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Vaniver comments on Open thread 7th september - 13th september - Less Wrong Discussion
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It seems to me that news streams fall into a few broad categories:
News your friends / coworkers / social contacts want to talk with you about.
News about production opportunities (business, financial, scientific, etc.).
News about consumption opportunities.
General news about the state of the world.
The first group, I find, is adequately served by Facebook. The sort of thing that a friend will bring up in conversation is also the sort of thing that that friend (or a similar friend) will share. (Facebook will also work for the next two, if you have the right friends, but it's still probably worthwhile to do your homework and go deeper than the viral hits.)
The second group is probably best served by a specialized business press, and won't be comparable across industries. For scientists, this is journals that have papers you should be aware of, and it's obvious that scientists should be reading different journals.
The third group is again probably best served by specialized business press, but on the other side--this is subscribing to the marketing newsletters of companies you like, fan blogs of things you like, and so on.
The fourth group is probably worthless, if you view it as the exclusion of the other three. (I don't need to read the New Yorker to find the best of the New Yorker; I can trust my friends will share that, and serve as a filter for me.)
There's another category:
This is not a special case of 1 since by the time everybody's talking about these things it's generally too late to take effective action.
I think none of the things you mentioned are black swans--market bubbles have popped before, banks have frozen before, bail-ins have (I think?) happened before--but I agree that 'impending catastrophes' is a category of things one would like to have the earliest warning of.
The low-probability piece, though, is not the news source but the ability to interpret the information better than everyone else. It seems to me that for the areas one knows well, this probably falls into 2 and 3--if you run a company that depends on online software, you should probably be paying attention to sources that will give you early warning of security issues. But will you be any better at interpreting political news than anyone else? And is the 'political risk insurance' worth the cost? (You pay attention and time periodically, in the hopes that you will lose less if something goes wrong.) Certainly everyone agrees that it would have been nice to have insurance when something goes wrong, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea looking into the uncertain future.
I don't think it's necessary to be better than everyone else. You only need to be better than most and that's not a particularly high bar to clear.
For example, look at the two recent financial crises in the Eastern Mediterranean: the Cyprus bail-in and the Greek bank freeze. Clearly some people saw it coming and got out; and clearly some people sat there twiddling their thumbs and going err... maybe... I dunno... my neighbour says it's going to be fine... -- and those people got caught and paid the price. You want to be in the first group, but you are not going to be alone in that group.
That obviously depends on where you live. The calculations for someone who lives in, say, Norway and someone who lives in Lebanon are going to be very different.
Can you give examples of people profiting from these early warning signs by reading generic news as opposed to being experts in that field?
Well, all the Greeks who took their money out of the banks before capital controls were introduced, to cite the most well-known recent example.
I think if you have enough local friends, that falls into 1. (I got a bunch of warning about recent bad weather in the Bay Area, because of how many Facebook friends I have there.)
Your general point is correct, that knowing about the general state of reality can be useful because reality can collide into your plans. But it's not clear to me you need to do much of that filtering yourself.