by kiba »

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…

Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?

If you are not an expert on a political issue. You are uninformed, period. You don't have time to write papers, do extensive research, email scientists. The reality of being humans is that we don't know most of everything and we can't. We specialize, not have uber intelligent men decide the fate of humanity.

This is the problem with politics. It's not that we are stupid, it's just that our brain can't store and think through the vast amount of knowledge needed to decide on multiple complex issues. To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#24

Post by slamdunc »

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?

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

This reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that showed how Time magazine offers different cover stories for their international and their US issues on the same date. One example was the Arab Spring (international) and something on "doing chores" for us here in the US.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#25

Post by MichaelApproved »

Sure, knowing that Osama was killed isn't a life or death piece of information but staying informed is important to many people. It doesn't have to be binary - read it all or read nothing. You can quickly stay informed if you pick news sources that respect your time.

IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.

[1] http://skimthat.com - Crowd sourced news summaries.

Another source for news summaries is http://www.newser.com and if you like videos you can try http://www.newsy.com/

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#26

Post by spindritf »

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 don't read newspapers, or watch news, or follow current events at all, except for hn, and I agree that most if not all news is of completely no consequence to my life but I do have ~130 feeds in my rss reader and derive a lot of value from them.

From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).

So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#27

Post by mediaman »

peterwwillis wrote: post #20

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 tha…

Frequency and quality are negatively correlated when it comes to news.

I would recommend Instapaper's curated list of articles, which tend to be long-form and more interesting than most, as well as The Browser ("Writing Worth Reading") for curated quality content. http://www.thebrowser.com

But you're not going to find quality content many times a day, no matter where you look.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#28

Post by Karunamon »

celoyd wrote: post #15
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 pr…

>Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone.

One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.

Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#29

Post by joedev »

In "The Four Hour Work Week", Timothy Ferriss claims to not have read a newspaper for years. It's all about maximum output. Minimizing input is one great way to free up time and energy to drastically increase output.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

peterwwillis wrote: post #20

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 tha…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN