I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html
I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn’t actionable even if it’s important.
It would be interesting to have a service that gives you summaries of the news from 6 or 12 months ago, with care taken to cover the general response and counter-narratives.
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.
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.