You might object, “Sure it’s not actionable for me, but if no one consumed the news, even important things wouldn’t percolate through society!”

That is probably true, but we’re so far from the point where the marginal consumption of additional news is a net positive that I don’t think we’re in any danger of an under-informed network here.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It’s made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, “Here’s a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today”, but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it should prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I’m not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it’s involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

@pganssle have you considered subscribing to some print news rags? It's not 6 months but it would be a delay between when news occurs and when you consume it.

@drewfer It's certainly better than instant news, but it's still got all the wrong incentives, and is generally not terribly accurate.

@brainwane I appreciate your perspective on this.

I think that the position that people who have less table living situations need the news more is not incompatible with my thesis that fewer people should read the news — I would guess that the median news consumer is well-off and in a stable situation.

That said, I think that the vast majority of news is not actionable, and even for people who would take action it doesn’t make sense to drink from the news firehose.

@brainwane At the end of the day, most world events are not something you can personally affect or which should change your behavior in any way.

In the very rare situations where this is the case, you’d be better off cultivating networks of people you trust to deliver you actual actionable information, since that automatically filters the signal from the noise for you.

@brainwane And as I mentioned in one of the posts in the thread, I’m mainly talking about the current state of things, on the margin. I’m not advocating a situation where no news is produced and no one learns about the wider world, just that there’s an immense over-production and over-consumption of news at the moment.

Interestingly, I could see a world where my view is “no one should read ‘the news’” rather than “fewer people should read ‘the news’’” — one where there is no generalized news, and people tend to follow specialized news (e.g. I follow Python news and I could follow news about my neighborhood or my town). If we did this and cultivated networks of people we trusted to show us interesting things that are timely and actionable, we’d probably get a much better experience (chances are you are 1-2 degrees of freedom away from someone who could tell you about a deadly disease coming or something).

@pganssle Paul, I like you and I care about your thoughts, and I'm not blocking you, but I'm not going to be reading further in this thread because it's personally distressing to me and I'd prefer not to have further conversation about it in written form.

@2ck I disagree here. The marginal voter is probably not informed particularly well by following the news.

Consider this: your vote is most likely to make an impact (and have a direct impact on you) in local elections, but very few people follow local politics.

Also, voting happens fairly infrequently — you don't need to poll for that information at a high frequency. Your time is much better spent reading history, economics and political science to build a framework for what good policies look like, and then reading a dispassionate summary of the candidates' positions and their previous actions just prior to voting.

@2ck Also, I think that politics is a team sport for the majority of people in the US. If you are a straight-ticket Republican / Democrat voter (which most people are), you are not going to accidentally miss something in the news that would flip your vote to the other side of the aisle — anything that makes a particular candidate so disdainful that committed partisans would flip allegiance for them would be such a big story that you'd hear about it anyway.

On the other hand, spending your time studying a diverse selection of "long view" sources is almost certainly more likely to change your mind about what part(ies) to support or not support, since it could cause an evolution in your thinking about what the best policies are.

@pganssle Democracy doesn't just work at elections. It is a day by day process involving maintenance of trust in democratic institutions and in society generally. That requires an understanding of what's going on currently so you can understand why people are doing what they're doing. That's news. Yes, it's important to have an understanding of history, and I agree that there's a lot of news that can be ignored, but that's hardly a reason to pan news generally. Rather, it's an argument for moderate one's intake.