Reading less daily news made me more informed about the world.
This is for a few core reasons:
- News has a short half-life
- For example, take this article about jurors in Elizabeth Holmes trial
- Will it be relevant even one week from now?
- News sources are incentivized for you to read not for you to learn
- Because most news is based on advertising models, news organizations want you to spend much as much time on their site as possible
- This leads to content that focuses on whatever gets clicks not what you actually need to know (this is clearest in many pop culture articles)
- News is inherently biased towards the negative
- There’s always something bad happening somewhere in the world and because we live in a global connected world, news will always show it to us
- As Hans Rosling shows in his wonderful book Factfulness worldwide statistics (lifespans, poverty, etc.) show consistent positive growth
- Because positive trends increase gradually over years, the increase in global lifespan will never make headlines while a local disaster will
- News doesn’t create independent opinions
- When you read opinion articles you’re shown the world from a particular lens
- Because true independent thinking requires hours of work, most news consumers take on the opinions of the authors/websites they read instead of doing this work
- News also doesn’t emphasize that it’s ok to not have a fully fleshed out point of view for most subjects and grey areas do exist
The approach I try to adopt is simple, but not easy.
Read less news, more books.
- While I say books, what I mean is focusing on reading/learning information dense material that will stay with you for a while
- Long form and thoughtful blog posts like my favorites here also fit the bill as it is information dense and their authors took days, weeks, months to distill this insight down
- Most modern news, FaceBook posts, Twitter comments, etc. are items where the author took very little time to think and write about it so it’s also probably not worth your time
If you read short term news, you’ll have a short term view. Read information dense sources (ex: history) and focus on information that last years not days.
Reference
Note, much of my initial thoughts on news were influenced by Shane Parrish and his article at Farnam Street