Stop spreading the news

Given my ongoing experiments with what I call retrospective reading (i.e. reading ‘news’ when it’s several weeks, if not months, old) I thought this was interesting. I haven’t stopped reading newspapers altogether, but I have certainly cut down very significantly and switched towards periodicals and books. Top tip: If you can’t stop your addiction, at least get rid of newspapers during the week and focus on weekend editions, which are more reflective and analytical. Anyway, this is from Rolf Dobelli, who is well worth reading.

News is bad for your health.

Out of the ­10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. Photograph: Guardian/Graphic

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we’d expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, “The market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory’s capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is “learned helplessness”. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

Book link.

Time to bring brainmail back?

GQ magazine, October 2019

Here’s something I’ve discovered. Many things move up and down and in some cases round and round. Therefore, if you have an idea that’s off-trend, or against conventional wisdom, the best thing to do in some instances is simply wait. Case in point my own low-fi newsletter called brainmail. It ran for about 12-years, but I eventually killed it off due to GDPR amongst other things. But it now looks like a hot new idea.

What’s that Confucius, or some other old dude, once said? Something like if you sit on a river bank and wait for long enough, the body of your enemy will eventually float past. BTW, sitting by the water in Lisbon, at the Web Summit, this thought feels especially true.

Enough already

Seems the BBC is now acting like a tabloid newspaper. How about a bit of proper context and analysis. Enough of this scaremongering. Yes it’s a concern that the US and Russia are led by ultra-nationalists and there are far too many actors on the world stage. And yes there are too many things happening at once.A major miscalulation is possible. But Putin isn’t stupid. All he wants is his old sphere of influence back. Maybe a buffer against the US and NATO too.

This is a bit of a jump, but expect to see ultra-nostalgia kick off anytime soon. Comfort foods, comfort films, comfort TV, comfort decor. It’s back to the future folks. As I said in one of my books, in the future the past is always present. Never truer than right now.

Full image here.

Instant stupidity

Really? Anything? In 5 minutes? So string theory then? Quantum physics? Brain surgery? Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? Joyce’s Ulysses? Gimme a break. This is a key problem with the internet. Information is now essentially free to create and distribute. There are no longer any barriers or filters, which means that anyone can create content, including people that really shouldn’t. But the real problem isn’t the people creating this kind of nonsense (literally non-sense), it’s the people that willingly consume it without thinking. And we wonder how we created Trump.

Idea of the month

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This is interesting. Text streaming technology. Not sure if I want to do it, but it’s certainly radical. Interesting implications for libraries, publishing, education and, of course, reading.

What is it? The company explains it this way:

“The time consuming part of reading lies mainly in the actual eye movements from word to word and sentence to sentence. In addition, traditional reading simply takes up a lot of physical space. Spritz solves both of these problems. First, your eyes do not have to move from word to word or around the page that you’re reading. In fact, there’s no longer a page – with Spritz you only need 13 total characters to show all of your content. Fast streaming of text is easier and more comfortable for the reader, especially when reading areas become smaller.”

Thanks to Luke who put me onto this.

http://www.spritzinc.com/

The Dangers of Personalisation

Is serendipity dead? I think things are moving in that direction. One of the unforseen consequences of digitalisation is that we are able to personalise incoming information. This is great on one level, but on another it allows for people to reinforce their own prejudices. More and more we are able to select sources of information (including news but also people) that match our own views. We are therefore less likely to have our views challenged and we are more likely to become hostile to opinions (or people) that do not match our own thinking. This is not good for quality debate or understanding.

Gimme the facts – fast

iminds4.png

Are you finding that you no longer have the time to read The Week (the weekly compendium of all the good bits from the world’s best newspapers)? If so I have just the thing for you. Go to Apple’s iTunes store and download something from the iMinds series – instant knowledge in just 9 minutes.

Yes, that’s right, learn about Astronomy, Confucius, the Magna Carta, Apartheid, the US Civil War, International Criminal Tribunals, Behavioral Economics or…wait for it…. Evolution in just 9 minutes! Mind you there is one slight problem. These miniature audio books don’t seem to tell you who is speaking and do not appear to give any sources for the material either.

BTW, I see there is even an iMinds on Gandi. You know, that Indian bloke wot said “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”