... misleads.
... is irrelevant.
... has no explanatory power.
... is toxic to your body.
... increases cognitive errors.
... inhibits thinking.
... works like a drug.
... wastes time.
... makes us passive.
... kills creativity.
([ certain type of ... can cause the listener to feel hopeless ])
([ the news - by its very nature, format, structure - suffer from selection bias ])
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
Rolf Dobelli
Friday 12 April 2013 15.00 EDT
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.
This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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([ the news - by its very nature, format, structure - suffer from selection bias ])
([ the reporting nature of news is that each report is a discrete event, a stream, a series of discrete event; history is absence, little to no historical context, and the big picture ])
George P. Richardson, Feedback thought in social science and systems theory [ ]
hidden character
[p.336]
... We have seen various emphases on “message” (Deutsch), “test and operations” (Millers, Galanter, and Pribram), “stimuli and responses” (Easton and others), each of which can be classified under one or the other of the generic terms “event” and “decision.” In contrast, the unit of behavioral description emphasized by social scientists in servo-mechanisms thread is the “pattern of behavior.” Thus the system dynamicist works with “behavior modes,” which are expressed in graphs of quantities varying over time.
In this regard, Forrester's distinction between “policy” and “decision” is significant (Forrester 1961, p. 97; see section 3.3). A decision is a discrete event. A policy is a persistent framework, a set of decision rules, within which arises an ongoing stream of decisions. Forrester described this distinction in terms of the conceptual “distance” of the viewer. Observed from a sufficient distance, a decision stream is seen not as a sequence of discrete decisions but as pattern of behavior that reflect a policy structure. Thus the units in which systems are described in the servo-mechanisms thread are policies, not decisions, and patterns of behavior, not events, and those patterns are usually expressed in terms of graphs over time. These more aggregate units or atoms of system description are consistent with the usually more distant perspective of the servo-mechanisms thread.
I believe that the distinction between events, patterns of behavior, decisions, and policy structure are among the most important observations in this investigation of the evolution of feedback thinking. The units of system description employed in the different feedback threads can be seen to be the foundation underlying many of their other characteristics.
“”
(Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., p.336)
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── “During World War II, the Jewish Austro-Hungarian mathematician Abraham Wald demonstrated a remarkable understanding of selection bias. Wald was asked to examine data on the location of enemy fire hits on bodies of returning aircraft, to recommend which parts of the airplanes should be reinforced to improve survivability. To this superiors' amazement, Wald recommended adding armor to the locations that showed no damage. His unique insight was that the bullet holes that he saw in surviving aircraft indicates places where an airplane could be hit and still endure. He therefore concluded that the planes that had been shot down were probably hit precisely in those places where the persevering planes where lucky enough not to have been hit.”, p.259, Mario Livio, Brilliant blunders, 2013
“”─
Mario Livio, Brilliant blunders, 2013 [ ]
pp.258-259
p.258
Statisticians always dread selection biases. These are the distortions of the results, introduced either by data-collecting tools or by the method of data accumulation. Here are a few simple examples to demonstrate the effect. Imagine that you want to test an investment strategy by examining the performance of a large group of stocks against twenty (20) years' worth of data. You might be tempted to include in the study only stocks for which you have complete information over the entire twenty-year period. However, eliminating stocks that stopped trading during this period would produce biased results, since these were precisely the stocks that did not survive the market.
p.259
During World War II, the Jewish Austro-Hungarian mathematician Abraham Wald demonstrated a remarkable understanding of selection bias. Wald was asked to examine data on the location of enemy fire hits on bodies of returning aircraft, to recommend which parts of the airplanes should be reinforced to improve survivability. To this superiors' amazement, Wald recommended adding armor to the locations that showed no damage. His unique insight was that the bullet holes that he saw in surviving aircraft indicates places where an airplane could be hit and still endure. He therefore concluded that the planes that had been shot down were probably hit precisely in those places where the persevering planes where lucky enough not to have been hit.
p.259
Astronomers are very familiar with the Malmquist bias (named after the Swedish astronomer Gunnar Malmquist, who greatly elaborated upon it in the 1920s). When astronomers survey stars or galaxies, their telescopes are sensitive only down to a certain brightness. However, objects that are intrinsically more luminous can be observed to greater distances. This will create a false trend of increasing average intrinsic brightness with distance, simply because the fainter objects will not be seen.
p.259
Brandon Carter pointed out that we shouldn't take the Copernican principle ── the fact that we are nothing special in the cosmos ── too far. He reminded astronomers that humans are the ones who make observations of the universe; consequently, they should not be too surprised to discover that the properties of the cosmos are consistent with human existence. For instance, we could not discover that our universe contains no carbon, since we are carbon-based life-forms. Initially, most researchers took Carter's anthropic reasoning to be nothing more than a trivially obvious statement.
(Brilliant blunders: from Darwin to Einstein ─ colossal mistakes by great scientists that changed our understanding of life and the universe / Mario Livio., 1. errors, scientific., Q172.5.E77L58 2013, 500─dc23, first Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2013, 2013, )
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