“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
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
