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News is bad for you

theguardian.com

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Re: News is bad for you

#211

Post by voxic11 »

hsitz wrote: post #199
leokun wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson To be fair news papers are much different now than they were then. A history of newspapers in America will show you journalistic credibility was hard to come by early on.

I get that newspapers and the journalistic profession used to be different, and in many ways better, than they are now. Still, doesn't it strike you as interesting that brilliant, thoughtful people living at at the same time as those "better" newspapers made criticisms similar to those being made today? Thinking too poorly of the present and too well of the past is a common error. Or, on a related not, "There's nothi…

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

Re: News is bad for you

#212

Post by olegkhr »

hspain wrote: post #148

http://goodnewsgopher.com I made a news crawler that automatically filters out bad news articles using sentiment analysis. I like to think it offers a good reprieve from all of the negative, depressing news you get inundated with from the major media.

The first "positive" news today on our site is about execution in north korea... I guess automatic filtering is not ready yet to such kind of tasks....

Re: News is bad for you

#213

Post by hsitz »

voxic11 wrote: post #211
hsitz wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that newspapers and the journalistic profession used to be different, and in many ways better, than they are now. Still, doesn't it strike you as interesting that brilliant, thoughtful people living at at the same time as those "better" newspapers made criticisms similar to those being made today? Thinking too poorly of the present and too well of the past is a common error. Or, on a related not, "There's nothi…

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

Hmm, I certainly thought he was implying that things used to be better. The fact that "journalistic credibility was hard to come by" was surely a good thing, no? It means readers are applying more stringent standards to what they read. As opposed to now, when (supposed) journalistic credibility is easier to come by, but worth much less. . . .

Re: News is bad for you

#214

Post by kissickas »

hsitz wrote: post #213
voxic11 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

Hmm, I certainly thought he was implying that things used to be better. The fact that "journalistic credibility was hard to come by" was surely a good thing, no? It means readers are applying more stringent standards to what they read. As opposed to now, when (supposed) journalistic credibility is easier to come by, but worth much less. . . .

Quite the contrary, I believe, and I'm sure your original parent comment was making the opposite point of what you think.

As far as I remember from grade school, newspapers in the US started doing legitimate work around the time of "muckrakers," early investigative journalists. It seems we've returned to the days of yellow journalism, when sensationalist articles were written just to push up circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

Re: News is bad for you

#215

Post by kabisote »

While it is wise not to believe everything we read in the news, it does not follow that there is nothing we can trust. The key may be to have a healthy skepticism, while keeping an open mind.

Re: News is bad for you

#216

Post by dinkumthinkum »

npsimons wrote: post #201
crazygringo wrote: post #132

I agree... but I think there are two important caveats. 1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest. 2) News does have explanatory power, but mostly in weekly mags like The Economist, New Yorker, etc., and occasionally in anal…

1) Some news is important, purely for social (not informational) reasons. When you show up to the office, you want to know why everyone's talking about Miley Cyrus! And you need to know who won the Superbowl, even if you have no interest. No, just no. Maybe I'll sound like a curmudgeon, but that information is totally worthless, and for people like me, is exactly the kind of thing that makes me depressed. "Oh, hey, s…

Recreated a pointless warfare act ... Man HN has a strong connection to the real world!

Re: News is bad for you

#217

Post by dinkumthinkum »

vacri wrote: post #208

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. This is an amazingly bad example. Most news sources would be leading the torch-and-pitchfork brigade to either the relevant…

Exactly, most are proceeding as if the OP is correct while neglecting that the basic example is completely wrong.

Re: News is bad for you

#218

Post by pfisch »

mynewwork wrote: post #179
base698 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, then I used a bad example, but I really don't think I did. Off topic, but... I recently bought a days usage from put.io with bitcoin. They got their money instantly, I don't have to worry about a hacker getting my credit card info or using more bitcoins in my wallet than I gave. I didn't have to enter a bunch of personal information to prove my identity.

When a hacker gets your credit card info, you're liable for $50 and have the hassle of a few days without your card until you get new one. When a hacker gets your bitcoin wallet, they can empty out your entire account.

It is just sooo much easier to get credit card information though. You literally give all of it to everyone any time you use it.

I don't really know why credit cards don't have a public/private key situation but they don't, so people are just stealing them constantly or applying for them with a bunch of stolen personal information and then running up your credit in ways that are pretty difficult to detect.

A lot of the fraud that is occurring today is because the systems we are using to transmit wealth digitally are inherently very insecure.

Re: News is bad for you

#220

Post by dinkumthinkum »

sgt wrote: post #96

Just stick to reading HN. If outside news is significantly important, then it'll reach HN too.

... But if you only read HN ... Let's say that news is really as bad as everyone is saying, that must mean that people are basically mindless and necessarily believe everything simply because they consume it ... Ok, but if that's case and you only consume HN comments and believe the general echo chamber ... I think you will end up with a bizarre conception of the real world ...
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