The News is Never Neglected
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I like reading the Sentinel email newsletter once a week for time-sensitive general world news, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024 (or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025 etc.) once every 3-4 months for non-time-sensitive general world news. That adds up to very little time—maybe ≈1 minute per day on average—and I think there are more than enough diffuse benefits to justify that tiny amount of time.
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1More annual links:
https://hntoplinks.com/year
Magnum forums like this one:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?timeframe=yearly
https://lesswrong.com/allPosts?timeframe=yearly
https://progressforum.org/allPosts?timeframe=yearly
https://forum.fastcommunity.org/allPosts?timeframe=yearly
and subreddits:
https://reddit.com/r/*/top/?t=year
Counterpoint 1: this sounds like a deliberate adoption of the bystander effect. The more people know about a problem, the less responsible I am to do anything about it...
Counterpoint 2: many problems require collective action, which requires the problem be widely known.
I don't know if I'd go as strong as the OP, but, I think you're being the most pro-social if you have a sense of the scale of other things-worth-doing that aren't in the news, and consciously checking how the current News Thing fits into that scale of importance.
(There can be a few different ways to think about importance, which this frame can be agnostic on. i.e. doesn't have to be "global utilitarian in the classical sense")
The last time I saw someone unconscious on the side of the road with a concussion due to a bicycle crash, there was bystander already attempting to render aid. I stopped to help anyway, and discovered that the bystander in question had failed both to render first aid and to call 911. In this situation, I think I did the right thing getting involved. I produced a trivially observable net positive effect.
That same year, I visited a protest against the current war in the Middle East, and tried talking to the participants. I left with the impression that their desire to act collectively and rebelliously for a righteous cause exceeded their curiosity to find out whether the cause was indeed righteous. This is a result of selection effects. The situation was morally complicated, but the people who protest are angry about it, and to be angry about it, they had to believe the situation was morally simple.
To put things another way, if you're in a situation that 10 people know about, then there's a good chance nobody is doing anything about it. However, if 10,000,000 people know about a situation, then it's statistically impossible that nobody is doing anything about it.
Agreed on both points. I had to say, without reading the news occasionally, I do not realize how much I don’t know about things going on in the world. It does help me to stay informed, and deep concrete stories in particular, help to understand full pictures. Though many times, I also need to do a bit of digging to find more information to avoid bias, but if one stick to news sources that have better quality, this issue will be better. It is very likely the choice of news sources, matters.
The OP had a strong assumption that whatever reported in the news are going to be mainstream; I think it is only partially true, and have some doubts; for “old” news, it is also/very possible they are getting attention bc nothing has been done about them. Things do not have to be new, to be underfunded/under resourced etc.
Why do your teachers, parents and other adult authorities tell you to listen to a propaganda machine? Because the propaganda machine is working.
I forget where I read this, but there's a reason they call it the "news" and not the "importants."
I almost think it's a problem you included the word "mainstream." It's a slippery word that winds up meaning "other people's news." It seems like realizing the point in your post is one step, and taking a more surgical dive into what news counts as obscure enough is another. If you're a doomscroller you're probably gravitating toward stuff many people have been hearing about, though.
Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.
This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire - can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let's say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself "the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn't be helping anybody." - I've convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.[1]
Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of "okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?" and the current question of "which news should I consume" remains unanswered.
- ^
No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn't work because I personally don't believe in that goddess's power.
Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?
A question you can ask yourself is whether your relationship to the news is proactive or reactive.
- A proactive approach is good. I've been learning about foreign affairs for many years. When the Ukraine War started, I immediately reacted, and did so with a comparative advantage. I consider this approach proactive, because I had prepared for the events long before the hit the news. By the time they hit the news, it was too late to begin studying foreign policy.
- A reactive approach is non-agentic. If you're paying attention to things because they're in the news, then you're at the mercy of whatever fads farm the most engagement. If the top thing on your mind is the top thing in the news, then that means you're letting a propaganda machine tell you what to think about. It means you're an NPC.
I'm interested in how you can convert that information proactively?
I'm aware that, for example, keeping abreast of macro or geopolitical changes can influence things like investing in the stock-market. But I'd be lying if I'm aware of any other possibilities beyond that.
I think that, more than drinking from the propaganda trough makes me an NPC, protagonists in games do novel things, potentially unexpected (from the perspective of the game designers). NPCs are predictable and habitual. If I cannot extract utility from the news, macro or micro, then I fear I'm an NPC.
I'm not talking about post-rationalizations like "Oh I just read for entertainment" or "Well it helps me engage in conversation and make small talk" - because, again, those are NPCish predictable expected means of extracting utility.
I mean something which comes under the broad category of 'lateral thinking' or 'radical problem solving'.
I'm interested in how you can convert that information [news] proactively?
This is a great question, and like many questions, there is a trick hiding in it. The thinking is backwards.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Proactive thinking doesn't start by watching the news and figuring out how to make best use of it. That's reactive thinking. Proactive thinking starts totally blocking out all the news for a while, and figuring out what you want. Then go find the resources you need to accomplish that. Usually "the resources you need" won't be news because news is ephemeral garbage.
1I want to let you know I've been reflecting on the reactive/proactive news consumption all week. It has really brought into focus a lot of my futile habits not just over news consumption, but idle reading and social media scrolling in general.[1] Why do I do it? I'm always hoping for that one piece of information, that "one simple trick" which will improve my decision making models, will solve my productivity problems, give me the tools to let me accomplish goals XY&Z. Which of course begs the question of why am I always operating on this abstracted, meta-level, distanced level from goals XY&Z and the simple answer is: if I knew how to solve them directly, I'd be actively working on the sets to solve them.
That's a lot of TMI but I just wanted to give you a sense of the affect this had on me.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Or those little "specials" at the Gas Station - buy one chocolate bar, get another free - the customer didn't save 100% of the price of the second chocolate bar, they lost 100% because they had no intention of buying a chocolate bar until they saw that impulse-hacking "offer".
- ^
On the flip side is the wasteful consumption that I don't read - my collection of books that I probably won't ever read. Why buy them? Seems as pointless as reading ephemeral news slop.
I think it's a very bad idea to dismiss the entirety of news as a "propaganda machine". Certainly some sources are almost entirely propaganda. More reputable sources like the AP and Reuters will combine some predictable bias with largely trustworthy independent journalism. Identifying those more reliable sources and compensating for their bias takes effort and media literacy, but I think that effort is quite valuable- both individually and collectively for society.
- Accurate information about large, important events informs our world model and improves our predictions. Sure, a war in the Middle East might not noticeably affect your life directly, but it's rare that a person lives an entire life completely unaffected by any war, and having a solid understanding of how wars start and progress based on many detailed examples will help us prepare and react sensibly when that happens. Accurate models of important things will also end up informing our understanding of tons of things that might have originally seemed unrelated. That's all true, of course, of more neglected sources of information- but it seems like the best strategy for maximizing the usefulness of your models is to focus on information which seems important or surprising, regardless of neglectedness.
- Independent journalism also checks the power of leaders. Even in very authoritarian states, the public can collectively exert some pressure against corruption and incompetence by threatening instability- but only if they're able to broadly coordinate on a common understanding of those things. The reason so many authoritarians deny the existence of reliable independent journalism- often putting little to no effort into hiding the propagandistic nature of their state media- is that by promoting that maximally cynical view of journalism, they immunize their populations against information not under their control. Neglected information can allow for a lot of personal impact, but it's not something societies can coordinate around- so focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else may represent a kind of defection in the coordination problem of civic duty.
Of course, we have to be very careful with our news consumption- even the most sober, reliable sources will drive engagement by cherry-picking stories, which can skew our understanding of the frequency of all kinds of problems. But availability bias is a problem we have to learn to compensate for in all sorts of different domains- it would be amazing if we were able to build a rich model of important global events by consuming only purely unbiased information, but that isn't the world we live in. The news is the best we've got, and we ought to use it.
First of all, thank you for the constructive comment.
The reason I consider journalism propaganda isn't that it's false; it's because of where the data comes from. In my experience, journalism is largely derived from press releases and similar information sources. In the extreme case, an article is effectively written by a corporation, and then laundered by a journalist. I agree that news in the AP and Reuters tends to be factually true, but what matters to me is the sampling bias caused by the economics of how they get their information.
I also agree that "a solid understanding of how wars start and progress based on many detailed examples will help us prepare and react sensibly when that happens". However, I haven't gotten this from reading the news. I've gotten this from reading history, and watching explanations by specialists such as Perun.
I think there's a difference though between propaganda and the mix of selection effects that decides what gets attention in profit driven mass media news. Actual intentional propaganda efforts exist. But in general what makes news frustrating is the latter, which is a more organic and less centralised effort.
