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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

News == entertainment.

Originally by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Although I have slightly different takes from his and the level of avoiding the news might be different too, but the core idea that I follow these days is there.

I used to think following the news was a mix of my duty as a citizen and important for my life, personal and professional. Now I believe it's quite the opposite, I better understand the world because I avoid the news. These days I think it is as much entertainment as Netflix or comics.

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In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, CNN was seen as somewhat skeptical of the rationale and purpose of the war, but the intro to each segment about the war was so thrilling: rousing, percussion-heavy music, tanks roaring over sand dunes, fighter jets banking in formation, night vision shots of anti-aircraft fire. Their primary, overriding mandate was to make people watch, so they made war exciting and attractive. What was said in their coverage made very little difference next to that.

Rolf Dobelli [0] wrote a few columns on Avoiding News Consumption and will publish a book later this year with the title Stop Reading the News: How to cope with the information overload and think more clearly.

In 2011 he wrote an essay Quit the News in Dutch NRC Next newspaper[1]. The next day the withdrawals poured in :-)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Dobelli#Avoid_News_Cons...

[1] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2011/09/01/weg-met-het-nieuws-1203...

I once met someone who had notifications turned on for CNN's "Breaking News" (which is rarely urgent). I couldn't believe someone would think allowing interruptions multiple times a day with things that are likely to make you angry or sad is a good idea.

News is best consumed in one-week chunks. Read a newsmagazine for the summary; dive deeper into particular topics.

There is a paradox here that while it's not important for you to know about 99.99% of the things that happen and are reported in the news, the fact that people are paying attention disincentivizes people in government from doing bad things in the extreme.

So it's not the news that you consume that improves your life, it's the news you never have to consume that improves your life.

I'm mixed on Tim Ferriss, but he also advocates this. His take is that if it's important enough news, then you will hear about it from your friends. Hearing about something a day or a few days later usually doesn't make a difference. I believe he also advocates trusting your friends' opinions when you need to vote and make political acts. However, this essentially is a selfish position that only works if a few people do it.

I'd like to hear more about how you have implemented this. Do you not read any news? Some? How do you find out what's going on?

I've been dabbling with this too, and my current state is that I don't consume any news or social media (twitter) that I cannot consume via my RSS reader, which in practical terms means I don't subscribe to any major news outlets, but instead subscribe to a smaller newspaper in my country that sends out daily newsletters which I then forward to my RSS reader that then shows it along regular RSS content - it's a feature of feedbin.com and it's a great feature!. Then I follow a lot of personal blogs, lobste.rs and HN, and then a curated list of twitter accounts, all via my RSS reader. The twitter thing is also a feedbin.com feature. And then I try to read books about a lot of different topics according to my mood, obviously. I get the feeling that any news that is not relevant to me after a month, six months, a year and so on, is probably not worth my time anyways except if it touches me directly, in which case I'll know anyways, so by reading books about, say covid-19 in a few years instead of news now, I'll get a much better picture of the whole thing than if I was intensely following the news every single day doing the pandemic.

But fear of missing out does often present itself. It's a constant fight between my rational mind, and some kind of stupid, irrational thing that is also part of me.

It's not hard for me. I have a very low fear of missing out.

I do end up consuming news, but always either through some sort of filter or directly (rarely), but realizing the role of entertainment in whatever I am watching.

I use Twitter a lot, but I follow people who mostly don't replicate the news. I try to follow people that say interesting things.

I read Hacker News a lot, but there is the explicitly idea to not replicate mainstream news here, so another good filter.

I use Whatsapp a lot, but I am only in groups with friends and family, so another source of news, but filtered by people I care about. Maybe luckily, or even by my influence, these few groups are not just spamming news to me.

I am not against the news, I don't particularly "hate" the news.

I do inform myself through podcasts, a few that talk about books for example, so it is another filter to consume the news.

I would like to echo WhatsApp groups as a news source. I don't own a TV, don't do twitter and keep Facebook for the odd monthly visit. WhatsApp groups keep informed. The best group is my the one made up of people who went to same boarding school. What's great about this group is you get both sides of the story without anyone leaving in huff. Somewhere down the middle is the real news. I find you can't have similarly discussions out in the open.

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." — Nassim Taleb

Something you read in the news today, is going to worth nothing tomorrow.

Sadly, this post retroactively suggests that we should not care about his arrest and death.

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