Stop Reading News (2013)

Stop Reading News (2013)
fs.blog

I agree, to state simply: news becomes history

So, my understanding of history is: integral(news)dt + history_reading

I'd argue that watching the (news)dt occur also helps me to evaluate the quality/accuracy of the history_reading, to see how the sausage is made.

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"Like other purveyors of drugs, producers of news want you to consume more of it."

Sure, but also: "Like other purveyors of drugs, producers of _x_ want you to consume more of it."

I'm definitely interested in a better method for learning, but if my target is understanding historical context in my lifetime, what is honestly better than contextualizing today's news with (history * yesterday's news)?

> " think, is that we cannot reliably reflect/contextualize about today's news/events until it becomes history, i.e. reliability"

This is exactly my point so far:: the best approximation I have for contextualizing today's news is by examining the diff of today's history and yesterday's news.

I'm not confident in my grammar; let me make a graphic:

......................................

..........|yesterday|Today

news...| A ........ | x

history.| B ........ | C

......................................

diff(x, reality) ~= diff(A,C)

......................................

Given A, C, and x; my goal is to determine reality, with the assumption that x does not necessarily equal reality.

over repeated days:

diff(x+1, reality+1) ~= diff(A,C) + diff(A-1, B) + diff(A-2,B-1) ~= integral(diff(A,C))dt

So, over time, reading current news allows me to contextualize current news as a function of how it became history in the past; increasing my ability to evaluate >"reliability" of current news.

Whatever improvement I'm looking for almost certainly lies in reading history, and comparing to what would have been current news at the time.

Is this where you're imagining big brother?

https://blog.ncase.me/we-become-what-we-behold-a-post-mortem...

To think about things maybe dear to us, the history of Apple, Steve Jobs, Amiga, Atari, is very different than the integral of news about those. It is more influenced by people's stories that were never "news". I'm not sure any news about these really constitute a major part of what we'd call the history there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History says "inquiry; knowledge acquired by investigation" ... most of what we call news doesn't really involve much in the way of inquiry or investigation. A lot of news is just PR. E.g. the crime reporter in the news knows some guys in the police and they give him some story and he prints it. That's news. Often the history of significant events is discovered over much longer time frames through more serious investigation and research. The events that aren't significant sort of fade away into nothingness.

Good journalism, investigative reporting, that provides some insight, seems incredibly rare in any domain.

When news stories come out about some technical discovery or science, and you're familiar with the domain, they very rarely are accurate. Like those "cancer is finally cured" stories that pop up every now and then as "news".

I guess it's like "reality" shows?