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

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

m.guardiannews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 245 posts

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#41

Post by InclinedPlane »

ctdonath wrote: post #6

Any suggestions for a good neutral concise must-know news source?

Sadly, no such thing exists. One thing that I've found useful is to use wikipedia as a news source. It seems odd, but for big, complex events wikipedia often has the best overall coverage. Most news stories are just little bites which assume you're caught up contextually, or just don't care about context. Whereas wikipedia will usually do a much better job of providing all the information together. For example, take a look at this roundup of the current crisis over North Korea and compare it to contemporary news coverage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_Korean_crisis

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#42

Post by Hitchhiker »

I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune.

" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "

" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "

" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "

" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "

source : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#43

Post by greenyoda »

webwielder wrote: post #7

See also "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

In the article (written in 2006), Aaron Swartz wrote:

"This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me?"

Ironically, he did unfortunately end up as a news story in which the government did something bad and he was personally involved.

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#45

Post by greenyoda »

shurcooL wrote: post #40

"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it - allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you." I agree, yet I find my main use for news is to make me feel connected with other humans... If I cut myself off from it, I…

As the article pointed out, you don't have to consume an endless, up to the minute, stream of news to know what's happening in the world. There are magazine articles, which are better researched and go into the stories in more detail, and there are also tons of books about recent history and politics. If you wait a week or a month before reading about some event, you can weed out a lot of the sensationalistic noise that constitutes news reporting, not to mention all the things that the reporters got wrong in the heat of the moment and had to correct later.

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#46

Post by dhughes »

I used to like watching the news but these days supposedly reputable news organizations are what tabloid shows were 20 years ago. "Guess what happened today!?" instead of just reading the news.

And everyone editorializes, everything has to be dramatic no news organizations seem to be impartial anymore news organizations are classed as either left or right of centre and people have to choose their side.

Someone once said about watching TV news "Your central nervous system isn't meant to handle seeing death and disaster everyday".

The only US news I like is PBS. Here in Canada CBC isn't too bad but I find it drifting to the left instead of the impartial center and also it seems to also be fascinated with making everything dramatic.

I think this problem with news these days is only for the under 30 crowd since it seems nobody I know under that age reads a newspaper or watches TV news, maybe at most a one paragraph blip on a website.

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#47

Post by jes5199 »

bbbhn wrote: post #36
rurounijones wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be opening myself up to some flak here but I think it is generally accepted that the BBC is one of, if not the, least biased news source (Excepting climate change.) Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news

Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.

BBC looks right-wing from where I'm standing.

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#48

Post by mmphosis »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #41
ctdonath wrote: post #6

Any suggestions for a good neutral concise must-know news source?

Sadly, no such thing exists. One thing that I've found useful is to use wikipedia as a news source. It seems odd, but for big, complex events wikipedia often has the best overall coverage. Most news stories are just little bites which assume you're caught up contextually, or just don't care about context. Whereas wikipedia will usually do a much better job of providing all the information together. For example, take…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

#49

Post by zabramow »

tathagatadg wrote: post #18

I used to read HN all day and felt good, elevated, enlightened ... pretty soon I was trying to learn every new language, trying every new framework, trying a new todo regime - needless to say I was getting no where. Soon I was very unhappy ... everybody was doing something cool other than me! Every Show HN: makes me feel I'm wasting my life in school ... and should dropout and start building what I've started sometim…

I had a similar experience with Twitter, especially in terms of keeping tabs on competitors. Recently, I've stopped reading the tech blogs and I've found it's made me a ton happier and allowed me to focus on what I'm doing and stop looking in the rear view mirror.

This post really resonated with me.

Post reply on HN