It's alright for one person to think this way, but if everyone did we'd be in a bit of trouble as a society. I think the reality is in the middle anyway, i.e. very few people are desperately gripped to each and every story, and if you think you're supposed to care about every story then you're missing the point of the news. Chances are enough people will care about each story to make it worthwhile running, even when many (or most) people don't care. If you're picking up the paper and literally zero stories affect you, well okay then! But you'd be in the minority. For most people there's something in there worth knowing. Even if it's not every single day. Most people benefit from knowing something about what's happening at least weekly. In hindsight this is a really odd article.
> For most people there's something in there worth knowing.
Your distribution is way off.
If we’re talking national US news like the NYT or WaPo reports on, there is actually worth knowing. The only value it provides is “sounding informed” at a party.
It has a huge negative downside too. It’s some watered down biased version of what’s going on in the world that fits narratives of the editors, with barely any relationship to reality.
National news is absolutely propaganda-loaded trash that serves a severely negative value for society overall.
Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.
Exactly. Nobody should be watching 24/7 news, but you also probably shouldn't be avoiding every news publication ever.
10 minutes a day skimming your news sources of choice for topics relevant to you combined with hearing things from your friends/family/coworkers goes a long way.
10 mins a day is still way too much. It’s 99.99% absofuckinguseless.
I say this as someone who read it for decades. It’s all caricatures of the truth designed to push some other narrative.
Every single time I thought I was informed and chatted with someone who had even a small notional bit of first hand information, it became immediately apparent how I was both extremely ignorant and how my false sense of knowledge made it worse.
Exactly. I'm a researcher, and there are maybe two or three things I know a lot about, and some things where I understand, structurally, how they function.
Literally everything on the news about these things is horrible. It either dumbs something down to the point where it supports aggressive misunderstandings, or highlights an element that serves to support some public (misguided) preconception, or it deletes structural context to the point where the thing said isn't per se wrong, but without that context, it's certain to be misunderstood.
I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed once (on more of a "lighthearted" subject, nothing controversial). The journalists twisted my words to make them conform to some feelgood complete misconception, reflecting the things "people like to read about themselves" and how we, in our late modern hyperindividualist societies, imagine the world works: it's all about you in the end! Nope.
The news is a commercial enterprise; its purpose, classically, is to sell your stereotypes back to you. Today, in polarized society, it's there to sell one segment's stereotypes back to that segment while maximally riling up other segments, thus creating engagement through battle. And no, "Publicly funded" ones aren't any better at it, they operate in the same space.
10 minutes is roughly 5 minutes of skimming through everything and 5 minutes reading the single thing that you might care about. It's definitely not too much. Some days you can even skip the last 5 minutes if nothing that you care about has happened.
Some people should definitely think that way though, specifically people prone to depression, suicide, and so on. If you're grappling with dark thoughts, the news is a pretty nasty hole to fall down. Aaron was sadly one of those people who probably was right that the news wasn't for him.
avoidance behavior is a bad response to mental issues. Even if it works temporarily, in the long run it shrinks your world and reduces your confidence. It's why people with panic disorders are taught to confront stressors and learn to adapt, not lock themselves in their house.
Regarding the news, a practical issue is of course that it doesn't always work. If you're privileged, self-employed or what have you, you can dodge a lot of issues for a while, but not always. Aaron himself ironically and sadly enough found himself at the center of the news years after he wrote this. That the news is just what happens to other people is an adolescent idea that will at some point be shattered.
I've got a lot of Ukrainian friends who did a lot of coding out of a bunker the last year and a half, and over there nobody has ever told me they stopped reading the NYT and their issues went away. That's most of the world, the news is real, only very few people are so removed they can just ignore the world for decades.
Reading the NYT would make me less informed on the issues that affect me and people I care about.[0][1] That's the point, I think. "The News" most people consume is a pale imitation of information. A version of this article with 10 years of growth might modify the suggestion toward finding better sources of information. Less New York Times, Fox News, and MSNBC. More ProPublica, NewsHour, and advocacy orgs staffed with people who are actually qualified to speak on the subject.
the article does recommend finding better sources of information
> to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. ...
> Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
the article also links to harper's weekly review
he also regularly posted reviews on his blog of the books he found to be good sources of information (as well as some he didn't); in 02006 he read 120 books http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2006 and in 02007 he read 70 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2007. many of his other blog posts were about one or another such book
a couple years later i worked with aaron on watchdog.net, an effort to collate and make easily available politically relevant information on politicians; we got a lot of information online and well organized, but voters didn't really care, and other people were doing a better job of providing that information
aaron was easily in the top 0.1% of the world population when it came to helping people find better sources of information
Like the joke about airports, if you've never missed hearing about an important event then you're paying too much attention to news. There's a level that's worth following, but most people read far more news than is worthwhile.
There is the nightly news broadcast, it goes for 1 hour - so 1/16th of your waking life. Maybe about 10-15% of that hour is anything of actual interest/importance.
I'm not sure this is true. Social networks, as in the underlying human phenomenon of communicating with other people, do a phenomenal job of spreading information.
Consider personally important news: some combination of ground-shaking global events, plus stories specific to one's interests, plus some local news. We hear about these things anyway! I heard about the war in Ukraine from friends and acquaintances before seeing it in a newspaper, with less waffling and including links to more in-depth analysis. I hear about human interest stories that actually interest me, weird bits of software/archeology/gaming/ecology/literature/sports/local stuff, instead of random articles about any old thing. I'm more up to date on local gossip than the actual media sometimes, since people who are unwilling to answer a reporter's questions are happy to just have a chat. The most serious news eventually ends up on HN in one form or another, which is at least an industry-specific link aggregator with less whiplash.
Probably there's news I need to know, and weekly might be an okay compromise, but even monthly or quarterly news would be supplemented by people telling me things.
One advantage of this approach is that it largely short circuits the ability of the various power players and organizations to direct your attention to where they want it when they want it, as well as reduces the chance of you getting your story from a doctored version. I think any approach that messes with potential behind the scenes coordination is just good old-fashioned risk management.
>> But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine?
This is probably best point in this article, the others are quite debatable. I would say that there is a value in knowing whats going on at some scale, but the actual problem is really down to the over-accessibility of news that we have today. Do we really need minute to minute updates on whats happening a thousand miles away?
> Let us look at the front page of today’s New York Times, the gold standard in news. In the top spot there is a story about Republicans feuding among themselves. There is a photo of soldiers in Iraq. A stock exchange chief must return $100M. There is a concern about some doctors over-selling a nerve testing system. There is a threat from China against North Korea. There is a report that violence in Iraq is rising. And there is concern about virtual science classes replacing real ones.
> None of these stories have relevance to my life.
The Tea Party, Iraq war and excessive for-profit medical care ended up having a massive impact in the US. Not every day is going to cover decade-defining events but this day in retrospect seems pretty relevant in understanding the following 10 years of US politics (2006-2016).
Maybe we should distinguish the impact of the story itself from the impact of people reacting to the story after they read the news? The Tea Party talked a lot about taxes and got a bunch of people elected to Congress, but if you simply ignored the news you'd be none the wiser (and totally unaffected). Same is true for the Iraq War -- it surely had major impact for Iraqis, but for most people in the U.S. it may as well have been a non-event. President Bush either lied about WMDs or didn't (depending on who you ask) and we invaded and killed a bunch of people and changed the government. If you ignored the news, you'd be blindsided by people who want to talk about the war or change their vote because of it, but the Iraq War itself probably wouldn't affect you. It didn't affect me, anyway.
Most things in the news are like that. But then again, a lot of things they teach you in school are like that, too. Knowing that humans came from monkeys or that WW2 began in 1939 doesn't really affect my life, but there's a certain kind of shared knowledge that makes it easier to have a community. So maybe following the news is a bit like following Game of Thrones? If all your buddies are going to talk about it on Monday morning, you wouldn't want to be the only one who doesn't know what's going on.
If you add up all the people that had live in a district where the Tea Party was active, or served in the military, or in government where budgets, decisions, negotiations, etc. were affected by the Iraq war or the Tea Party, it’s probably a decent minority. Now add in anyone who works in health care or received a large medical bill. Then add in their families and friends. That’s got to be a large minority either directly affected or one step removed.
Obama got elected 2 years after this article with these 3 issues core to the debates. I’m guessing that some people who weren’t directly affected based their votes off of the news.
I see what you’re saying that a lot of knowledge isn’t useful day to day, but I actually do use my knowledge of WWII and evolution as foundations of some of my ethical and political views, which I’m sure emanate out into the world via my votes, purchases and conversations.
I agree though the line between news and entertainment is blurry and some people might follow just for the sake of not being out of the loop socially.
I guess for context I'll add this is Aaron Swartz, a cofounder of Reddit, and fierce advocate for free speech. He was federally prosecuted for wire fraud in 2013 for downloading academic journals from MIT, faced up to 30 years in prison, and committed suicide just before his trial.
I had seen his name thrown around but I didn't know the story. Thank you for sharing, from the layman's perspective it really seems like an overreach of federal prosecution.
There is some truly awful irony that a cofounder of reddit, with reddit's current actions, was the victim of a reactionary bully justice system for using his legal access to the JSTOR database [1] even though JSTOR came to a non-criminal settlement with him over it. A prosecution that undoubtedly contributed (or caused) mental health difficulties leading to his suicide.
And now, a decade later, the reddit platform that he cofounded is betraying the principles of that cofounder.
[1] Yes it's slightly more complex than that, I know, but not to anything that should have come anywhere near the attention of criminal prosecutors. He used his legitimate access to download far more than JSTOR ever thought someone would do. He did it in a basement that anyone walking around the building could go into, and entering an unlocked closet where he connected his laptop to a network switch wherein he left the laptop running while downloading.
~
Heck even after MIT noticed this they didn't lock the closet! Instead the just surveilled it with a camera to observe who might be going in & out. If there was any harm at all from these actions is was merely that downloading the way he did made the JSTOR system slow down at times until they blocked the offending IPs, and then the whole block.
A decade later and this injustice still fills me with sadness and rage every time it comes up. And as cynical as I get with every passing year, I hope to hell that I still at least hang on to that sadness and rage and never let time and cynicism dull its edge.
Aaron is often said to be a reddit founder but I dont think that is true. His Wikipedia page goes into the details. He founded infogami and created web.py as part of that. He later joined up with reddit and helped port reddit from lisp to python. The article states "As a result, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit." Which sounds retroactive/honorary to me.
Not to put down Aaron in any way. Just interested in what really happened.
You don't have to be at a company at literally the moment of inception in order to be classified as a founder. Basically, did he invest key talent and resources early in the company's lifespan, before it hit product-market fit? Yes.
Infogami (Aaron's company) merged with Reddit 6 months in. Reddit was still largely unknown when infogami merged with it in 2005. Swartz was given equal shares so clearly Ohanian and Huffman valued this merger highly.
As a queer person watching a slew of recent anti-LGBT laws pass, I wish I could have the luxury of just ignoring the news and not caring. Aaron was 20 when he wrote this and it shows.
What, specifically, would have happened to you if you simply ignored it all? Would you have accidentally violated one of these new laws (in the place where you live) because of not reading the news?
I think his perspective is a bit more nuanced than this; the complaint is with "real-time" news (somewhere on his blog, Aaron wrote about how he preferred to read post-event summaries in the New Yorker rather than being up-to-date every day).
Tennessee has recently passed a law banning “male or female impersonators” from performing in public places. Tennessee also does not alter sex on birth certificates for trans people.
Arguably this means that Tennessee banned trans people from performing in public in any capacity.
as well as individuals being different to each other. lots of different lesbians, with lots of different ideas, opinions.. everyone is an individual. it's not like one heterosexual is the same as another.
I am trying to understand this. People can be different from each other but still share relevant attributes. For example, two women can have different ideas and opinions, but they are both women. I don’t see the problem here
I don’t see how you can come to that conclusion. “Male and female impersonators” as written in the law was meant to refer to drag shows, which are definitely not just trans people.
Do you think things would change if you stopped following the news?
If you take the time you follow the news now and spend it voluenteering at an LGBT group, do you thing that would do more or less for your cause than watching the news?
It is straight unreal to me that this guy partially creates Reddit, what his intentions were vs what it has become.
If someone came to me saying “I want to get things wrong, I want to have a surface understanding of topics, I’d really like to be distrusting and skeptical and believe everything I’m told by behind the scenes powers ensuring I think a specific thing”… I would introduce them to Reddit.
I do wonder whether encouraging people to exist entirely in their bubble is healthy.
I agree with the article to a point. I don't really have a "daily news ritual," though I tend to stumble across major stories.
But enough people being isolated from the news can result in an uninformed populace. People continuing to vote R or D simply out of habit.
I mean, I'm unlikely to vote anything but D for the foreseeable future. But if the R party self-destructs and an actual, viable, left-leaning party is created, I'd want to know that.
But that doesn't mean I need updates on every manufactured crisis daily, either.
I find that "the news" is what is creating those bubbles. The more you read the nytimes, or watch fox, the more you lock into that particular bubble mindset.
NYT? Only if you consider "what's actually happening" or "reality" to be a bubble. I see both liberal and conservative viewpoints in the NYT all the time.
Reality does have a stubborn liberal bias, after all.
That said, NYT is equally driven by sensationalism, in the "If it bleeds, it leads" sense.
For whatever reason liberals always seem to be the ones who withdraw into their bubbles. The problem is this leaves the other side the opportunity to capture various government organizations, like SCOTUS.
It has nothing to do with being a social butterfly. I don't have the quote handy, but it's decades old. A GOP operative said something like "our goal is to get liberals to disconnect from the political process" while at the same time engaging their own base. This is what the GOP is famous for. The social issues (flag burning, abortion, gay marriage, etc, etc, etc).
In the late 90's and leading up to the 2000 POTUS race, with few exceptions all of my liberal friends had disconnected from politics. It's always been the case, in my circle of people I know, that conservatives vote more regularly. This is over more than 40 years.
Are you in a predominantly conservative area? A "red state"?
Or is your circle of friends in their late teens and 20s? Younger folks just don't vote as often as older.
In the circle of people I know, who are mostly actual liberals, and who are generally 40+, they've been very engaged and voting consistently.
Heck, even the conservative Republicans I know have been engaged and voting consistently for Democrats since Obama came on the scene. I do tend to hang around smart and educated individuals, and every ethical conservative at this point has defected to voting for Democrats for years now--at least since Trump won.
OP, if you hear me, please append the year (2006) at the end of the title. It’s not an obligation but it’s a good practice that the community already used to, other tags like [video] and [pdf] are popular too.
Read it if it affects your circle or you are going to act on it. Otherwise consider if you could be doing something better with your time. I used to read the news assiduously until I realized I could not act on it in a satisfactory way. Would that I could do more.
There's a lot of noise day-to-day, so some smoothing/averaging may be useful in reducing that. Perhaps monthly (e.g., The Atlantic) for longer-form articles on bigger topics as well.
> But finally, I’d like to argue that following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.
You could always try rolling around on the ground and kicking your feet. It's really amazing how often that works.
It may be hard to grasp, but reading the news isn't for enjoyment, it's for information (although I have to conceed that modern news is largly information free, but this is exactly because they're trying to make it entertainment).
It's important to understand what's going on in that place called reality. I know its so unpopular! Who even talks about reality on twerk tick anyway?! Let's all just stick to the stuff that involves me, like those choo funny videos of the "set your balls on fire challenge"!
I think we need to take into account profits and careers of people producing news.
Mostly, news is a business. It will inevitably distort reports to make more profit. Even the most well-intentioned editors and journalists will be outcompeted those who make better stories.
I guess this mechanism works on the level of people and organizations.
Also, people who argue against Aaron's idea tend to forget that there are other sources. Books, in-depth articles, discussions of experts may provide a better understanding. However, it's much more effort. If you really want to be informed, then, it's work.
For perspective, this was written by an extremely precocious 16 year old. And I think for most people, the front page of the New York Times may indeed contain nothing of practical use. You're effectively paying for general up-to-date worldly knowledge and social currency.
Nevertheless, at some point in your life, knowing current events, even remote ones, and knowing how events have unfolded in the past, has great practical value in making decisions about personal actions or decisions which affect many people, or financial decisions.
The news is, of course, full of lies. Too much exposure to lies is no good for one's mental health. But it's important to have some degree of regular exposure, as a means of inoculation. And to, hopefully, parse out the truth between the lines; truth is valuable for its own sake.
The post is from 2006. I wonder how he would have written it differently or not at all during the pandemic or if he was a refugee, for example. Of course, these are extreme cases, but they demonstrate that you have to be in a special position to be able to perceive the news as a “waste of time”.
I also have the habit of avoiding most news, but I believe it did not serve me well, since I have been ignorant about many current issues and often feel ashamed when I don’t know things that are very relevant to the lifes of people around me that I may talk to. Especially when there was a recent disaster or political event that made a huge impact and I just missed it and thereby fail to sympathize with someone who is directly affected by it.
But I also see how reading the news can really drag me down and feed into my depression, so a healthy balance always worked best for me, like catching up once or twice a week. I have yet to find a good aggregate source of quality, independent news though.
Read a book by an expert if you'd like to know an order of magnitude more about a subject than the average TV-watching person. Once catch is that it needs to be an actual unbiased quality source. Not all of them are of course.
For example, a couple of years after 9/11 I read Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies (later Tenet's and others) and was gobsmacked about all the misguided sound-bites being repeated by regular folks.
> 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? It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.
This is just blatantly wrong. Actions have consequences and many politicians have lost their job after a story got out.
Unfortunately, this type of thinking is what happens when you live in a stable country. You get too comfortable and start thinking you can just ignore what's going on elsewhere. Who knows, maybe he'll get away with it. I'd wager it was the Russians and Ukrainians who read the news that managed to get out in time before they got drafted and I'd wager back in the 1930s that it was mostly the Jews who read the news who managed to escape Nazi Germany and not get shipped off to a camp.
I'd say there's a strong similarity between the news and martial arts training. 99.9999% of the time you might not need it but you'll be damn fucking grateful the 0.0001% of the time that you do.
The observation may not be relevant for extreme situations like those mentioned. However, even then, most people around you will know, so unless you live in a cave you will get the information on time.
Comparison with martial arts is inapropriate. Also, there are other things you could do to protect (and inform) yourself that do not demand payment with your most scarce resource.
> However, even then, most people around you will know, so unless you live in a cave you will get the information on time.
Some people are just tuned out regardless. My mother is perpetually outraged/shocked that her mortgage is going up every month despite me telling her for months that yes, that is what happens when the central bank raises interest rates. She is 100% one of the people who would fail to see the writing on the wall or do anything until the bombs were dropping.
This right here is why I hate the pedestal Swartz has been put on since his suicide. His "hot take" is just straight-up trash you'd expect from any random 20-something techbro libertarian off the street.
How did he not fall over from the irony of being a Jewish man and saying "well nothing in the news today doesn't directly concern me, so I don't care about the news ever"?
How would you know if the news concerned you if you didn't read it?
> Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
If anything all books are merely published bias. No issue reading them but don't take books as gospel. They are just as fallible as every other medium.
I would still very incorrect though. You are discussing how lies are told in a medium insisting that it’s harder in a book, I argue that it’s easier as some people (you for one) have a bias that printer books carry an additional authority over say a TV shoe or podcast.
> The news will never teach you how to think. It will tell you what to think.
Oh I disagree with this...presumably you notice lots of people have the same "facts" based on what's in the news, but have you not noticed that the "logical reasoning" that accompanies these "facts" is also quite similar, and typically not very logical?
I stopped reading or watching news about a year ago. Other than HN and conversations with people I don't have any exposure. I always find out about important stuff some way or another, and have overall a more positive outlook in life. Highly recommended.
