

Overdosing on Celebrity Gossip, The News, and Low Quality Information - sunasra
http://jamesclear.com/brain-food

======
draugadrotten
_" The problem with most news, gossip, and link-bait titled articles online is
that they are filled with surface level information. Your life isn’t better
off for reading them and you’re rarely better informed because of them."_

Strangely enough, that is how I feel after reading this blog post: The title
promised more than the content delivered. I recognize the problem, but the
article is thin on insight beyond the observation.

It doesn't provide insight. It ends with asking the reader what to do.

------
ZenoArrow
Thank you for sharing this article sunasra, accurately describes how I spend
(too much of) my time. I am slowly getting better at controlling how much
infosugar I intake, but it's still a pesky habit.

Most of the time I waste online is HN-related. I'll read articles that at best
I only have a passing interest in. Whilst I enjoy knowing a little about a
lot, I'd still prefer to be chipping away at larger projects, even if I only
have a few minutes at a time to spend. Time for another HN detox...

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Turn it off, put it down, go outside. Talk to people. Or make something with
your hands.

This is _exactly_ the same like junk food. The solution is the same.

------
mattgreenrocks
Everywhere you find addicted users, look at who is feeding them, and you'll
find perverse incentives: whether they're page views, contextual ads, or in-
app purchases. Aggregators compete amongst one another for users, so they
trickle out _all_ content. They claim that quality content is voted to the
top, but it is ultimately thinly-masked groupthink. Comment sections are often
intellectual wastelands rife with people needing to yell and/or 'win' Internet
points for no reason at all.

The world needs innovative thought, not people reinforcing the 'right'
opinions. I find social media is particularly bad at this: why is it normal to
ingest everyone's opinions on a daily basis? Why don't we want that mental
space for ourselves?

We're far too content with the cheap substitutes for things that truly satisfy
us. Facebook uses this to great effect, and aggregators do too.

~~~
humanrebar
There is plenty of innovative thought out there. The problem is the lack of
efficiency in requiring that every individual find and consume the best
innovative thought on her own.

Also, I agree that modern manners insist on a a very peurile fear of conflict,
which leads to strong segregation of viewpoints, groupthink, a lack of
empathy, and even an ignorance of alternate viewpoints.

What we need, among other things, is a new set of manners that encourage
conflicting opinions (or even debate) while providing ground rules for
avoiding harm to feelings, reputations, and relationships. The fact is, if
people become hurt, angry, or withdrawn when someone simply disagrees (let
alone argues) with their viewpoint, there is not really any hope for breaking
everyone out of their echo chambers. It's simply not worth it to antagonize
people for the sake of calling Scientology bogus or homeopathy a waste of
money.

And as long as that is the case, I don't see news aggregators (including all
forms of journalism) promoting against-the-grain or otherwise uncomfortable
information within their respective echo chambers.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
And this is the true sadness: new media suffers from the exact same
biases/critical flaws of old media. Except it's OK this time, because it's a
_different_ set of biases.

------
_fs
That popup at the end of the article totally broke my concentration about the
subject at hand. I quickly fell from thought to disgust when the popup came up
and covered 1/4 of the screen. Then I backed out of the site. Why do people
insist on getting their users onboard a newsletter for a blog like this?

~~~
davelocity
because it works. the site owner knows it's obnoxious, but the numbers justify
the annoyance.

~~~
rhizome
Does it really, though? Any hard numbers to back up the "it works"?

------
lowmagnet
This is almost entirely this post from a week ago:
[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/07/how-big-is-your-
ci...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/07/how-big-is-your-circle-of-
control/)

------
humanrebar
This article reads like a call for better curation. There's too much
information for everyone to be fully informed about everything. But (and
here's where I differ) it's not acceptable to just remain ignorant about
things I can't affect. If nothing else, I can (and should) react strategically
to even the biggest and the most foregone trends.

Journalism is exactly the answer to a call for better curation. News networks,
newspapers, blogs, documentary film-makers, and so on, should be providing the
high-level view of what is important and nothing more in an age where
attention is a scarce resource.

Unfortunately, there isn't (yet) a successful business model for journalism
that rewards the content producer for being efficient. That is, newspapers
don't get rewarded for not producing a paper on slow news days (or for being
shorter in general). Likewise, TV channels cannot pride themselves on
providing a twelve-minute newscast covering the same information as the
competition.

On the contrary, all modern sources of information (news, facebook, and
otherwise) get rewarded for attracting eyeballs as much as possible, so there
is an incentive to do the exact opposite: there's no news today, so here's a
kitty fashion show or some linkbait to get your blood boiling.

------
evanlivingston
Er, Natural disasters, as caused by climate change, are increasingly within
the sphere of human control. War is also very much a result of our own
behavior. I have trouble with the argument that 'ignoring' these things has a
positive outcome.

~~~
humanrebar
Or how about: So what if I can't do anything _about_ big issues? There's
usually something I can do _because_ of those big issues.

If I'm aware of a war broiling in a certain country, I can avoid investing
there. If I'm aware of market trends, I can plan my investments accordingly.
If I believe immigration restrictions on educated workers will be loosened
over the next fifty years, I can develop products that will be especially
useful to people with green cards and white-collars.

Sure, you won't be able to do anything _tomorrow_ , but that won't mean you
ready yourself to seize opportunities that present themselves over the next
decade or two.

~~~
jsun
I think the author was more talking about the difference between consuming
information or consuming narrative even though he didn't quite phrase it that
way. Learning about a new piece of regulation that just passed on immigration
reform is information. Learning about what the sheriff of Arizona thinks about
illegal immigration is narrative. Someone somewhere crafted that piece for you
to consume and is spoon-feeding it to you. It's like the junk food of
information.

We like narrative, because its fun and exciting and designed to appeal to us,
but at the end of the day has very little information value.

------
BigChiefSmokem
Wikipedia is my modern and globalized version of CliffsNotes. I only deep dive
into sources and research if I happen upon a subject incredibly interesting to
me (my "fun" reading) or might help me get ahead with one of my projects (my
"work" reading).

As for HN, this site provides more of the guilty pleasure of looking inside
the tech bubble than actually being an incredible source of information. So to
me it lies somewhere between the national news and Wikipedia.

------
bitofenglish
I really identified with this article's message. It is nicely written. For my
part: in an effort to cut through some of the noise of one of the most popular
channels - Twitter - I recently created and launched this service:

[http://qureet.com](http://qureet.com) \- Find Meaning on Twitter.

FYI, it is implemented 100% in golang, and runs on a Raspberry Pi.

------
iambateman
Literally clicked away from this article to Facebook.

Maybe I have a problem. ;)

