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army1987 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!
Meh. Sufficiently big natural disasters or political events find a way onto my Facebook feed anyway.
Once in a while when I'm bored I check out the Android app of my country's wire service (I think the American equivalent would be the Associated Press) and/or the box in the top right of the English Wikipedia's home page. But it's a rare week that I spend more than half an hour seeking out news deliberately.
I'm not sure how much one should trust the news filter in one's country's wire service.
Trust it for what purposes?
Trust to not be politically biased.
Given the way I use it I don't care whether they're politically unbiased, just whether they're less addictive than blogs and Facebook.
So another voter defects in the rational ignorance collective action problem.
Why would the knowledge of who won the World Cup or how many kids Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have any relevance at all when deciding whom to vote for?
(I jest, but LeechBlock is going to get me the hell out of here in a minute and a half so I don't have time to write a more serious reply.)