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Metus comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm radically cutting any source of information out from my life as soon as I get the feeling that I never use the information or don't get some measure of enjoyment from it. This reduced the time I spend on catching up from multiple hours a day to less than an hour. My mind feels much quieter in a good way. I still get a "noisy" sensation in my mind ("I just had a thought but have already forgotten it") but it feels contentless ("There is something on my mind") and the sensation weakens every day. Replacing the time spent on reading useless drivel with actual books and Wikipedia feels much more satisfactory.
I fear that this might lead to my perspective narrowing, but I act against it by having a couple of information dense blogs in my feed and still meeting with people and having Wikipeda to seek new avenues of information. And of course LessWrong.
What did you cut?
Most parts of Reddit. Hackernews as I am not a software engineer and read the interesting things elsewhere anyhow. Cracked. Facebook most of the time. News sites as soon as I read a sensationalist headline the second time that week. And plenty of things I can't remember as I started doing this months ago. The mere fact that I don't remember the sources already shows that they couldn't be that important.
Tim Ferriss talks about this in the Four Hour Work Week, he calls it the "information diet". Since I read it, I pretty much stopped listening to all news.
Ironically I read that article some time ago and intended to implement it someday. Now I did.
I've tried a similar tack, and I was also worried about "narrowing".
It may be helpful to explicity note that "informative" is meaningful relative to your current set of beliefs. There are high-quality sources that I love and would recommend, but that I try not to spend much time on because the content is so close to my viewpoints that I get very little "information" out of it, even if it information-dense in an quasi-objective sense.
I recognise a consistent pattern of finding a new site or information source, exploiting it and then realising I'm not getting enough information relative to my effort, leading me to seek something new. So yes, always look for something that updates relative to your current knowledge.
Are you sure thats not just you eliminating low hanging fruit?
Call it whatever you want, of course the easier stuff gets repeated more often and is thus easier retained.
Society as a whole benefits from an informed public. Some news isn't really informative, but some is. The levels of wealth across countries strongly associate with their political systems and the level of really terrible stuff that happens correlates with how knowledgeable / active people are. Now correlation isn't causation, but consider that there could be a link.
If so, then you as an individual could benefit from being less informed. You could also privately benefit from not voting. Or you could benefit from cheating on taxes in a difficult to detect way, or littering instead of carrying garbage and looking for a trash can. Someone can always privately benefit from defecting in a prisoners dilemma or participating in a tragedy of the commons. An informed public is a public good.
The take away isn't don't cut news reading. A lot of news is of no value to you or anyone else, but at least some news is probably of negative value to you personally but socially positive. So when cutting a subject, at least briefly consider what would happen to the commons if all informed people didn't read it.
This is a (the?) standard challenge to the idea of adopting an information diet for personal gain, and it's presented lucidly.
Another implication: The threat imposed by a news reading public (who are itching to be frenzied), is a powerful incentive for prominent (and usually powerful) individuals to act in accord with public sentiment. Perversely, if the threat is effective, then the actual threat mechanism may appear useless (because it is never used).
This isn't always good, because the public can be wrong, but there seem to be morally mundane cases.
An example: If you live in California, should you read a story about a corrupt and powerful mayor in a small town in Iowa? It really does seem like the "media frenzy" is a primary vector for handling this type of situation, which may otherwise continue because the actors directly involved don't have enough power.
This also justifies the seeming capriciousness of the news cycle: Why this particular outrage at this particular time? Why not this other, slightly more deserving, outrage? Because this is a coordination game, and the exact focal point isn't as important as the fact that we all agree to coordinate.
A quote about education (attributed to George Pólya, although I can't find the source): "It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five different problems one way". I would guess that similarly, if one wants to educate oneself about world affairs, one should (regularly) take a few of the most important (current) issues/events and learn about them as in-depth and from as many angles as one can, synthesizing everything into a big picture, rather than pay attention to every non-issue. Of course, in order to be able to do that, one should try to learn history, economics, statistics, game theory, public choice theory, geography, biology, etc (curiously, in some cases reading something about the past might be more beneficial to understanding the present than reading something about the present itself). Of course, in some situations this "issue/event centered" (vs "news as they appear") approach could also have some drawbacks, for example, if, for some reason (e.g. (non-)availability of relevant literature, ideological reasons, etc.), one approaches events only from one or two angles ("hedgehog", as opposed to "fox") one could easily fall prey to confirmation bias.
I categorically reject the notion that news is relevant to being informed. A single reading of an economics text book for example will make anyone who I should want to be able to vote more informed than the same amount of news. Further news is completely irrelevant for being informed as only the exceptional things are news worthy and not trends against which one could act, like climate change or shifting balances of power.
Thus the proposition is to be informed on some topic one cares about. Again there I suggest to not read "news" as most people will get more out of reading comprehensive articles on the topic or even a text book to better understand it.
In short: No, this is not just a prisoner's dilemma and I dislike political systems where governance is one.
For context, there are about eight econ textbooks in my line of sight at this very moment. I've even read some of them. The kind of knowledge you get from consuming such a textbook is certainly useful, but for practical purposes it's highly contingent on what kind of world you're living in. The textbook probably won't tell you that, but an equivalent amount of news almost certainly would.
I doubt that regular reading of a popular news paper will make ones opinion more relevant than a good understanding of supply and demand, judging by the average comments section.
I think you're taking a narrow reading about what sort of information you can glean from a given story.
Reading the average comments threads on a news item is very very terrifyingly informative, just not about the subject at hand. (Or course, you hit the point of diminishing returns quickly)
I think sixes_and_seven's point (though I may have misunderstood) is that your understanding of supply & demand (and everything else in the econ textbook) still has to be applied to concrete cases to prove useful, and following the news furnishes you with concrete cases, and allows you to practice recognizing where the models in the textbook are most applicable.
I'm sympathetic, but surely this rejection is contingent on certain facts about your local environment. If you lived in a area experiencing rapid and chaotic change, following the news would be very valuable, even if the news was presented poorly or had significant bias. Consider Syria.
Depends if you are reading for usefulness or the experience. I don't necessarily learn much from tumblr/twitter/facebook but I tend to enjoy it, especially when I lack the mental energy for other stuff.
Facebook specifically is an interesting example. It is used by exactly the people I do not want to keep up with the details. My close friends and I and in general the people I deeply care about keep contact just fine.
I'd add that with enjoyable, low-effort time-killing activities, one may still have to be careful not to space out and wind up killing hours & hours on something that's fluff with diminishing returns, like Facebook or Twitter or channel surfing. (I try to consciously catch myself before I idly pull up a game of Solitaire or Freeciv or whatever, to check I'm not about to waste 10 minutes or 4 hours because my brain was in cruise control.)