I Hate the News (2006)

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

by sealeck • 3 years ago

115 93 3 years ago

noduerme• 3 years ago

I was disagreeing but mentally playing along with the thesis right up until the sign-off:

> You should follow me on twitter

Boy. If the NYT is going to scramble my brain with too many topics, I don't think what I should do is get on social media...

Kye2• 3 years ago

I don't think you'll need to worry about how he feels about you not following him on Twitter considering he died 10 years ago.

nexus7556• 3 years ago

It is easy to forget what a different world it was back then.

chrisco2552• 3 years ago

I guess for context I'll add this is Aaron Swartz, a cofounder of Reddit, and fierce advocate for free speech. He was federally prosecuted for wire fraud in 2013 for downloading academic journals from MIT, faced up to 30 years in prison, and committed suicide just before his trial.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

Archives [1a][1b] as I am unable to view the site, I get a SSL error [2] RIP

[1a] - http://archive.today/KMAEL

[1b] - https://web.archive.org/web/20230704222137/http://www.aarons...

[2] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.aaronsw.c...

tacker20002• 3 years ago

(2006)

rcarr2• 3 years ago

This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me? It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.

This is just blatantly wrong. Actions have consequences and many politicians have lost their job after a story got out.

Unfortunately, this type of thinking is what happens when you live in a stable country. You get too comfortable and start thinking you can just ignore what's going on elsewhere. Who knows, maybe he'll get away with it. I'd wager it was the Russians and Ukrainians who read the news that managed to get out in time before they got drafted and I'd wager back in the 1930s that it was mostly the Jews who read the news who managed to escape Nazi Germany and not get shipped off to a camp.

I'd say there's a strong similarity between the news and martial arts training. 99.9999% of the time you might not need it but you'll be damn fucking grateful the 0.0001% of the time that you do.

majkinetor• 3 years ago

The observation may not be relevant for extreme situations like those mentioned. However, even then, most people around you will know, so unless you live in a cave you will get the information on time.

Comparison with martial arts is inapropriate. Also, there are other things you could do to protect (and inform) yourself that do not demand payment with your most scarce resource.

rcarr2• 3 years ago

However, even then, most people around you will know, so unless you live in a cave you will get the information on time.

Some people are just tuned out regardless. My mother is perpetually outraged/shocked that her mortgage is going up every month despite me telling her for months that yes, that is what happens when the central bank raises interest rates. She is 100% one of the people who would fail to see the writing on the wall or do anything until the bombs were dropping.

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

This right here is why I hate the pedestal Swartz has been put on since his suicide. His "hot take" is just straight-up trash you'd expect from any random 20-something techbro libertarian off the street.

How did he not fall over from the irony of being a Jewish man and saying "well nothing in the news today doesn't directly concern me, so I don't care about the news ever"?

How would you know if the news concerned you if you didn't read it?

dryanau• 3 years ago

It's alright for one person to think this way, but if everyone did we'd be in a bit of trouble as a society. I think the reality is in the middle anyway, i.e. very few people are desperately gripped to each and every story, and if you think you're supposed to care about every story then you're missing the point of the news. Chances are enough people will care about each story to make it worthwhile running, even when many (or most) people don't care. If you're picking up the paper and literally zero stories affect you, well okay then! But you'd be in the minority. For most people there's something in there worth knowing. Even if it's not every single day. Most people benefit from knowing something about what's happening at least weekly. In hindsight this is a really odd article.

lmm• 3 years ago

Like the joke about airports, if you've never missed hearing about an important event then you're paying too much attention to news. There's a level that's worth following, but most people read far more news than is worthwhile.

NovaDudely3• 3 years ago

There is the nightly news broadcast, it goes for 1 hour - so 1/16th of your waking life. Maybe about 10-15% of that hour is anything of actual interest/importance.

xboxnolifes2• 3 years ago

Exactly. Nobody should be watching 24/7 news, but you also probably shouldn't be avoiding every news publication ever.

10 minutes a day skimming your news sources of choice for topics relevant to you combined with hearing things from your friends/family/coworkers goes a long way.

kortilla4• 3 years ago

10 mins a day is still way too much. It’s 99.99% absofuckinguseless.

I say this as someone who read it for decades. It’s all caricatures of the truth designed to push some other narrative.

Every single time I thought I was informed and chatted with someone who had even a small notional bit of first hand information, it became immediately apparent how I was both extremely ignorant and how my false sense of knowledge made it worse.

EA-3167• 3 years ago

Some people should definitely think that way though, specifically people prone to depression, suicide, and so on. If you're grappling with dark thoughts, the news is a pretty nasty hole to fall down. Aaron was sadly one of those people who probably was right that the news wasn't for him.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

avoidance behavior is a bad response to mental issues. Even if it works temporarily, in the long run it shrinks your world and reduces your confidence. It's why people with panic disorders are taught to confront stressors and learn to adapt, not lock themselves in their house.

Regarding the news, a practical issue is of course that it doesn't always work. If you're privileged, self-employed or what have you, you can dodge a lot of issues for a while, but not always. Aaron himself ironically and sadly enough found himself at the center of the news years after he wrote this. That the news is just what happens to other people is an adolescent idea that will at some point be shattered.

I've got a lot of Ukrainian friends who did a lot of coding out of a bunker the last year and a half, and over there nobody has ever told me they stopped reading the NYT and their issues went away. That's most of the world, the news is real, only very few people are so removed they can just ignore the world for decades.

chongli• 3 years ago

There’s a lot in the news that’s breaking one day and gone the next. I think people in general consume too much news, rather than too little.

We might be better off getting news out of our lives and just having some kind of alert system for events that are relevant to our lives.

strken• 3 years ago

I'm not sure this is true. Social networks, as in the underlying human phenomenon of communicating with other people, do a phenomenal job of spreading information.

Consider personally important news: some combination of ground-shaking global events, plus stories specific to one's interests, plus some local news. We hear about these things anyway! I heard about the war in Ukraine from friends and acquaintances before seeing it in a newspaper, with less waffling and including links to more in-depth analysis. I hear about human interest stories that actually interest me, weird bits of software/archeology/gaming/ecology/literature/sports/local stuff, instead of random articles about any old thing. I'm more up to date on local gossip than the actual media sometimes, since people who are unwilling to answer a reporter's questions are happy to just have a chat. The most serious news eventually ends up on HN in one form or another, which is at least an industry-specific link aggregator with less whiplash.

Probably there's news I need to know, and weekly might be an okay compromise, but even monthly or quarterly news would be supplemented by people telling me things.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

One advantage of this approach is that it largely short circuits the ability of the various power players and organizations to direct your attention to where they want it when they want it, as well as reduces the chance of you getting your story from a doctored version. I think any approach that messes with potential behind the scenes coordination is just good old-fashioned risk management.

kortilla4• 3 years ago

For most people there's something in there worth knowing.

Your distribution is way off.

If we’re talking national US news like the NYT or WaPo reports on, there is actually worth knowing. The only value it provides is “sounding informed” at a party.

It has a huge negative downside too. It’s some watered down biased version of what’s going on in the world that fits narratives of the editors, with barely any relationship to reality.

National news is absolutely propaganda-loaded trash that serves a severely negative value for society overall.

Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.

Shared404• 3 years ago

Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

Local news isn't immune either.

E: Apparently I posted twice when I tried to edit the Youtube link to the main site. Deleted the dupe.

tacker20002• 3 years ago

> But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine?

This is probably best point in this article, the others are quite debatable. I would say that there is a value in knowing whats going on at some scale, but the actual problem is really down to the over-accessibility of news that we have today. Do we really need minute to minute updates on whats happening a thousand miles away?

mvc• 3 years ago

Oh boy would Aaron not like what has become of 'news' since he left.

EPWN3D• 3 years ago

Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.

Gonna need a source on this one, chief.

wild_egg• 3 years ago

Good luck, author died in 2013. This was written in 2006 and it's safe to say people consumed media differently back then

throw0101a• 3 years ago

If someone feels this way it may be worth getting a (paper) subscription to a weekly paper (assuming those still exist: The New Yorker?):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_newspaper

There's a lot of noise day-to-day, so some smoothing/averaging may be useful in reducing that. Perhaps monthly (e.g., The Atlantic) for longer-form articles on bigger topics as well.

assimpleaspossi3• 3 years ago

Some days, when reading the paper, it's not worth getting up off the toilet.

SomeCallMeTim3• 3 years ago

I do wonder whether encouraging people to exist entirely in their bubble is healthy.

I agree with the article to a point. I don't really have a "daily news ritual," though I tend to stumble across major stories.

But enough people being isolated from the news can result in an uninformed populace. People continuing to vote R or D simply out of habit.

I mean, I'm unlikely to vote anything but D for the foreseeable future. But if the R party self-destructs and an actual, viable, left-leaning party is created, I'd want to know that.

But that doesn't mean I need updates on every manufactured crisis daily, either.

e402• 3 years ago

For whatever reason liberals always seem to be the ones who withdraw into their bubbles. The problem is this leaves the other side the opportunity to capture various government organizations, like SCOTUS.

sealeck2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure conservatives are exactly the social butterflies you make them out to be.

toomim• 3 years ago

I find that "the news" is what is creating those bubbles. The more you read the nytimes, or watch fox, the more you lock into that particular bubble mindset.

SomeCallMeTim3• 3 years ago

Fox? Yes. Absolutely.

NYT? Only if you consider "what's actually happening" or "reality" to be a bubble. I see both liberal and conservative viewpoints in the NYT all the time.

Reality does have a stubborn liberal bias, after all.

That said, NYT is equally driven by sensationalism, in the "If it bleeds, it leads" sense.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

You probably can read the news once per month and be well informed.

killjoywashere• 3 years ago

If you think the news has no impact, you just haven't been the one in the news yet.

NovaDudely3• 3 years ago

This goes to the core of what Mark Twaine said "Don't those that buy paper by the ton and ink by the barrel."

fsckboy• 3 years ago

(there was a typo)

"Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton."

- Mark Twain

redbell• 3 years ago

OP, if you hear me, please append the year (2006) at the end of the title. It’s not an obligation but it’s a good practice that the community already used to, other tags like [video] and [pdf] are popular too.

superchroma• 3 years ago

I agree completely. It's a complete waste of time making us more miserable.

jumelles• 3 years ago

Well this sure has aged poorly.

jmcgough• 3 years ago

As a queer person watching a slew of recent anti-LGBT laws pass, I wish I could have the luxury of just ignoring the news and not caring. Aaron was 20 when he wrote this and it shows.

sealeck2• 3 years ago

I think his perspective is a bit more nuanced than this; the complaint is with "real-time" news (somewhere on his blog, Aaron wrote about how he preferred to read post-event summaries in the New Yorker rather than being up-to-date every day).

Danjoe4• 3 years ago

I'm not aware of any recent laws that restrict the rights of LGBT individuals, could you please name them?

mathewsanders• 3 years ago

Both ACLU and HRC have convenient tracking for these bills.

Last year over 300 bills were introduced, and 29 were signed into law (still far too many).

https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-wor...

https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-the-aclu-tracks-a...

kweingar4• 3 years ago

Just one example:

Tennessee has recently passed a law banning “male or female impersonators” from performing in public places. Tennessee also does not alter sex on birth certificates for trans people.

Arguably this means that Tennessee banned trans people from performing in public in any capacity.

Meekro2• 3 years ago

What, specifically, would have happened to you if you simply ignored it all? Would you have accidentally violated one of these new laws (in the place where you live) because of not reading the news?

silisili• 3 years ago

Not lgbt, but had the same takeaway. Can't blame him. It's funny that at 20 we know everything. By 40 we barely know anything.

tomjen3• 3 years ago

Do you think things would change if you stopped following the news?

If you take the time you follow the news now and spend it voluenteering at an LGBT group, do you thing that would do more or less for your cause than watching the news?

esafak• 3 years ago

Read it if it affects your circle or you are going to act on it. Otherwise consider if you could be doing something better with your time. I used to read the news assiduously until I realized I could not act on it in a satisfactory way. Would that I could do more.

thenerdhead3• 3 years ago

I also hate the news (and advertisements).

The news will never teach you how to think. It will tell you what to think.

I love books though. Books don't tell lies to you because you have to think for yourself.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

Books don't tell lies to you

That is entirely inaccurate though. There are a LOT of books designed for a goal.

NovaDudely3• 3 years ago

If anything all books are merely published bias. No issue reading them but don't take books as gospel. They are just as fallible as every other medium.

thenerdhead3• 3 years ago

The whole point of my comment is that reading books helps you develop skills where it is a hell of a lot easier to decipher bullshit.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

The news will never teach you how to think. It will tell you what to think.

Oh I disagree with this...presumably you notice lots of people have the same "facts" based on what's in the news, but have you not noticed that the "logical reasoning" that accompanies these "facts" is also quite similar, and typically not very logical?

thenerdhead3• 3 years ago

That is exactly what I’m saying here. Perhaps not expressed explicitly enough.

dbtc• 3 years ago

Worse, you will be taught how to not think.

Books can also lie, but at least there is room for truth in them.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

It is straight unreal to me that this guy partially creates Reddit, what his intentions were vs what it has become.

If someone came to me saying “I want to get things wrong, I want to have a surface understanding of topics, I’d really like to be distrusting and skeptical and believe everything I’m told by behind the scenes powers ensuring I think a specific thing”… I would introduce them to Reddit.

i8comments• 3 years ago

Something very similar can be said about the majority of social media comments.

phforms• 3 years ago

The post is from 2006. I wonder how he would have written it differently or not at all during the pandemic or if he was a refugee, for example. Of course, these are extreme cases, but they demonstrate that you have to be in a special position to be able to perceive the news as a “waste of time”.

I also have the habit of avoiding most news, but I believe it did not serve me well, since I have been ignorant about many current issues and often feel ashamed when I don’t know things that are very relevant to the lifes of people around me that I may talk to. Especially when there was a recent disaster or political event that made a huge impact and I just missed it and thereby fail to sympathize with someone who is directly affected by it.

But I also see how reading the news can really drag me down and feed into my depression, so a healthy balance always worked best for me, like catching up once or twice a week. I have yet to find a good aggregate source of quality, independent news though.

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

Read a book by an expert if you'd like to know an order of magnitude more about a subject than the average TV-watching person. Once catch is that it needs to be an actual unbiased quality source. Not all of them are of course.

For example, a couple of years after 9/11 I read Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies (later Tenet's and others) and was gobsmacked about all the misguided sound-bites being repeated by regular folks.

dang• 3 years ago

I Hate the News (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684881 - March 2018 (61 comments)

I Hate the News (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224858 - March 2015 (187 comments)

I Hate the News (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5812409 - June 2013 (1 comment)

I hate the news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5051902 - Jan 2013 (74 comments)

totallywrong• 3 years ago

I stopped reading or watching news about a year ago. Other than HN and conversations with people I don't have any exposure. I always find out about important stuff some way or another, and have overall a more positive outlook in life. Highly recommended.

scelerat2• 3 years ago

But finally, I’d like to argue that following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.

We've come a long way since 2006.

scelerat2• 3 years ago

For perspective, this was written by an extremely precocious 16 year old. And I think for most people, the front page of the New York Times may indeed contain nothing of practical use. You're effectively paying for general up-to-date worldly knowledge and social currency.

Nevertheless, at some point in your life, knowing current events, even remote ones, and knowing how events have unfolded in the past, has great practical value in making decisions about personal actions or decisions which affect many people, or financial decisions.

mtlynch• 3 years ago

For perspective, this was written by an extremely precocious 16 year old.

Small correction: Swartz was born November 8, 1986, and this was published October 20, 2006. He was three weeks shy of 20 years old.

awb2• 3 years ago

Let us look at the front page of today’s New York Times, the gold standard in news. In the top spot there is a story about Republicans feuding among themselves. There is a photo of soldiers in Iraq. A stock exchange chief must return $100M. There is a concern about some doctors over-selling a nerve testing system. There is a threat from China against North Korea. There is a report that violence in Iraq is rising. And there is concern about virtual science classes replacing real ones.
None of these stories have relevance to my life.

The Tea Party, Iraq war and excessive for-profit medical care ended up having a massive impact in the US. Not every day is going to cover decade-defining events but this day in retrospect seems pretty relevant in understanding the following 10 years of US politics (2006-2016).

Meekro2• 3 years ago

Maybe we should distinguish the impact of the story itself from the impact of people reacting to the story after they read the news? The Tea Party talked a lot about taxes and got a bunch of people elected to Congress, but if you simply ignored the news you'd be none the wiser (and totally unaffected). Same is true for the Iraq War -- it surely had major impact for Iraqis, but for most people in the U.S. it may as well have been a non-event. President Bush either lied about WMDs or didn't (depending on who you ask) and we invaded and killed a bunch of people and changed the government. If you ignored the news, you'd be blindsided by people who want to talk about the war or change their vote because of it, but the Iraq War itself probably wouldn't affect you. It didn't affect me, anyway.

Most things in the news are like that. But then again, a lot of things they teach you in school are like that, too. Knowing that humans came from monkeys or that WW2 began in 1939 doesn't really affect my life, but there's a certain kind of shared knowledge that makes it easier to have a community. So maybe following the news is a bit like following Game of Thrones? If all your buddies are going to talk about it on Monday morning, you wouldn't want to be the only one who doesn't know what's going on.

awb2• 3 years ago

If you add up all the people that had live in a district where the Tea Party was active, or served in the military, or in government where budgets, decisions, negotiations, etc. were affected by the Iraq war or the Tea Party, it’s probably a decent minority. Now add in anyone who works in health care or received a large medical bill. Then add in their families and friends. That’s got to be a large minority either directly affected or one step removed.

Obama got elected 2 years after this article with these 3 issues core to the debates. I’m guessing that some people who weren’t directly affected based their votes off of the news.

I see what you’re saying that a lot of knowledge isn’t useful day to day, but I actually do use my knowledge of WWII and evolution as foundations of some of my ethical and political views, which I’m sure emanate out into the world via my votes, purchases and conversations.

I agree though the line between news and entertainment is blurry and some people might follow just for the sake of not being out of the loop socially.

mo_42• 3 years ago

I think we need to take into account profits and careers of people producing news.

Mostly, news is a business. It will inevitably distort reports to make more profit. Even the most well-intentioned editors and journalists will be outcompeted those who make better stories. I guess this mechanism works on the level of people and organizations.

Also, people who argue against Aaron's idea tend to forget that there are other sources. Books, in-depth articles, discussions of experts may provide a better understanding. However, it's much more effort. If you really want to be informed, then, it's work.

johnea• 3 years ago

Yea, reality sucks, huh?

You could always try rolling around on the ground and kicking your feet. It's really amazing how often that works.

It may be hard to grasp, but reading the news isn't for enjoyment, it's for information (although I have to conceed that modern news is largly information free, but this is exactly because they're trying to make it entertainment).

It's important to understand what's going on in that place called reality. I know its so unpopular! Who even talks about reality on twerk tick anyway?! Let's all just stick to the stuff that involves me, like those choo funny videos of the "set your balls on fire challenge"!

Georgelemental• 3 years ago

The news is, of course, full of lies. Too much exposure to lies is no good for one's mental health. But it's important to have some degree of regular exposure, as a means of inoculation. And to, hopefully, parse out the truth between the lines; truth is valuable for its own sake.

I Hate the News (2006)

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