I stopped reading political news 2.5 years ago, and haven’t looked back since. I now view news as an addiction, similar to fast food, alcohol or gambling. I occasionally consume a bit of political news here and there, and it always leaves a bad taste in my “mental mouth”, almost physically, as if I’ve eaten something too big and sugary to be healthy.
(This is despite the fact that I live in Russia, a country in which news seemingly have higher survival value than in developed countries. Plus, I live in a region bordering eastern Ukraine, which now flickers between a failed gangster state and an active war zone—and I have relatives living there, right on the front line between the Ukrainian army and the rebels! Instead of reading the news, I just call them and check up on them directly.)
My strategy for getting important news is:
Have friends and talk to them occasionally.
Have relatives and talk to them occasionally.
Have coworkers and talk to them occasionally.
Ride in taxicabs and talk to the drivers occasionally.
Or, if you are not a social person:
Don’t be a hikikomori and go out occasionally.
Browse the Internet occasionally.
If there’s a high-impact event happening around you, you just won’t miss it, even you don’t talk to anyone. You’ll overhear people talking about the event, you’ll see threads with huge karma on the front pages of Hacker News and Reddit, you’ll have your aunt calling you about that. I don’t think you’d be able to miss 9/11 or Katrina during the days they were happening.
Edit: I just noticed that my strategy for getting meaningful news boils down to this:
Talk to people, or
Observe people talking.
This applies to any news domain: general news, professional news etc. Personally, I think it is safe to disengage from general-life communities (e.g. Facebook) but not from professional communities (e.g. Hacker News, CGTalk etc.). This way you’d get ultra-high-impact general news, and all high-impact professional news. If you’re in science, I don’t think that you had any chance of not seeing CRISPR on the front page of your community. If you’re in tech, you certainly couldn’t miss the Snowden story. And you wouldn’t miss 9/11 in both these communities.
Edit2: Here’s an even simpler strategy:
Be available to people.
If a news item is of any importance, it will hit you from multiple directions. My personal recent example is the european refugee problem. I heard about it from three separate sources: Reddit, a friend in Germany and a local friend addicted to news.
It seems to me that news streams fall into a few broad categories:
News your friends / coworkers / social contacts want to talk with you about.
News about production opportunities (business, financial, scientific, etc.).
News about consumption opportunities.
General news about the state of the world.
The first group, I find, is adequately served by Facebook. The sort of thing that a friend will bring up in conversation is also the sort of thing that that friend (or a similar friend) will share. (Facebook will also work for the next two, if you have the right friends, but it’s still probably worthwhile to do your homework and go deeper than the viral hits.)
The second group is probably best served by a specialized business press, and won’t be comparable across industries. For scientists, this is journals that have papers you should be aware of, and it’s obvious that scientists should be reading different journals.
The third group is again probably best served by specialized business press, but on the other side—this is subscribing to the marketing newsletters of companies you like, fan blogs of things you like, and so on.
The fourth group is probably worthless, if you view it as the exclusion of the other three. (I don’t need to read the New Yorker to find the best of the New Yorker; I can trust my friends will share that, and serve as a filter for me.)
I think none of the things you mentioned are black swans—market bubbles have popped before, banks have frozen before, bail-ins have (I think?) happened before—but I agree that ‘impending catastrophes’ is a category of things one would like to have the earliest warning of.
The low-probability piece, though, is not the news source but the ability to interpret the information better than everyone else. It seems to me that for the areas one knows well, this probably falls into 2 and 3--if you run a company that depends on online software, you should probably be paying attention to sources that will give you early warning of security issues. But will you be any better at interpreting political news than anyone else? And is the ‘political risk insurance’ worth the cost? (You pay attention and time periodically, in the hopes that you will lose less if something goes wrong.) Certainly everyone agrees that it would have been nice to have insurance when something goes wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea looking into the uncertain future.
the ability to interpret the information better than everyone else
I don’t think it’s necessary to be better than everyone else. You only need to be better than most and that’s not a particularly high bar to clear.
For example, look at the two recent financial crises in the Eastern Mediterranean: the Cyprus bail-in and the Greek bank freeze. Clearly some people saw it coming and got out; and clearly some people sat there twiddling their thumbs and going err… maybe… I dunno… my neighbour says it’s going to be fine… -- and those people got caught and paid the price. You want to be in the first group, but you are not going to be alone in that group.
And is the ‘political risk insurance’ worth the cost?
That obviously depends on where you live. The calculations for someone who lives in, say, Norway and someone who lives in Lebanon are going to be very different.
I think if you have enough local friends, that falls into 1. (I got a bunch of warning about recent bad weather in the Bay Area, because of how many Facebook friends I have there.)
Your general point is correct, that knowing about the general state of reality can be useful because reality can collide into your plans. But it’s not clear to me you need to do much of that filtering yourself.
Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?
Yes.
What about the news that are relevant, e.g. changes in the tax code that you need to know about?
If you try to read the news, you will see far more proposed changes tax changes than actual changes, and far more useless political debate than practical ramifications. Much more efficient to just google “tax changes [state] [year]” once a year or ask an accountant you know.
There’ve been some otherthreadsanda post about cutting down on news or eliminating news from one’s life, too.
Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?
It’s actually very plausible to me that a little news is the optimal amount for most people to deliberately consume, but I do mean a little — maybe 5 minutes a day as an order-of-magnitude guess — and one is probably not going to miss out on that much by cutting down to literally zero (though in a given time & place it might be a bad idea).
I’m aiming for the soft spot of eliminating all the unnecessary news while still getting those pieces that are relevant for me.
The first idea which pops into my mind is specialization: pick news/commentary sources where a specialist talks about a narrow topic they know well. In your tax code example, you might be able to find some interesting tax bloggers(!) who’d be likely to mention important changes to the tax code in your jurisdiction.
Information diet?
I did a quick search on LW but didn’t find any important article about information diet. Did I miss something?
Questions worth considering:
Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?
What about the news that are relevant, e.g. changes in the tax code that you need to know about?
So I’m aiming for the soft spot of eliminating all the unnecessary news while still getting those pieces that are relevant for me.
Any ideas?
I stopped reading political news 2.5 years ago, and haven’t looked back since. I now view news as an addiction, similar to fast food, alcohol or gambling. I occasionally consume a bit of political news here and there, and it always leaves a bad taste in my “mental mouth”, almost physically, as if I’ve eaten something too big and sugary to be healthy.
(This is despite the fact that I live in Russia, a country in which news seemingly have higher survival value than in developed countries. Plus, I live in a region bordering eastern Ukraine, which now flickers between a failed gangster state and an active war zone—and I have relatives living there, right on the front line between the Ukrainian army and the rebels! Instead of reading the news, I just call them and check up on them directly.)
My strategy for getting important news is:
Have friends and talk to them occasionally.
Have relatives and talk to them occasionally.
Have coworkers and talk to them occasionally.
Ride in taxicabs and talk to the drivers occasionally.
Or, if you are not a social person:
Don’t be a hikikomori and go out occasionally.
Browse the Internet occasionally.
If there’s a high-impact event happening around you, you just won’t miss it, even you don’t talk to anyone. You’ll overhear people talking about the event, you’ll see threads with huge karma on the front pages of Hacker News and Reddit, you’ll have your aunt calling you about that. I don’t think you’d be able to miss 9/11 or Katrina during the days they were happening.
Edit: I just noticed that my strategy for getting meaningful news boils down to this:
Talk to people, or
Observe people talking.
This applies to any news domain: general news, professional news etc. Personally, I think it is safe to disengage from general-life communities (e.g. Facebook) but not from professional communities (e.g. Hacker News, CGTalk etc.). This way you’d get ultra-high-impact general news, and all high-impact professional news. If you’re in science, I don’t think that you had any chance of not seeing CRISPR on the front page of your community. If you’re in tech, you certainly couldn’t miss the Snowden story. And you wouldn’t miss 9/11 in both these communities.
Edit2: Here’s an even simpler strategy:
Be available to people.
If a news item is of any importance, it will hit you from multiple directions. My personal recent example is the european refugee problem. I heard about it from three separate sources: Reddit, a friend in Germany and a local friend addicted to news.
It seems to me that news streams fall into a few broad categories:
News your friends / coworkers / social contacts want to talk with you about.
News about production opportunities (business, financial, scientific, etc.).
News about consumption opportunities.
General news about the state of the world.
The first group, I find, is adequately served by Facebook. The sort of thing that a friend will bring up in conversation is also the sort of thing that that friend (or a similar friend) will share. (Facebook will also work for the next two, if you have the right friends, but it’s still probably worthwhile to do your homework and go deeper than the viral hits.)
The second group is probably best served by a specialized business press, and won’t be comparable across industries. For scientists, this is journals that have papers you should be aware of, and it’s obvious that scientists should be reading different journals.
The third group is again probably best served by specialized business press, but on the other side—this is subscribing to the marketing newsletters of companies you like, fan blogs of things you like, and so on.
The fourth group is probably worthless, if you view it as the exclusion of the other three. (I don’t need to read the New Yorker to find the best of the New Yorker; I can trust my friends will share that, and serve as a filter for me.)
There’s another category:
Early warning signs of potential black swans you want to adept to, e.g., popping market bubbles, bank freezes, bail-ins.
This is not a special case of 1 since by the time everybody’s talking about these things it’s generally too late to take effective action.
I think none of the things you mentioned are black swans—market bubbles have popped before, banks have frozen before, bail-ins have (I think?) happened before—but I agree that ‘impending catastrophes’ is a category of things one would like to have the earliest warning of.
The low-probability piece, though, is not the news source but the ability to interpret the information better than everyone else. It seems to me that for the areas one knows well, this probably falls into 2 and 3--if you run a company that depends on online software, you should probably be paying attention to sources that will give you early warning of security issues. But will you be any better at interpreting political news than anyone else? And is the ‘political risk insurance’ worth the cost? (You pay attention and time periodically, in the hopes that you will lose less if something goes wrong.) Certainly everyone agrees that it would have been nice to have insurance when something goes wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea looking into the uncertain future.
I don’t think it’s necessary to be better than everyone else. You only need to be better than most and that’s not a particularly high bar to clear.
For example, look at the two recent financial crises in the Eastern Mediterranean: the Cyprus bail-in and the Greek bank freeze. Clearly some people saw it coming and got out; and clearly some people sat there twiddling their thumbs and going err… maybe… I dunno… my neighbour says it’s going to be fine… -- and those people got caught and paid the price. You want to be in the first group, but you are not going to be alone in that group.
That obviously depends on where you live. The calculations for someone who lives in, say, Norway and someone who lives in Lebanon are going to be very different.
Can you give examples of people profiting from these early warning signs by reading generic news as opposed to being experts in that field?
Well, all the Greeks who took their money out of the banks before capital controls were introduced, to cite the most well-known recent example.
News about a disaster that could affect you. Most warnings aren’t that big a deal, but occasionally you get a Hurricane Katrina.
I think if you have enough local friends, that falls into 1. (I got a bunch of warning about recent bad weather in the Bay Area, because of how many Facebook friends I have there.)
Your general point is correct, that knowing about the general state of reality can be useful because reality can collide into your plans. But it’s not clear to me you need to do much of that filtering yourself.
Yes.
If you try to read the news, you will see far more proposed changes tax changes than actual changes, and far more useless political debate than practical ramifications. Much more efficient to just google “tax changes [state] [year]” once a year or ask an accountant you know.
What, no conditionality on e.g. where you live?
I found a post that might be talking about the capital-I capital-D Information Diet you might be talking about.
There’ve been some other threads and a post about cutting down on news or eliminating news from one’s life, too.
It’s actually very plausible to me that a little news is the optimal amount for most people to deliberately consume, but I do mean a little — maybe 5 minutes a day as an order-of-magnitude guess — and one is probably not going to miss out on that much by cutting down to literally zero (though in a given time & place it might be a bad idea).
The first idea which pops into my mind is specialization: pick news/commentary sources where a specialist talks about a narrow topic they know well. In your tax code example, you might be able to find some interesting tax bloggers(!) who’d be likely to mention important changes to the tax code in your jurisdiction.