Christos Margiolis: philosophy

Rolf Dobelli: Avoid the News

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +1200

The article was written by Rolf Dobelli. I reformatted it to HTML and added a table of contents, because I couldn’t find a non-PDF version of it.

Prologue

This article is the antidote to news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the reading habit and struggle to absorb more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap — if you are not already too deeply in it.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body

We are so well informed and yet we know so little. Why?

We are in this sad condition because 200 years ago we invented a toxic form of knowledge called “news.” The time has come to recognize the detrimental effects that news has on individuals and societies, and to take the necessary steps to shield yourself from its dangers.

At core, human beings are cavemen in suits and dresses. Our brains are optimized for our original hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small bands of 25 to 100 individuals with limited sources of food and information. Our brains (and our bodies) now live in a world that is the opposite of what we are designed to handle. This leads to great risk and to inappropriate, outright dangerous behavior.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to shift 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, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information overload that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food intake. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be and we are learning to take the first steps toward an information diet.

This is my attempt to clarify the toxic dangers of news – and to recommend some ways to deal with it. I have now gone without news for a year, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first hand: less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more insights. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

My good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, was one of the first people to recognize news consumption as a serious problem. I owe many of the following insights to him.

No 1 — News misleads us systematically

News reports do not represent the real world.

Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.

News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.

The highly visible misleads us.

Take the following event. A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? On the car. On the person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). What kind of person he is (was). But — that is all completely 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. That is the lesson to be learned from this event.

The car doesn’t matter at all. Any car could have caused the bridge to collapse. It could have been a strong wind or a dog walking over the bridge. So, why does the media cover the car? Because it’s flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce.

As a result of news, we walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.

Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated.
Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated.
Britney Spears is overrated. IPCC reports are underrated.
Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the news-mongering press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from consuming news is entirely different from the actual risks that we face. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real probability, no matter your intellectual sophistication. If you think you can compensate for this bias with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists — who have powerful incentives to compensate for newsborne hazards — have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

No 2 — 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, your business — compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news.

The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.

Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life — compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile? Probably not.

In 1914, the news story about the assassination in Sarajevo dwarfed all other reports in terms of its global significance. But, the murder in Sarajevo was just one of several thousand stories in circulation that day. No news organization treated this historically pivotal homicide as anything more than just another politically inspired assassination.

The first Internet browser debuted in 1995. The public birth of this hugely relevant piece of software barely made it into the press despite its vast future impact.

People find it very difficult to recognize what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognize what’s new. We are not equipped with sensory organs for relevance. Relevance doesn’t come naturally. News does. That’s why the media plays on the new. (If our minds were structured the other way round, the media would certainly play on the relevant.) The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the modern man.

News floods you with a worldview that is not relevant to your life. What does relevance mean? It means: what is important to you personally. Relevance is a personal choice. Don’t take the media’s view for it. To the media, any tale that sells lots of copies is relevant – Darfur, Paris Hilton, a train crash in China, some idiotic world record (like someone who ate 78 cheeseburgers in an hour). This swindle is at the core of the news industry’s business model. It sells the relevant, but delivers the new.

Media organizations want you to believe that news offers individuals some sort of a competitive advantage. Many people fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. We fear we’re missing something important. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume the bigger the advantage you have.

Afraid you will miss “something important”? From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of meta-information, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know.

No 3 — News limits understanding

News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.

News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world.

It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is to understand the underlying processes, how things happen. Unfortunately, precariously few news organizations manage to explain causation because the underlying processes that govern significant social, political and environmental movements mostly are invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheap to produce.

The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below the journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect.

Most people believe that having more information helps them make better decisions. News organizations support this belief. Hell, it’s in their interest. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is actually inverted. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.

No evidence exists to indicate that information junkies are better decision makers. They are certainly not more successful than the average Joe. If more information leads to higher economic success, we would expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case. Quite the contrary. We don’t know what makes people successful, but amassing news tidbits is certainly not it.

Reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything. What’s best: cut yourself off from daily news consumption entirely. Read books and thoughtful journals instead of gulping down flashing headlines.

No 4 — News is toxic to your body

News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (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 glucocordicoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. News consumers risk impairing their physical health. The other potential side effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitization.

No 5 — News massively increases cognitive errors

News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions in favor of evidence that confirms our beliefs. 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.” That is the confirmation bias. News consumption, especially customized news intake, exacerbates this human flaw. The result is that we walk around in a cloud of seemingly confirming data — even when our theories about the world and ourselves may be wrong. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities.

News not only feeds the confirmation bias, it exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” — even if they don’t correspond to reality. And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories. Instead of just reporting that the stock market declined (or increased) by 2%, TV news anchors proclaim, “The market declined by 2% because of X.” This X could be a bank profit forecast, fear about the Euro, non-farm payroll statistics, a Fed decision, a terrorist attack in Madrid, a subway strike in New York, a handshake between two presidents, anything, really.

This reminds me of high school. My history textbook specified seven reasons (not six, not eight) why the French Revolution erupted. The fact is, we don’t know why the French Revolution broke out. And especially not why it exploded specifically in 1789. And we don’t know why the stock market moves as it moves. Too many factors go into such shifts. We don’t know why a war breaks out, a technological breakthrough is achieved or why the oil price jumps. Any journalist who writes, “The market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. Of course, X might have had a casual influence, but it’s far from established, and other influences may be much more meaningful. To a large degree, news reports consist of nothing but stories and anecdotes that end up substituting for coherent analyses. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world. It’s inappropriate. It’s irrational. It’s forgery. And I refuse to let it contaminate my thinking.

No 6 — News inhibits thinking

Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 8). This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.

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 minimum amount of slippery data (try repeating a 10-digit phone number after you hear it for the first time). The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must past through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing passes through. Because news disrupts concentration, it actively weakens comprehension.

You don’t visit Paris for just one hour or speed through the Museum of Modern Art in two minutes. Why not? Because the brain needs spool- up time. Building up concentration takes a minimum of a 10-minute read. Given less time, your brain will process the information superficially and barely store it. News pieces are like wind hitting your cheek. Ask yourself: What are the top ten news items from a month ago (that are no longer in the news today)? If you have a hard time remembering, you are not alone. Why would you want to consume something that doesn’t add to your body of knowledge?

The online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study[1] two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increase. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting.

News consumers are suckers for irrelevancy, and online news consumers are the biggest suckers. News is an interruption system. It seizes your attention only to scramble it. Besides a lack of glucose in your blood stream, news distraction is the biggest barricade to clear thinking.

No 7 — News changes the structure of your brain

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary story lines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.

Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of checking the news, you are driven to check it even more often. Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them. This has to do with a process called “long-term potentiation” (LTP) and the reward circuits in your brain. Addicts seek more of an addictive substance to get their fix, because they need more stimulation than non-addicts to reach a satisfying reward threshold. If you set your attention on other things – like literature, science, art, history, cooking, pet grooming, whatever – you will become more focused on those things. That’s just how the brain works.

Science used to think that our brain, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. The human brain is highly plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the consumption of news, we end up with a different brain. Adaptation to news occurs at a biological level. News reprograms us. That means our brain works differently even when we’re not consuming news. And that’s dangerous.

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 read and 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. In the words of Professor Michael Merzenich (University of California, San Francisco), a pioneer in the field of neuroplasticity: “We are training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. When you consume news, your brain structurally changes. This means that the way you think changes. Regaining the capacity for concentration and contemplation will take nothing less than a radical news-free diet.

No 8 — News is costly

News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs.

News taxes productivity three ways. First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading, listening to or watching the news.

Second, tally up the refocusing time — or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself wastes more time.

Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

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, you’re eating substantial time. Then, add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, plus distraction and refocusing time. You will lose productive hours totaling at least half a day every week. Half a day — and for what?

On a global level, the loss in potential productivity is huge. Take the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, where terrorists murdered some 200 people in an act of chilling exhibitionism. Imagine that a billion people devoted, on average, one hour of their attention to the Mumbai tragedy: following the news, watching some talking head on TV, thinking about it. The number is a wild guess, but the guess is far from a wild number. India, alone, has more than a billion people. Many of them spent whole days following the drama. One billion people times one hour is one billion hours, which is more than 100,000 years. The global average life expectancy is today 66 years. So nearly 2,000 lives were swallowed by news consumption. It’s far more than the number of people murdered. In a sense, the newscasters became unwilling bedfellows of the terrorists. At least the Mumbai attacks had actual impact. Look at the hours lost when Michael Jackson died — no real content in the stories, and millions of hours wasted.

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why give away your mind?

No 9 — News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement

Reputation affects how people cooperate in society. In our ancestral past, a person’s reputation was directly linked to his or her achievements. You saw that your fellow tribe member killed a tiger single handedly and you spread word of his bravery. With the advent of mass-produced news, the strange concept of “fame” entered our society.

Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives. The media grants fame to movie stars and news anchors for scant reason. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement. The tragedy is that pop notoriety crowds out the achievements of those who make more substantive contributions.

No 10 — News is produced by journalists

Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time — or the capacity — for deep analysis. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news.

My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate. Many reporters cobble together the rest of the news from other people’s reports, common knowledge, shallow thinking and whatever the journalist can find on the internet. Some reporters copy from each other or refer to old pieces, without necessarily catching up with any interim corrections. The copying and the copying of the copies multiply the flaws in the stories and their irrelevance.

No 11 — Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always

Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process.

The New Yorker magazine is legendary for its fact checking. The story goes that when an article mentioned the Empire State Building, someone from the fact-checking department would go out and visually verify that, in fact, the building was still standing. I don’t know if the story is true, but it highlights a point. Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies (though still alive and well at The New Yorker).

Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in a complex world is impossible. Overwhelming evidence indicates that forecasts by journalists and by experts in finance, social development, global conflicts and technology are almost always completely wrong. So, why consume that junk?

Did the newspapers predict World War I, the Great Depression, the sexual revolution, the fall of the Soviet empire, the rise of the Internet, resistance to antibiotics, the fall of Europe’s birth rate or the explosion in depression cases? Maybe, you’d find one or two correct predictions in a sea of millions of mistaken ones. Incorrect forecast are not only useless, they are harmful.

To increase the accuracy of your predictions, cut out the news and roll the dice or, if you are ready for depth, read books and knowledgeable journals to understand the invisible generators that affect our world.

No 12 — News is manipulative

Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, and signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta-data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming. Why go through that?

Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).

The public relations (PR) industry is as large as the news reporting industry — the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated, or at least influenced or swayed. Corporations, interest groups and other organizations would not expend such huge sums on PR if it didn’t work. If spinmeisters can manipulate journalists, who have a natural skepticism toward powerful organizations, what makes you think you can escape their trickery?

Take the Nurse Nayirah story. Nayirah was a 15- year-old Kuwaiti girl who testified to the U.S. Congress during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. She alleged that she had witnessed the murder of infant children by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. Virtually every media outlet covered the story. The U.S. public was outraged, which in turn pushed Congress closer to approving the war. Her testimony, which all media outlets regarded as credible at the time, has since come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.

Journalism shapes a common picture of the world and a common set of narratives for discussing it. It sets the public agenda. Hold on: do we really want news reporters to set the public agenda? I believe that agenda setting by the media is just bad democracy.

No 13 — News makes us passive

News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world.

Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.

If the human brain encounters a barrage of ambiguous information without being able to act upon that information, it can react with passivity and a sense of victimhood. 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. Viewed on a timeline, the spread of depression coincides almost perfectly with the growth and maturity of the mass media. Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe the constant onslaught of fire, famine, flood and failure adds to depression, even if these sad reports come from far away.

No 14 — News gives us the illusion of caring

Kathleen Norris (even if I don’t share most of her ideas) said it best: “We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.”

News wraps us in a warm global feeling. We are all world citizens. We are all connected. The planet is just one global village. We sing “We Are the World” and wave the little flame of our lighters in perfect harmony with thousands of others. This gives us a glowing, fuzzy feeling that delivers the illusion of caring but doesn’t get us anywhere. This allure of anything bespeaking global brotherhood smells like a gigantic chimera. The fact is, consuming news does not make us more connected to each other. We are connected because we interact and trade.

No 15 — News kills creativity

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. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. 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 whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

The creativity-killing effect of news might also be due to something simpler we’ve discussed before: distraction. I just can’t imagine producing novel ideas with the distraction that news always delivers. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t read news.

What to do instead

Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey.

Make news as inaccessible as possible. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. Sell your TV. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. Do not pick up newspapers and magazines that lie around in airports and train stations. Do not set your browser default to a news site. Pick a site that never changes. The more stale the better. Delete all news sites from your browser’s favorites list. Delete the news widgets from your desktop.

If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it.

Read magazines and books which explain the world — Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life — or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.

The first week will be the hardest. Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite news Web site. Don’t do it. Stick to the cold-turkey plan. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world.

After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed — and you’re not going to miss — any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”

Are you afraid that living a news-free existence will make you an outcast at parties? Well, you might not know that Lindsay Lohan went to jail, but you will have more intelligent facts to share — about the cultural meaning of the food you are eating or the discovery of exosolar planets. Never be shy about discussing your news diet. People will be fascinated.

Good News

Society needs journalism — but in a different way.

Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. The best example is Watergate. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Often, reporting is not time sensitive. Long journal articles and in-depth books are fine forums for investigative journalism — and now that you’ve gone cold turkey on the news, you’ll have time to read them.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer The above statements reflect the most truthful viewpoint I can achieve at the time of this writing. I reserve the right to revise my views at any time. I might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting myself. I have done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. The only reason I would change my views (a switch which would undoubtedly be noticed by the “consistency police” (usually journalists with good high-school degrees) is because the new version is closer to the truth, not ever because I would gain any personal advantage.

Notes

[1] Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains, Wired, May 2010

In defense of the Old Web

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +1200

The internet has reached the point where almost everything has been concertrated in just a few platforms. This is both opposed to the original idea of a decentralized and free internet, and is also used as a tool for control, since the flow of information is “managed” only by a handful of companies. Another problem is the amount of AI-generated and SEO-optimized websites plaguing every search engine result nowadays, making it almost impossible to find quality handwritten individual websites anymore.

My rather romanticized proposal is that we should make an attempt return to the old ways of the internet (1990s-2000s) — when personal websites and small communities were thriving — not because of nostalgia, but because it espoused better values and promoted creativity, despite its problems (spam, malware, bad security practices, unencrypted traffic). This might very well be a pipe dream at this point, but I think it would be great to at least see the existing movement attracting more people than it already does.

I was initially working on a full article explaining my viewpoint in depth, but the following articles express them better than I could ever have:

So, how can you be part of the small web? To start off, you need:

A domain name.
Somewhere to host your website/service. I rent a Vultr VPS with the cheapest plan available, which is more than enough for my needs, but you can even do self-hosting at home if you want. If you do rent from Vultr, you can follow this guide.
To connect the domain name with the server, so that your website can be reached.
A stable and secure operating system for servers, such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

A list of guides I’ve written:

To make finding other websites easier, have a links page, and consider being part of a Webring.

The tools you choose to manage your website depend on personal preference and needs, but I firmly believe that because building a website is not rocket science, and because the web has been getting severely bloated you don’t need anything more than a few command line utilities, a text editor, and perhaps a static site generator. Modern web frameworks tend to cause more headaches than actually improve workflow, so I’ll refrain from recommending them. I like writing articles in Markdown, and using Hugo for static site generation and templating.

Social media is ruining our lives

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +1200

In its infancy, the idea of social media might have had good intentions behind it. In hindsight though, social media as we know it today, seems to have caused more harm than good, for multiple (perhaps too many) reasons. The very nature of the centralization of public discourse on the internet and the mechanisms employed for reacting to content (likes, dislikes, etc), is what lead to social media becoming what it is today: a tool for manipulation.

This article is not a scientific paper, and as such, I don’t want to bore with percentages and details that you can find on more reliable sources (I do link to some of them). These are merely my thoughts, anecdotal experiences and my attempt to spread awareness about a subject I feel is genuinely harming our society.

Addictiveness and the drug-like nature of social media

Scrolling the feed.

Social media arguably statisfies most of the requirements to be classified as a drug. It’s addictive, it’s a coping mechanism, it’s hard to quit and it affects our mental and even physical health, especially on young people (more on that in the next section).

Social media companies are competing to keep us engaged and make their services as addictive as possible. Many people spend a large portion of their day endlessly scrolling their feeds, consuming content that is carefully curated by complex AI to match what is most likely to keep us scrolling. Scrolling your feed isn’t necessarily exciting or fun, but it’s addicitive by design. Sometimes we don’t even want to scroll our feeds, but we do it nonetheless, like a junkie who can’t stop doing drugs, because our brains love that dopamine hit we get every time we see a new post or video popping up. Social media has mastered the “art” of exploiting our human weaknesses and subconscious, so that we are glued to our screens; that’s their business model, the more time you spend on their platform and the more ads you see, the more data you give away, the bigger their profits. It’s essentially a slot machine on steroids.

We now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called Attention Engineers, who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling, among other places, to try to make these products as addictive as possible. That is the desired use case of these products; is that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted from your attention and data.

And something I think we’re going to be hearing more about in the near future, is that there’s a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired, and this behavior of exposing yourself to stimuli with intermittent rewards throughout all of your waking hours. It’s one thing to spend a couple of hours at a slot machine in Las Vegas, but if you bring one with you, and you pull that handle all day long, from when you wake up to when you go to bed: we’re not wired from it. It short-circuits the brain, and we’re starting to find that it has actual cognitive consequences — one of them being this sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety."

— Cal Newport: Quit social media

If you’re addicted to gambling, smoking, or anything, the best thing you can do is quit, not minimize usage. Not smoking was unheard of a few decades ago, but now that we know about the harms caused by smoking we try to get people to quit it, not live with it because it’s the norm. The same applies to social media; because everyone uses it, it doesn’t mean you should too.

Over the years I’ve noticed the following recurring patterns that indicate social media addiction:

You can’t stay for a few hours without reflexively picking up your phone to check social media, even if there’s nothing to see.
You compulsively refresh your feed every second without really knowing why.
Your hand is already in the pocket the second a notification pops up, like you’re reaching for a gun.
You pick up your phone the moment you’re bored.
Despite knowing the harms social media causes, you still spend hours on it everyday.
You pause to check notifications when you’re hanging out with someone, even when they might be talking to you.
Checking social media is the first thing you do in the morning and/or the last thing before sleep. As a parallel, my father once told me the first thing he’d do when he woke up was pick up a cigarrete and start smoking before he even got out of bed.

They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed.

— Dr. Jean Twenge: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Social media is so smartly engineered that it even gives you a “high” when your post is successful. That is done through likes, shares, retweets, and so on. We usually underestimate how powerful this simple mechanism is, but making a “successful” post feels like you accomplished something, because you managed to capture the public’s attention.

So we want to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible and then give you back that dopamine hit. We did that brilliantly at Facebook. Instagram has done it. Twitter has done it.

And because we get rewarded in the short-term signals — hearts, likes, thumbs up — and we conflate that with value and truth. And instead, what it really is, is fake, brittle popularity, that’s short-term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty than before you did it.

— Chamath Palihapitiya (former growth VP at Facebook).

The hours people spend every day staring at a piece of glass and plastic should be enough to convince you.

Effects on mental health

It’s a known fact that extensive use of social media can lead to depression, anxiety and feelings of isolation, inadequacy, insecurity and low self-esteem. This mostly stems from the tendency humans have to compare themselves to others. In the past, we used to compare ourselves to a much smaller pool of people, mostly our immidiate circle and at worst TV-stars, but with the rise of social media the pool has increased to include pretty much most of the world. This is not really the problem per se though, but rather, the fact that much of what you see on social media isn’t an actual reflection of real life. People will go to great lengths to show off their best moments and you now have access to everyone’s curated representations of their lives, and so, it’s not uncommon to feel inadequate when you see everyone around you living their best life, even though in reality that’s only a small portion of it. We essentially compare our normal everyday lives to others’ highlight reels.

Studies have shown that those kinds of comparisons are most prevalent among young women, who tend to feel negative about their appearance, and in some cases even starve themselves to look like their favorite influencers and models. What’s even worse is that the influencers themselves often don’t like that in real life anyway. Extensive use filters and editing is very common, and as a result, they set unrealistic and fake beauty standards. There is also correlation between increase in female depression and suicide rates and use of social media.

Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

— Dr. Jean Twenge: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Teenagers in general seem to be the most badly affected demographic from social media use, and there’s enough research to suggest that. Depression and suicide attempts have greatly increased since the start of the 2010s, which, is no surprise that at that time, social media and smartphones started being widely adopted by the younger generations.

Smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold in late 2012 – right when teen depression and suicide began to increase. By 2015, 73 percent of teens had access to a smartphone.

Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets. We found that teens who spent five or more hours a day online were 71 percent more likely than those who spent less than an hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor (depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan or attempting suicide). Overall, suicide risk factors rose significantly after two or more hours a day of time online.

Of course, it’s possible that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online. But three other studies show that is unlikely (at least, when viewed through social media use).

Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week.

The argument that depression might cause people to spend more time online doesn’t also explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones, which doesn’t seem too logical.

— Dr. Jean Twenge: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

The economy of attention

I’m not smart enough to have coined this phrase, but I think it explains the situation we’re in really well. This UC Berkley article goes a bit more in-depth on the subject.

We’ve all heard the phrase “when the product is free, you are the product”. It usually refers to how the service is free, but our data is what makes social media companies immensely profitable. But I want to give a different spin on this phrase. The goal of a product is to sell, and since we are the product, the way to tell if our product sells, is through likes and comments. This is our currency, and as is expected, we want more of it, and so, we’ll strive to take the perfect shot, to show the best moments of our lives, and we’ll wait for the right time to post in order to maximize engagement. If the product sells, we’ll create more of it. If it doesn’t, we’ll change it, and this translates to changing our appearance, our lifestyle, our identity, in order for the product to be “valuable”.

In an “actual” economy you sell a product to make money, but in the case of the social media economy, you do it for validation and to feed your ego. Even if you don’t want to admit it, for many individuals the underlying motivation behind posting on social media is to feel important, to feel that the world notices them, to project an ideal version of themselves. This is why people upload tens or hundreds of pictures of their faces and bodies, and spend hours every day perfecting their profiles and obsessing over how many likes and followers they got or who saw their stories.

See Adam Alter (NYU professor) and Tristan Harris (Google whistleblower and former engineer).

Hijacking the social apparatus in your brain is a good way to get people to keep looking back, and one thing they’ll do for example, is they introduced a lot more “social approval indicators” into these apps. A social approval indicitator is some way that someone can indicate to you that they thought about you or were thinking about you. The original structure of social media didn’t have a lot of this, but when they added things like the like button, there’s a reason for that, because now the like button meant that’s a lot more social approval indicators, and they added more and more of these things.

Tens of millions of dollars were invested to figure out how to do the facial recognition required to do auto-tagging on photos. Why did they spend so much money to solve that really hard computer science vision problem, is because it was another stream of social approval indicators. They’re always looking for ways that people can easily indicate that they are thinking about you, because human psychology says, if clicking on this app might reveal new social approval indicators, it’s almost impossibly irresistible not to. If I click on this app and see an indication that someone was thinking about me, that’s very hard to resist. And once they added those social approval indicators, usage minutes of the apps skyrocketed, because now, instead of it being something maybe you signed on to once a day to see what was going on, you had a constant reason to keep checking.

And the you add on to that “intermittent reinforcement”. Sometimes when you click there is nothing and sometimes there is; now you’re becoming almost impossible to avoid. Intermittent reinforcement is something that Las Vegas casino gambling has taken a lot of advantage of in their design of their games like slot machines.

So you put those type of things together, which are all engineered; this didn’t exist in the original social media, it’s not necessary for a social media experience to be what it is. All of that makes clicking on these apps really difficult to avoid.

— Cal Newport

Social media is not a substitute for real-life interaction

What makes real-life interaction meaningful is that it requires sacrifice, whereas a message or a like on social media doesn’t; it’s cheap. Taking the time to go outside and meet someone, reading each other’s body language and showing actual emotions (instead of emoji reactions) is something that social media simply cannot replace. The human brain is not wired to perceive likes and chat discussions as meaningful interaction.

A while ago I’ve had an interesting conversation about musicians (and artists in general), and how one can show support for their art. Imagine the following two cases; 1) you upload your music online, and lots of people like and comment on it, 2) you organize a concert where only a few people who really enjoy your music come, but make the effort to pay and spend their time to actually come and see you play. Which of the two cases you think would make a musician feel appreciated?

Spending more time on social media than in real-life not only causes a decline in social skills and an increase in “social anxiety” cases, but can also lead to depression and feelings of isolation and loneliness.

What a lovely meeting.

Future generations and the ability to focus

Do we really want a generation raised by TikTok and Instagram influencers? A future generation filled with mental health issues, one that is unable to have normal and healthy social lives, that is brainwashed and isolated? All that so that we make a bunch of tech companies profitable?

Our ability to focus and attention span has plummeted, because our attention is fragmented by the stream of notifications and messages we get. We’re so used to wasting hours on social media every day that we have stopped being conscious of how we spend our time. Doing important work is a struggle when you have to check your phone every few minutes, and that’s an issue even for grown-up individuals, imagine what the generations who grow up with social media from day one are going to be like.

Because social media provides constant stimuli and keeps you entertained all the time, we’ve become averse to boredom. Being bored is good, it means you have time to sit with your own thoughts and ponder. It’s a sign that you need to get a hobby and do something productive, and we lose those moments of peace and clarity when we fill our free time with noise. And I don’t believe it’s right to blame the users for this — social media apps are the result of billions of dollars worth of attention engineering.

For those reasons, and to not repeat the damage that’s been done to the current generations, it’s essential that we control our children’s tech usage in order to prevent them from becoming virtual junkies.

In the very first paragraph I mentioned how social media, in the beginning, might have actually had genuinely good intentions. In fact, I believe that, but as time went on, tech companies realized that they’re in a position where they can use their platforms to “program” users and leverage this to promote their own political agendas and twist reality to their own advantage. Here are a few ways with which this is achieved:

Self-regulation through likes and dislikes, content moderation, and Terms of Service. As I’ve explained here, there’s an incentive to being compliant and changing in order to be accepted. That, however also expands to beliefs and opinions, because the same mechanism can incentivize you to be a “good boy” and believe and say the right things, because that’s what will get you the best reactions, or even keep you on the platform. Reddit’s upvote/downvote system is a great example of this mechanism in action.
Verified accounts and expert-based consensus, which is pretty much what I discussed in my article about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. An MIT study shows fake news spreads faster than the truth.
Data collection. Just as data is used to show you the right ads in order to maximize profits, it can also be used to train AI to promote and recommend the content and narratives that the company thinks is “correct” and will push their ideological ambitions.

Tech giants, and especially social media companies, have proven countless times how they do have political motivations behind their policies, but I’m going to let the reader look for evidence to this claim themselves this time (spoiler alert: it’s endless). Considering their political nature and the fact that they are so big they now control the virtual public square, those platforms have switched from free speech to allowing only the narratives that benefit them, hence the various methods used for dealing with dissidents (e.g shadow-banning, demonetizing, bans for arbitrary ToS violations, etc).

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

— Noam Chomsky

But propaganda isn’t merely only spread by bad actors, useful idiots, and politically-driven tech companies. Social media also provides governments (yes, even Western ones) with the most effective way to spread propaganda, something that people like Joseph Göbbels and Joseph Stalin (probably has to do with the first name) could only dream of in their time. Governments can now just pay influencers to spread propaganda for them, and most people will not even realize it. If you think I’m making things up, I’ll let you do the research yourself for this claim as well.

Here are a few quotes from an expert in the field that should ring an alarm:

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

— Joseph Göbbels

The solution

The ideal solution is to simply quit social media altogether and seek alternative forms of online interaction. Apart from all the unecessary harm it has caused, modern social media goes against the very notion of the decentralized (i.e., normal) internet. The online world did, does, and will function perfectly fine — better even — without social media.

And remember; not using social media isn’t “weird” or “anti-social”, as you will hear some people, maybe even your friends and family, say. Being mindful of the technologies you choose to use, having control over your time and attention, not wanting to be a passive consumer and be used as input for some mega-corporation’s AI, and seeking meaningful and real socialization is, in fact, pretty healthy.

Political labels considered harmful

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +1200

I’m an anarcho-syndicalist, a reactionary, a classical liberal, a socialist! And the list goes on…

ideologue /ˈaɪ.di.ə.lɑɡ/: an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.

— Merriam-Webster dictionary

My point is not to suggest that we shouldn’t discuss ideology or that ideology in and of itself is useless. My issue is the urge to attach labels, and people basing their whole identity around a set of labels, which results in more division, stifling free thought, and viewing things from an “us an them” standpoint.

Labels are restrictive, not descriptive

…because people are complex; so too, are their politics. As such, political labels tend to be more restrictive than descriptive and, ultimately, they miss a key point — people aren’t defined by politics; people define politics. Labels are no substitute for experience. Allowing them to become so has rendered possible many of our most divisive political issues — from identity politics and partisanship to fake news and echo chambers.

Too often, labels become an attempt to turn the complicated into the simple. And people and politics aren’t simple.

Individuals are incredibly diverse and often hold a wide-range of political views depending on the subject or circumstances. It’s why political labels need so many caveats and hyphens — Alt-right, Far Left (or Right), Progressive Liberal, Moderate Republican, etc. It’s also why political labels are rife for exploitation.

For many, the complexity and gravity of political issues leaves them perplexed and frustrated. Understandably, people assume labels to align with political ideologies in the hope of having their views represented; however, labels divide just as easily as they associate

— Excerpts from this article

Labels as a tool for ostracization

Oftentimes we use labels to dismiss someone’s ideas. Say for example someone has views against immigration. An open-borders person’s first reaction would be to shout racist accusations at them, and thus label them as a racist, far-right, or what have you, without really judging their points based on merit or facts, but based on emotion and bias. This is a very simple an easy way to gain moral high ground in a debate or ostracize someone. And this has always happened. Christians, muslims, nazis, communists, all attaching labels to their enemies to portray them as undesirables and worthy of contempt.

Labels are not always attached to someone based on their actual views, but on someone else’s (usually limited) perception of their views. How does this make labelling at least accurate in the first place?

Between the 1940s and 1970s, Greece, my home country, had experienced a civil war, political persecution and a CIA-backed military junta. During the civil war, there were two camps you could join: the nationalists, backed by NATO, and communists, backed by the Soviet Union. Eventually, the communists lost, but polarization was so high, that persecution of them continued during the dictatorship (1967-1974). The issue was, that one was labelled arbitrarily, and simply landing on the “wrong” side was as easy as simply listening to the wrong music or having been born in a family with leftist ancestors. Others, snitched on their neighbours, or even family members, on suspicion of political heresy. Mind you, there were persecuted people that had nothing to do with leftism or communism, but not being sympathetic to the regime meant you were automatically a communist.

The reason behind this tangent is to give an example of how misleading labelling can be, and how easy it is to use it as a tool to dehumanize someone. In times of turmoil, labels are a weapon.

Another example is the Bolshevik regime using the term kulak to target dissident peasants:

Kulak, in particular, became a term of abuse directed by party propaganda against peasants who incurred the wrath of the authorities through failure to comply with demands for the delivery of grain.

— Edward Hallet Carr in “The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin, 1919-1927”

My proposal and personal approach

Whenever I get asked about my ideology, people who expect me to respond with a simplistic term such as “left” or “right”, are usually annoyed, or think I am just avoiding the question. For one, I really don’t think I 100% agree with any particular ideology, and second, I don’t want to reduce the capacity to think for myself to a political label and create all sorts of biases before I even start to express any view. I find it nearly impossible to explain my whole political worldview with just a term — and that’s not because I think I am some kind of intellectual with very unique thoughts, but because one’s politics really cannot be accurately defined with just a word.

There are ideologies which I think have more merit than others, that I’m more attracted towards and tend to agree with, but I don’t like the role-playing aspect of ideologies. It’s almost always the case that people who are keen on labelling are the most insufferable in a discussion, because their goal is not to have a healthy conversation, but to prove that their side is the right one.

So, what am I proposing, anyway? I think the single most important point I’d make is to develop critical and independent thinking. Blindly accepting or denying an idea because the ideology you’re subscribed to says so, is really no different than following a religion. Instead, my approach is to study and discuss various ideologies, extract the good things from each one of them, use my intuition and common sense, and form my own worldview.

Of course, anyone who takes a political stance does fall into some broad category, but there really is no point in obsessing over the label you go with, like it’s a football team.

Why reinvent the wheel

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve got a few reasons for “reinventing the wheel”, some personal and some practical:

I’m curious and want to know how things really work.
I like DIY from scratch projects.
Bottom-up learning is valuable.
There are things that are fundamentally flawed and need to be done again from scratch.
Existing tools don’t always match the criteria for your specific task and/or introduce too much complexity.
Because there’s already a way to do something, it doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do it.

Some of the greatest innovations have in fact been a reinvention of the wheel, because what already existed at the time wasn’t good enough. Imagine someone telling James Watt he shouldn’t waste his time reinventing the wheel. Improving what already exists means we have stable foundations and better tools to work with in the future. The wheel itself has been reinvented multiple times, hence why we don’t use Bronze Age wheels anymore.

A good example in the software world of why sometimes reinventing the wheel is a good idea is UNIX vs Windows. UNIX was written from scratch to replace Multics which had serious flaws, so they ended up with a new and clean system, built right from the bottom-up. They reinvented the wheel and made huge innovations in the process. Windows on the other hand, is built on top of MS-DOS which even at the time was a mess, so what Microsoft is left with is an OS which up to this day is overly complicated, because of fundamental design flaws that cannot be fixed unless they do away with the whole thing and start from scratch. Instead, they are coming up with half-assed solutions and add complexity to the system with each update.

Then there’s quality and efficiency. Writing your own tools means they can be tailored to perform a specific task perfectly — something a big generalized framework or piece of software can’t do in many cases. We tend to ignore the improvements better software can bring in the long term and instead spend time fighting with not-so-great tools and also rely on the power of modern hardware to cope for our mediocre solutions (see modern web tools or the web in general).

So, am I proposing that we’d be better off writing machine code and building our own programs for everything? Absolutely not. What I AM saying though, is that instead of being allergic to reinventing the wheel, we can start to see the merits in it, without overdoing it. This approach is benefecial to our personal improvement as engineers, which means an improvement in software as a whole. Just as you learn any other skill by mastering and understanding the basics, programming has to be understood from the bottom-up, not the opposite way. There’s no point in knowing all kinds of fancy frameworks if all you see are black boxes, or cannot even implement a linked list if asked to. After all, it’s a fact that software is getting worse.

And to save myself from sounding ignorant, there are cases where reinventing the wheel is a problem, namely:

Companies rolling their own proprietary solutions for everything, and ending up creating protocols and programs, which are arguably worse, expensive, harder to maintain, and incompatible with existing software.
People who like to reinvent the wheel for the sake of just having “their own” version of something, even when there actually is good software out there that covers their needs just as well.

Knowing how things really work will enable you to trace bugs easier, write/design more performant software, and overall know what the hell you’re doing. And that can only be achieved by, sometimes, reinventing the wheel. Nothing can teach you what getting your hands dirty will.

A related article I found funny.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +1200

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

— Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

USA TODAY removed 23 fabricated stories from their website, and, what’s interesting is that most of these 23 articles are mundane and boring. One can only imagine how frequent this is when it comes to politically and economically-related topics.

The co-founder himself has confirmed that Wikipedia is biased.

Christos Margiolis: philosophy

Rolf Dobelli: Avoid the News

Table of contents

Prologue

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body

No 1 — News misleads us systematically

No 2 — News is irrelevant

No 3 — News limits understanding

No 4 — News is toxic to your body

No 5 — News massively increases cognitive errors

No 6 — News inhibits thinking

No 7 — News changes the structure of your brain

No 8 — News is costly

No 9 — News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement

No 10 — News is produced by journalists

No 11 — Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always

No 12 — News is manipulative

No 13 — News makes us passive

No 14 — News gives us the illusion of caring

No 15 — News kills creativity

What to do instead

Good News

Disclaimer

Notes

In defense of the Old Web

Social media is ruining our lives

Table of contents

Addictiveness and the drug-like nature of social media

Effects on mental health

The economy of attention

Social media is not a substitute for real-life interaction

Future generations and the ability to focus

The solution

Political labels considered harmful

Labels are restrictive, not descriptive

Labels as a tool for ostracization

My proposal and personal approach

Why reinvent the wheel

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Christos Margiolis: philosophy

Rolf Dobelli: Avoid the News

Related reading

Table of contents

Prologue

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body

No 1 — News misleads us systematically

No 2 — News is irrelevant

No 3 — News limits understanding

No 4 — News is toxic to your body

No 5 — News massively increases cognitive errors

No 6 — News inhibits thinking

No 7 — News changes the structure of your brain

No 8 — News is costly

No 9 — News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement

No 10 — News is produced by journalists

No 11 — Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always

No 12 — News is manipulative

No 13 — News makes us passive

No 14 — News gives us the illusion of caring

No 15 — News kills creativity

What to do instead

Good News

Disclaimer

Notes

In defense of the Old Web

Social media is ruining our lives

Table of contents

Addictiveness and the drug-like nature of social media

Effects on mental health

The economy of attention

Social approval indicators

Social media is not a substitute for real-life interaction

Future generations and the ability to focus

Social control and propaganda

The solution

Political labels considered harmful

Labels are restrictive, not descriptive

Labels as a tool for ostracization

My proposal and personal approach

Why reinvent the wheel

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect