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polymathwannabe comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't have any sensible way of learning about current affairs. I don't consume broadcast or print news. Most news stories reach me through social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research, and I will independently follow up on the ones I think are worthy of interest. This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.
Regular news outlets seem to be messy, noisy attention traps, rather than the austere factual repositories I wish them to be. Quite importantly, there seems to be a lot of stuff in the news that isn't actually news. I'm pretty sure smart people with different values will converge on what a lot of this stuff is.
Has this problem been solved already? I'm willing to put in time/effort/money for minimalist, noise-free, sensibly-prioritised news digest that I care about.
ETA: Although I haven't replied to all these responses individually, they seem very useful and I will be following them up. Thanks!
Get an RSS reader and read only the headlines. That way you can process hundreds of news in a few minutes and only open the ones that seem seriously important.
A trivial inconvenience which could make a huge difference -- if there was a software which would put all those headlines in plain-text format, to reduce the temptation of clicking. (There is still google if something is irresistible.)