I shocked my friend when I stated to a dinner table full of our friends:

“I am deliberately trying to avoid the news cycle right now (during the UK General Election). It’s full of noise and I don’t believe that it’s improving my ability to choose between candidates”

To which my friend responded

“Why are you proud of being ill informed?”

This is a reasonable question.

I used to be a news junkie. I was proud of having “my finger on the pulse”, at least as seen through the eyes of The Economist. I could reel off figures of the hectares burned in the latest Canadian forest fires. I would be able to recite the editorial byline on Jacob Zuma’s abuses of power in South Africa. I copy and pasted an opinion on the latest round of climate change talks. I believed this made me intelligent. But the truth was: I was less happy. I was liable to doom scrolling. I would cram irrelevant information that did not improve my map of the world and how it worked.

Slower moving processes are more important for grokking the world

An article by Max Roser (from Our World In Data) shares the idea that while harm is done in an instant, progress happens over the course of decades. He considers a newspaper published once every 50 years. Can you imagine the positivity? The world eradicates smallpox, polio. Child mortality drops from 17% to 4%. Global poverty falls from 60% to <10%. This is wild. Sure there’s some negative stuff too, the number of terrestrial animals has fallen 60% since 1974. We are now 1 degC warmer than 1974.

But the point of the 50 year newspaper is that the world is shaped more by processes operating over decades than processes operating over hours or days. No one is worried about whether Lampard should have been given that goal against Germany in the 2010 World Cup (answer: yes, yes he should have).

The idea that reading the news is the best way to remain informed about the world is also up for debate. Important ideas should persist, and therefore, to get a better mental map of the world you should read history books instead of the news.

Fast News has a negativity bias

Recently I came across Bryan Caplan in his discussion with Rob Wilbin on the 80,000 hours podcast. The central thesis is that reading the news makes you less happy because the media has a negativity bias. The reasons are twofold:

  • Negative news sells. People enjoy reading about disaster and destruction.
  • Negative things NOT happening doesn’t make a compelling story.

Bryan Caplan’s question he recommends we ask is:

In a well-functioning society of 8 billion people, how much bad stuff would be reported anyway?

This makes clear that you expect some level of bad things to happen. Relative to this level of expected badness, are we experiencing more bad things (let’s worry), or less (progress baby!)

You should be careful about the information you consume. You are primed to believe it.

Eleizer Yudkowsky describes experiments showing that, by default, we accept statements as true, and only reject them after consideration. Your bullshit detector occurs after you have already inhaled the story.

But if you are distracted while reading then your “bullshit detector” is worsened. His post ends with a warning: “Be careful when you glance at that newspaper in the supermarket.”.

Does this differ in an election year?

During an election year there probably are more compelling reasons to follow the news cycle, the debates between the leaders of the parties and come to a conclusion about who you will support. But fundamentally, I think there are compelling reasons to read less news and dedicate the time saved to reading longer lasting sources of information.