Did You Hear We Got Osama?

What helps me get off the news pipeline:

No one is remembered for being well read. - some blog post I've lost, but the quote is still written on my chalkboard, luckily.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. _why

EDIT: I know it's ironic that these came from online sources. I guess the point is about balance and focused, purposeful consumption you later use.

I use a combination of IRC(active) and Twitter/Tweetdeck(passive) for most of my online "reading" these days. It tracks the most social things: people, global topics, and "meeting places," rather than "bloggers", "pop news", or "discussion forums", which have a service/task-oriented feel to them. It is addictive, of course, so I do have to turn it off occasionally, but on balance, I get a lot of benefit out of it, since it's low-maintenance and fairly high-signal, albeit a bit prone to "what i ate for dinner" type spam.

I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest-common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.

News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.

*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.

Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html

This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)

The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.

Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.

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 composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

In our winner-take-all system, the natural constituency for a third party would have to be willing to withdraw their support from the less unfavorable major party candidates, and give elections over to the other side's nutjobs. That's a very high cost just to communicate a trend to politicians, which could have been done by straw poll without the resulting damage to civil rights, the economy, church-centric values, or whatever you're most concerned about. The cure for tactical voting is some other polling system like IRV or approval, where I don't lose all possible effect on outcome just because my favorite doesn't win.