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News is bad for you
21–30 of 239 posts
Re: News is bad for you
#22Information overload is depressing. No, I mean it can cause depression. Mild perhaps as opposed to clinical, but you're more stressed when overloaded. My first thoughts on reading the title, however, went here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU
"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."
Re: News is bad for you
#23While I agree with the sentiment, Rolf Dobelli himself is a plagiarist. This whole reasoning is basically stolen from Nassim Taleb. http://fooledbyrandomness.com/dobelli.htm http://blog.chabris.com/2013/09/similarities-between-rolf-do... EDIT: For another take on not reading the news, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
I thought I'd heard that line before...
Re: News is bad for you
#24Happier at the moment but possibly a lot madder when you find out how terrible the future might become.
Re: News is bad for you
#25I made the decision to quit news broadcasts (TV and radio) some time ago and I don't consider myself any less informed.
Scientific research publications, local papers, special-interest blogs and good old fashioned conversation are more than enough to get the useful information.
It's extraordinarily rare that the TV/radio news ever contains any information that's directly useful to my life and I have better things to do than pan for gold whilst being subjected to varying degrees of propaganda.
Re: News is bad for you
#26I do not believe that news itself is bad for you. Reading about horrors and then doing nothing to follow-up is bad for you. But these days I do not have to do that. I am not helpless. I can see the Philippines being destroyed and donate money, donate time, talk to people I know who are from there or who are there now. This is true of any event. We are ruined by inaction, not by information.
I can consume any and all news and have it be beneficial to me. Not because I now know facts, but because I can understand each of the stories as a glimpse into the lives and processes of other people in all disciplines and all walks of life. In doing so I can create equality where, in my own mind at the least, it may not have already existed.
Re: News is bad for you
#27Whether news is bad for you or not probably depends more than a little on what the source is. I don't watch television—for years our TV was in a box in a closet, brought out mostly just for watching the Olympics. But I do look at Google News and try to train it to give me mostly long-form suggestions about science and world issues from diverse sources with professional reporting and editing. That helps. The claim tha…
> Google News and try to train it
Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?
Re: News is bad for you
#28What is the motive for a newspaper to tell people not to read news? Reverse psychology?
Strictly speaking it's not "the newspaper" saying this, but an op-ed contributor:
> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
Newspapers don't necessarily agree with the views they publish – though presumably they found this an interesting piece regardless.
Re: News is bad for you
#29The biggest problem with news is that it's about newness and rarity. Whereas what we actually need to know is mostly not new. Eg, "man eaten by alligator" is a billion times less important than "decades of data say you will likely get heart disease."
Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.
My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:
Not News - A car accident across town - A single crime in another state - Celebrities - Scandals - Daily stock market fluctuations
News - A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me - Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city - Economic trends and their underlying causes
Re: News is bad for you
#30Whether news is bad for you or not probably depends more than a little on what the source is. I don't watch television—for years our TV was in a box in a closet, brought out mostly just for watching the Olympics. But I do look at Google News and try to train it to give me mostly long-form suggestions about science and world issues from diverse sources with professional reporting and editing. That helps. The claim tha…
> Google News and try to train it Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?
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