181–190 of 212 posts
Almost everything we do in adult life is to make social life easier. We go to college, learn new language, we read news, we buy things. All this has an small practical value but huge social impact. Knowing what's going on the news is a HUGE part of our relationship with others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is there not a service that tracks news stories and algorithmically relates them into the narrative of history, driven by the singular question of "why?"? Something in between google news and quora/stack exchange (anonymized to avoid embarrassment of dumb questions like "what are Israel and Palestine fighting over anyway?" but with a points/voting system to propagate quality answers.) Whoever makes this, please T…
I am working on this very thing, and in fact it's called Whybase ( http://whybase.com ).
John Irving nailed it in A Prayer for Owen Meany: "Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may…
Great quote. Two thoughts. One, i hope irving was referring to the medioocre tabloids as opposed to real papers. I've had the opportunity to attend some of the social functions for pulitzer judges in the past and they get some really quality content. Second, that cheesburger metaphor is hilarious in today's context of lolcat memes/speak/etc
Unless your job is to directly action the news (e.g. if you're a trader, in which case I hope you have better sources than newspapers), "news" makes zero difference to your life, no matter how greatly written it might be. This is true of all papers, not just tabloids.
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…
You may need special means to get these outside the UK. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/podcasts/ ) I recommend:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/maths http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/americana http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/analysis ...well, you get the hint. There are very many hours of great quality reporting there.
I loved Americana... until Radio 4 removed it and replaced it with an interminable panel game featuring four of the usual suspect "comedians" who seem to take up an inordinate amount of the station's airtime.
Now, I go the other way, and listen to a lot of stuff on NPR stations from the US.
Reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes quote: "His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composit…
Great allegory except Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not a neuroscientist, so there isn't actually any evidence to back up that theory.
TLDR: BS! Reading good books unrelated to your main work is more necessary than ever. And that'a why closing the pipes of the noise is a good idea.
This is a topic that I've thought some on in that my company is in the recommendations space, and some thoughts on what make news recommendations difficult: The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk. I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very…
Reading How to do X better articles, on the other hand, not so much.
But I didn't write this comment just to agree with the OP. I wanted to add..
Say that you somehow didn’t know we found and killed Osama Bin Laden last year, I claim that your life would be virtually the same if you did.
That is probably true, but let me add something that takes even more of people's (or at the typical american male's) thought capacity and the knowledge of it is DEFINITELY meaningless: The fact that the Giants won the Super Bowl two weeks ago.
With the disclaimer that I am formerly a pretty big sports fan, it astounds me how much detail people know about pro sports. They can talk endlessly, for hours. The amount of time they spend just attaining that knowledge each season - it's gotta be comparable to the amount of time it takes to learn and become proficient in a new programming language. It's the same amount of time to perhaps take and do all the work for not one but several MIT/Stanford online learning courses. It's the same amount of time that, devoted to exercise, would transform an overweight person into shape. Every year! Yet they spend that time watching and reading about the NFL.. - and to what end? So they can be knowledgeable enough about the second-string tight end on the Packers that they can have a locker-room conversation about it?
Of course, the same can be said about entertainment in general - indeed, the OP's point was that news, while claiming to be important, is just entertainment. And while I didn't watch any news or football games this year, I'd be a hypocrite not to point out that I did watch a lot of Star Trek with my son. The consequence of this became clear to me this week - we punished him this week for something he did by disallowing all screens - which meant the TV didn't go on all week (and my wife and I didn't watch TV either.) Without thinking about it, by the end of the week I had come up with an idea and was hacking away at a whole new side-project. I haven't done that in a long time. Feels good. Any my son? He's reading. Got into a whole new series of books he found at the library and has set himself a goal to read every one of them.
tl;dr: if news is a waste of time, what about sports and other idle entertainment?