I feel like i wrote this article! i stopped watching news/ propaganda/pr for a year and a half and i can't believe i wasted my time back then!
The power of ignoring mainstream news
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Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#32I recently had the opposite revelation: Most social sites are too much of a distraction, feeding us with pointless weakly-written opinions and things that have zero effect in my life. Their signal to noise ratio is definitely lower, and is not compensated by the higher amount of info they pile up. Humans are by nature curious about what's happening, and no matter how much one bulks up at the local gym, they are proba…
You're presenting a false dichotomy: Joel never said "switch to social sites"; in fact, he suggested we all go out and do things.
If you feel like you need to "quench your thirst" for current news, maybe traditional outlets work better for you than social media. Personally, I agree with Joel; most of us in the modern world are gluttons for information, and consume more than we even want, let alone what we need.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this to a social news site.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#33Good news come from being close to the source while having means of integrating the knowledge. For programming topics I found irc channels and conferences are hard to beat. Unless you work in interesting companies.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#34I found that when I let mainstream news go and tried to stay informed via social media, blogs, and Reddit, I felt informed. Then I got a Kindle and tried a mainstream newspaper subscription. I quickly noticed that the newspaper often disagreed with what I'd "learn" from Reddit and blogs, and upon further investigation the newspaper was almost always correct. Apparently the Reddit circle jerk is not as good at news as…
Examples?
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#35One of the problem that the OP blog points out is that mainstream news dish out bad news that encourage an exaggerated and wraped fearful worldview. For example, when a mass murder incident happens, people talk a lot about gun violence and how it's gripping the country and we should do something about it. Of course, they forgot that 40K people die in car accidents, 600K more die of heart disease and about 500K more die of cancer each year. A mass murderer is essentially an amateur when they are compared to inanimate or impersonal killers like cells going out of control or high blood pressure.
People aren't going to stop talking about these incidents and they aren't going to stop being terribly uninformed with just this blog post. What they need is some sort of media campaign to inform them of the real risk of dying and what they really need to fear.
This is what I called "fear inoculation", a term I coined at http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts#fear-inocula...
In essence, fear inoculation is basically protection against memes that promote irrational fear of certain things like terrorist incidents and airplane crash.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#36It's not only a problem of negativity though. It's also about churnalism, which compromises the integrity of a lot of mainstream news.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#37I feel like i wrote this article! i stopped watching news/ propaganda/pr for a year and a half and i can't believe i wasted my time back then!
Ditto, but I did it back around 2008. Most of the articles I read are less on current events than they are on subjects that lean towards timeless ideas, concepts and theories. Plus I already have tons of interests (mostly humanities) and that keeps my plate full. Recently, I also started 'printing as PDF' any articles I want to read later and putting them in a folder on my desktop.
Being aware of what constitutes propaganda/pr allows me to watch some mainstream films and TV shows while not being as brain-washed as someone who watched them 'to relax'/unfiltered. Being a person who likes to think and analyze, I can relax/rest when I sleep.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#38I found that when I let mainstream news go and tried to stay informed via social media, blogs, and Reddit, I felt informed. Then I got a Kindle and tried a mainstream newspaper subscription. I quickly noticed that the newspaper often disagreed with what I'd "learn" from Reddit and blogs, and upon further investigation the newspaper was almost always correct. Apparently the Reddit circle jerk is not as good at news as…
Eh, as much as I want to agree with you (and I do, reddit is a cesspool at times) you still can't argue with this:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/trapwire/since1...
and this:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/flame
Trapwire: funded by rich people who don't want to get noticed Flame: software showing off the usa's capability for cryptovirology and basically saying our most public stuff beats your best secret shit
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#39"Not only is watching news going to put an out of proportion amount of negative thoughts in your mind, which will affect what you can achieve, it is also valuable time where there are many amazing and meaningful things you could be doing"
Well let's add to this then. What about time wasted sitting in synagogue or church saying the same prayers over and over again? To me that's even a bigger waste of time. What if people got together and actually learned something during that time (if together) or on their own. To me at least the sermons were always interesting (ymmv of course) but they were mainly filed under "entertainment" value.
That said there is a value to main stream news depending on what your business or product is. It is important to have the beat on what others are watching and thinking to me it does have value. Some people say "who cares what the WSJ or NYT thinks"? But the truth is others care and carry that info out to people and it's a good idea to know what others are going to believe and think. That doesn't mean that you have to watch mainstream everyday, but I wouldn't go as far as saying the right approach is to stop watching TV totally as Joel says he has done. Or reading mainstream news.
Re: The power of ignoring mainstream news
#40Here is the kernel of good advice in this post: consuming news can be addicting, can create a negative worldview, and might not provide the informational content you think it may. However, the author then makes a series of suggestions for all the things you should be doing with your time, such as: (a) playing videogames; (b) mentoring other startup founders; (c) building your own startup; (d) writing on your blog; (e…
This makes me wonder: which is more valuable? writing blog posts or reading actual news?