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Azathoth123 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!
I get my news from instapundit.
Instapundit is highly ideological libertarian, so you should balance it out with a reactionary news source like Theden.tv or Steve Sailer.
As it happens I also read Steve Sailer, although he isn't so much news as editorial cometary whereas instupundit is more "list of headlines" of the kind sixes-and-sevens was asking about.
I don't wish to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but for sixes-and-sevens benefit, I'll note that Instapundit is a highly ideological libertarian (alternatively, in the view of many progressives, a partisan Republican pretending to be a libertarian). If you use him as a news source, you should balance with a progressive source.
ETA: This advice holds even if you are skipping narrowly political articles and reading about crises/disasters, etc., since ideology informs what kinds of crises people consider salient.
This looks like the classic grey fallacy.
Looks like, but isn't. The goal isn't that you take one viewpoint and take another viewpoint and find "something in the middle"; the point is that having multiple independent viewpoints makes it easier to spot mistakes in each.
It feels natural for us to think critically when our preconceptions are contradicted and to accept information uncritically when our preconceptions are supported. If you want to improve the odds that you're reading critical thought about any given topic, you need sources with a wide range of different preconceptions.
I agree and wouldn't have objected if Prismattic advised to read multiple sources from a variety of viewpoints. As it is, he just said "you need to read progressives as well" and that's a different claim.
I'm not arguing that the views should be averaged, but that the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias. A libertarian/fusionist source is likely to devote more coverage to, say, stories of government corruption and less to stories of corporate wage theft or environmental degradation; a progressive source to do the opposite. All of those stories might be important (in general or to sixes-and-sevens in particular), so the combined news feed is in that sense better.
So why did you recommend progressives and not, say, news coming from the Roman Catholic Church, from marxists, from PETA, from infowars, from Al-Jazira, etc. etc.?
Well, taking those specific examples as non-rhetorical: PETA, the Catholic Church, and Infowars are various kinds of insane in ways that extend beyond ordinary political mindkilling, so I'd be unlikely to recommend them. Al-Jazeera English is actually pretty good as a news source, but its website is an adjunct of being a broadcast news source, which is less helpful from a time-investment perspective. I predict that a center-left news source will provide coverage on a broader range of issues than a far-left news source, but your mileage may vary.
The center-left source is also most likely to compensate specifically for the coverage holes in a center-right source. That still isn't averaging their factual claims.
You're not averaging factual claims, you're averaging exposure to viewpoints.
I would argue that this summing, not averaging exposure. There's a difference between saying "You should read both GreenNetNews and BlueCast" and saying "To save time, read GreenNetNews on odd-numbered days and BlueCast on even-numbered days".
I think it's averaging because your capacity to absorb news/viewpoints is limited.
Any particular reason you didn't make a similar reply to Christian's suggestion of the ideologically progressive vox dot com?
Because I hadn't seen it.
I find the implied accusation of bias amusing. I've actually tweeted at Matt Yglesias once to complain about the quality of an article on Vox.
Are you using "progressive" to mean left-leaning, or in the usual way? Just for clarity; if you meant the latter disregard.
I thought "left-leaning" was the usual way? What else, in the political sphere, does "progressive" mean?
I've heard it it as synonymous with "good," "new" and anti rich tax policy. Can you make a recommendation? Either just left or, since libertarian is socially liberal fiscally conservative, a good source that is fiscally liberal and socially conservative? I asked the DNC for the former and just got on their mailing list. Not impressed.
The US "left" is considerably to the right of the European left, and LW has a broad international readership, so I think just saying "left" would be more confusing ("liberal" would even more confusing, given the dispute between libertarians and progressives over who is the legitimate heir of 19th century liberalism). But yes, in this case, I meant progressive in the sense of "mainstream center-left."
Some of the US "left" (notably, the mainstream Democrats) are considerably to the right of the European left. "Left" encompasses a rather large landscape.
Right right, thanks. Any source you'd recommend?
Of course a progressive will think that progressivism is good, and part of progressivism is that it is good becuase it is new (the clue is in the name). Those who are not progressives will hardly agree. And anti rich tax policy is a straightforward left-leaning policy.
It is tempting for progressives to define the word to mean "good" and "new", as it saves them the trouble of defending the ideology. The ideology can then be treated not as any set of beliefs about the reality, but as reality itself.
No, that's not it. It doesn't mean you can't have new things happen that are bad. It does refer to a time derivative, but it's more of a goal than a statement of fact: government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That's 'progress'. (Note: this summary is not an endorsement)
Progressive tax structures are not named so due to this time derivative. They are named so due to the derivative in income. Regressive tax structures exist, but they aren't named so due to being more like the past.
That is progress, but that is not what is meant by "progressive" in the political sense. The belief that government can be engineered to improve things is shared by everyone except those in despair of it ever happening. Moldbug has proposals to do that -- is he a "progressive"?
No, "progressive" means certain specific views about what is valued as an improvement, and specific beliefs about what policies will make those improvements. These values and views are accurately summarised as "left-leaning".
A lot of libertarians would beg to disagree there.
Yes, there are specific things it's aiming at. I was justifying the word choice. And either way we've moved past the ridiculous notion that it is good because it's new. If you're going to try to correct me for being overly general you can at least own up to having been far more overly general just a few hours previously.
These days, how many of the people who call themselves progressive think that GMO's are really great because they are new technology?
Half a century ago progressives really liked nuclear power because of the hope that it brings wealth. These days not so much.
As someone else already pointed out, "progressive" doesn't mean "approving of all new things" (and in the context of taxation it's only a verbal coincidence that progressive politics tends to go with liking progressive taxation). Having said that, and in full awareness that anecdotes are little evidence: Hi, I'm a political progressive who has no objection in principle to GMOs and thinks we should be moving to nuclear power in a big way. (I have some incidental concerns about GMOs; e.g., they interact with IP law to provide exciting new ways for unscrupulous corporations to screw people over, which is a pity.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that progressives around 1900 called the method of taxation they favored progressive taxation.
I haven't said something about objections in principle, my statement was much weaker.
More to the point, I expect that a bunch of people on LW are pro-new-technology but that's not true for the average left person and pretending that being pro-new-technology is something that's an essential feature of progressive thought in the 21st century ignores the political realities.
On the other hand it was an essential feature of progressive thought 50 years ago. In Marx idea of history, it's a natural law that history moves in the right direction.
I'm fairly sure the majority of LW regulars who identify as progressives (myself included) would agree with these views about GMOs and nuclear power. However, I'm also pretty sure this is not true of the progressive movement at large, sadly. This is particularly frustrating because these two technologies are probably the most promising tools currently available for solving the problems many progressives purport to care most about.
Amen. Just saying I've heard that use from other moderates as well who don't think too hard about it.
Anyway, the other question is the more interesting to me. Any good left-leaning or socially-conservative-fiscally-liberal (short name?) news source?
The American Conservative is definitely socially conservative and, if not exactly fiscally liberal, at least much more sympathetic to economic redistribution than mainstream conservatism. But it is more composed of opinion pieces than of news reports, so I don't know if it works for way you want.
As others suggested, Vox could be a good choice for a left-leaning news source. It has decent summaries of "everything you need to know about X" (where X = many current news stories).
Thanks!
Short name = Christian.
"Christian" covers a lot of ground. That's a fair description of the mainline Catholic viewpoint, but looking up a random Christian news source in the US could get you fiscal viewpoints ranging from lukewarm left to hardline right to more or less apolitical.
(It's reliably socially conservative, though, generally speaking.)
That comes with some theological baggage, of course. You don't want a news source that interprets everything in terms of the end times and looks forward to a nuclear war to annihilate the damned.
I've heard good things of the Christian Science Monitor (which obviously has even more questionable baggage), but I haven't read it myself. Also Al Jazeera, which has other baggage (owned by a government), and which I also haven't read.
I honestly had not considered a Christian news option.