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gjm comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I appreciate the distinction you make between urgent and non-urgent news.
Finding out about things quickly isn't necessarily my priority. In fact, one of my problems with "regular" news outlets is that they have poor sense of time sensitivity, and promote news that's stopped being useful. The value of knowing about Icelandic volcanoes grounding all northern European air traffic is actually very useful to me when it's just happened, but in a week's time I may as well read about it on Wikipedia.
I'm more concerned about finding out about things at all. My ad hoc news accretion drops the ball more often than I'd like. My ideal wish-upon-a-star would be a daily digest saying "here are a list of things that have happened today in two sentences or less". I can then decide whether to follow it up or not.
(I have a secondary motive of wanting to associate events in my memory to improve the granularity of my recall. I know, for example, that Eyjafjallajökull erupting was concurrent with the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election, which helps me position it in time quite accurately, as well as position personal events that I remember happening around the same time.)
Do you have some examples in mind of things you never found out about but would have been better off for knowing?
(Of course if you literally never found out about something you can't know. But I'm guessing there are things you did find out about but not until much too late.)
A couple of semi-recent examples would be the referendum on Scottish independence and the Islamic State business in the middle east. I obviously found out about them, but it felt like I found out about them a lot later than I would have liked. It's not so much that these have an immediate impact on my life (Scottish independence does, but it's not like I'd be able to remain ignorant by the time it's resolved), but they're massive news events that I basically didn't notice until everyone else was talking about them. This suggests I'm probably missing other events that people aren't talking about, and that makes me want to up my game.
What about the recent Swedish election results?
Incidentally, it was disturbingly hard to find an article about them that didn't put a misleading spin on the results.