News

How many of the articles you read in the past 12 months actually led you to take useful actions?
Portraying a society where everyone hates each other is the most dangerous virus of all, because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing spreads faster than anger. Especially anger in the specific format of "just look at how awful the people we hate are".
- There is a hierarchy of "interestingness" that applies to the great information currents and media outlets that shape society as a whole. It's better to raise up controversial topics than high impact one like charity.
- Social media and news usually works against fixing the issues which most of us agree should be fixed. Instead they focus only on perpetuating the things which keep us all discussing, forever.
The amygdala (emotional core of the mind) is built to make us react to "threatening" information that doesn't fit into our worldview the same way we react to a predator. That's called the "Backfire Effect". Remember that your worldview is not perfect!
If our perceptions of reality are increasingly informed by media with other-than-truth motivations, we'll increasingly lose our handle on the truth. We will be living in a state of split consciousness, being immune to thousands of deaths and concerned about the latest changes in your favorite team.
We're losing our ability to think together. Communities can only think when people talk and when they're free to say what they really think. As echo chambers grow larger and more intimidating, people inside them are afraid to defy the sacred narrative. And the more all-encompassing political identities become, the more topics turn from kickable machines to precious infants. Meanwhile, inter-group communication suffers even more, as opposing groups become totally unable to collaborate on ideas.
A polarized society that isn't capable of building broad coalitions can't take forward steps—it can only self-inflict.
A large amount of stuff in the news is flat-out wrong.
The news also bias the layperson's perception of risk. The very fact that bad events are rare these days, makes them newsworthy. With a large sample size, unusual tragedies happen daily, and they end up on the news nightly. For example, car crashed might cause more damage than other events like floodings or fires.
- News are incentivized to cherry-pick stories that spread fast. For example, scam news. A scam is like a virus that converts trust into cynicism, but it's the news, in the name of keeping things entertaining and addictive, that distributes the virus across the whole country.
- Media is business and business is for profit. The market is incentivizing bad media. Media is called on bias/inaccuracy only by their political foes, which isn't their audience. Audiences have to start pushing back on the media that shares their bias.
News programs are, with the exception of a few non-profit or publicly funded ones, commercial enterprises designed to turn and maximize profit.
- The profit comes from advertising, and advertising revenue is maximized by pulling the largest audience, holding their attention for the longest possible time, and putting them into the mental state most conducive to purchasing the products of the advertisers (which turns out to be helplessness and vulnerability). This is why the news always starts out with a sensationalist take on a topic of at least plausible national interest, takes a detour into truly horrific and depressing irrelevant tragedies is one that unfortunately crossed my screen when doing research for this article, then ends on an uplifting note with something like a defiant entrepreneur or a caring soup kitchen. An emotional roller-coaster ride every day of the week. They don't explore solutions.
There isn't enough actual news (ie events that are "new") to fill the standard news slot — so the fillers became pundits and commentators interpreting "news" and "potential news" for us. Humans are good at finding efficiencies, and potential events far outweigh the number of past events, and potential negative events captivate our attention better than potential positive events, so these news-cycles naturally became dominated by commentators interpreting any number of potential negative events.
Progress happens too slowly to notice, setbacks happen too fast to ignore. Bad things can happen fast, but almost all good things happen slowly. Even if the trendlines are improving, the feeling the news give is the opposite.
Online & mainstream media and social networking have become increasingly misleading as to the state of the world by focusing on ‘stories' and ‘events' rather than trends and averages. This is because as the global population increases and the scope of media increases, media's urge for narrative focuses on the most extreme outlier datapoints—but such datapoints are, at a global scale, deeply misleading as they are driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. News are often "correct" on a basic level, but really more like "yes, but it's complicated" on a deeper level. If you've ever seen a surface-level description of something you know about at a deep level, and you realize how wrong it is, or at least how much nuance it's missing. Realize that it's like that with everything.
- On certain topics, it's good to remember that you're often being informed by the most delusional people.
- The news's obsession with having a little bit of information on a wide variety of subjects means that it actually gets most of those subjects wrong.
When we're talking about very unpopular beliefs, polls can only give a weak signal. Any possible source of noise (Lizardman's Constant) can easily overwhelm the signal. Beware of bad designed polls.
Uncertainty doesn't sell. Nuance doesn't sell. Long, complex lectures don't sell. A video of someone saying "it's complicated" will never perform the way one would of someone using confident, flippant, polarizing rhetoric, and that's a huge problem.
Main rule of fast-moving situation (e.g: early days of COVID-19): No one knows anything.
Avoid content that takes the creator less than 10x of their own time to produce. Consume most of content that takes 100x or more to produce. Replace short-form content with long-form content. The latter is less dense, but requires far more effort to produce. Let the authors self-select what’s important.