🗞 Bad News

The daily news is a cornerstone of small talk, maintaining its hallowed position in the ritual of polite conversation across many generations. It has saved many awkward conversations with strangers from becoming downright uncomfortable — if you have nothing to talk about, talk about the news. In this frame, it is irrelevant whether the news concerns residents of a remote village thousands of miles from where you live or a new tax on billionaires, none of whom you know. The news is the news.

Knowledge of the news is a common proxy for measuring competence and intelligence. It’s simpler to trust a salesman who is caught up to the drama in the house of parliament last night, even though politics has no bearing on his ability to explain the benefits of a massage chair. It is easier to be impressed by a finance student who is up to date with the financial markets, despite it giving you no indication of how their portfolio is doing.

I am going to ask and give my thoughts on a very counterintuitive question — should you stop reading the news? Obviously this question is irrelevant to those professions that need to deal regularly with the news such as politicians, traders, etc. This question is for the rest of us and elicits some interesting ideas.

I commented in our first post about how our brains are not exactly optimized for the modern world. At the risk of sounding like a boomer yelling at anyone who will listen about the same old thing, I want to reiterate the point in the context the news and its role in our life.

Our brains are simply not optimized to handle the daily flood of news they are now exposed to. The short answer to why is because this is a relatively new phenomenon. And I will spare you the long version. Once again zooming out to the scale of human history, the ability for every bit of news to reach every corner of the world is a recent feature. And as Sharon discussed in our previous piece, a globalizing world means that it is even more likely that news from all around the world reaches our eyes and ears.

Barely Newsworthy

This might come as a surprise to people who know me personally, but I intentionally stopped reading most news around a year ago. And just the fact that people around me haven’t noticed that at all is probably noteworthy. But let me start with why I decided to take a break from the news, a break that has extended much longer than I initially imagined.

I don’t think I was the only one that felt overwhelmed by the news over the last few years. Everywhere you look, you see people suffering — war, famine, the pandemic, Chelsea FC losing. If you watch the news daily, you’re likely to be convinced that this is the worst time in history to be alive.

But the facts just don’t match up to our perception of our times. For all the flaws, inequalities and injustices, we still live in the best time in human history. You’re much less likely to be murdered, less likely to die in a war, more likely to survive as an infant, less likely to be undernourished… you get the idea.

So it appears that the world is getting better but we think it is getting scarier, why?

Incentives all the Way Down

Incentive structures are an underrated lens for understanding the world. So let’s look at the incentive structures for news channels. An obvious guess would be that news channels are incentivized to bring the truth to light, but that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. News channels are incentivized to claim that their goal is to search for and share the truth, but not to actually do it.

The real structure of incentives is centered around keeping you hooked. The more addicted you are, the more money news channels make. After all the primary revenue source for news channels is advertising revenue. The more eyes watching a news channel at any given moment, the more money they make. The primary battle is now for your time, illustrated by this unexpected quote from Netflix’s earnings report in 2019:

Netflix is not just competing with HBO, and CNN is not just competing with Fox News. In an ad driven economy where average people only have a handful of leisure hours to spend each day, these platforms are all competing with each other for your time. Once you see that CNN is a TikTok competitor, the whole idea makes a lot more sense.

This is not to say that news channels are disincentivized from reporting honestly, just that they are structurally incentivized to sensationalize and exaggerate. The more exaggerated a story is, the more it feels like it might affect your life, the more likely you are to tune in the next day for more. After all, fear and excitement are nearly identical physiologically speaking.

The Next Coronavirus

If you take a moment to think back about all of the red herrings you have seen in the news over the past year, you might surprise yourself. If you are into politics there’s the “impending nuclear war in Ukraine,” “potential world war after the Nord Stream blew up,” “collapses of democracies across the world” and many more sensational headlines. If you like economics, you saw headlines about “the impending collapse of the bond market,” hyperinflation, disinflation, the worst recession and the possible collapse of the monetary system packed into the last year. If you are anyone at all, you probably saw numerous stories about “the next coronavirus” and how this upcoming pandemic is going to be worse than Covid.

Each sensational headline is the next biggest disaster for humanity, until something more clickbait-able shows up a week later.

The news is hijacking your brain and tricking you into believing its relevance. The amount of noise compared to the amount of signal for a typical news source is staggering. And when something important really does happen, you are likely to care less than you would if you were not bombarded with important sounding things all the time. Empathy fatigue is becoming more and more common and I find it unsurprising considering the amount of news we are exposed to.

It is important to caveat at this point that this whole piece is not an attack on news channels or a call to unplug yourself from the world entirely. I am only trying to highlight how a hidden system of incentives is likely causing world news to occupy a lot more of your mental real estate than it should.

Why care?

Our brains, our attention and our memory are all finite. So is our capacity for empathy. The biggest reason I care about this issue is that the constant barrage of news and the stresses of keeping up with it make it harder to retain actually useful information and more difficult to care about the real issues.

So my solution to this was simple: let go. Not entirely or indiscriminately, but in a selective manner. Not all news is irrelevant to you, but most of it is. The exceptions are clear: local news is directly applicable and I wouldn’t suggest cutting that out. Similarly, news from the fields of your interest or expertise is often helpful.

Cutting out the rest creates two virtuous mechanisms that are likely to help you. The first is it allows you to access a time-tested method of getting the news — from people around you. Most news that is very important but outside your fields of interest will invariably reach you through word of mouth. Most other news simply won’t make its way into daily conversation.

The second benefit is the elimination of something called Gell-Mann Amnesia. This phenomenon refers to you realizing that a lot of the reporting on a subject in your domain of expertise is inaccurate, but not realizing that it applies to other domains as well — you just don’t have the expertise to see it. When you primarily consume news from within a field you understand, you are much better positioned to sift out the real shit from the bullshit.

Take a Step Back

This formula I have adopted doesn’t work for everyone and only you would know best whether or not you should give it a shot. All I’m saying is that we are fortunate to be born in possibly the best time in history, that most things that seem like the end of the world aren’t really, and that there is a conscientious way of consuming news that works for you and your mental health.

So try to take a step back, I certainly am. As things stand, content factories, including the news, are competing for your attention nonstop. They don’t stop and they don’t sleep, but sometimes you need to.