“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” — Mark Twain
“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” — A. J. Liebling
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” — Malcolm X
24 hours each day isn’t enough to consume 0.0001% of the world’s events.
The Paradox of News: The more news you consume, the less informed you are about the world.
Want to know more about the world? Turn off the news and go spend time in it.
Nassim Taleb’s “Noise Bottleneck”
Data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio.
- More data leads to a higher ratio of noise-to-signal
- By consuming more, you end up knowing less about what’s actually going on.
Gell-Mann Razor
- Assume every media article contains a certain percent of false information.
- Sandbox the article from your worldview until you’ve:
- Seen primary sources
- Spoken to 3 domain experts
For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.
The Negativity Doom Loop
Trends > News
專注於「不會變的東西」，才不會每天都被「變來變去的東西」搞得心神不寧。
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只關注/吸收具有「時效性」（Timeless）的資訊，這些內容在多年後依然適用、價值不減。
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反之，盡可能忽略「即時性」（Timely）的新聞，例如：
- 某政治人物遭遇事件（如川普槍擊）
- 體育賽事精華（環法賽、世足賽等）
這類資訊雖然短期內令人興奮，但通常無助於長遠成長，甚至可能在事後帶來「空虛與失落感」☹️