Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet. Rolf Dobelli. 2010. https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf
"This article is the antidote to news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the reading habit and struggle to absorb more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap –if you are not already too deeply in it."
No 1 – News misleads us systematically
No 2 – News is irrelevant
No 3 – News limits understanding
No 4 – News is toxic to your body
No 5 – News massively increases cognitive errors
No 6 – News inhibits thinking
No 7 – News changes the structure of your brain
No 8 – News is costly
No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
No 10 – News is produced by journalists
Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some (my note: most???) incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time–or the capacity–for deep analysis. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news. My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Lessthan 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate. [my note: I advise the author to re-examine mentioning Watergate, as per nos. 1, 10, 12, as a minimum]
No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always <<< very, very frequently, but not always... that's why we keep reading the news and forecasts
No 12 – News is manipulative
No 13 – News makes us passive
No 14 – News gives us the illusion of caring
No 15 – News kills creativity
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My comments: This is so so wrong in so many counts that I do not know where to start. And, despite this, it is also useful showing a need to avoid news generally. Could we say most, not all? Could we say it is best to avoid uncritical examination of the news? Or that maybe the general press is the one to avoid, but some subgroup, maybe the big economic press, is not to be avoided entirely? Or that local news is to be forgotten completely? Or that newspapers in countries where there is more informality or more people is more exaggerated talking, or the press is more economical with truth, are to be ignored?
Could it be that all press in Asia (except the London Times and maybe some Japanese newspapers), all of Africa (to know about Africa, check the London Times and the BBC) and all below the Rio Grande could very well be sent to oblivion, and just two newspapers could survive in the US (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal)?
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
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