Tag: 2017

Why I Stopped Reading the News: Notes on a News Blackout

Why a News Blackout?

(If you’re already convinced or don’t care about my specific reasons, skip to the methods and findings)

I’ve been a news junkie for a decade. The addiction began during my final year of high school as a blend of historical research and discovering left wing news sites. My consumption varied a lot over the years, with my commentary touchstones becoming Ta-Nehisi Coates blog at the Atlantic, Matt Yglesias’ Moneybox at Slate, and Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog at WashPost. I followed those guys and the people in their circles from about 2008 until the present.

I watched Coates study WW2 and the Civil War, publicizing his education, learning from the Horde, and become the author of Between the World and Me. I watched Matt and Ezra morph from college bloggers to founding (with Sarah Kliff, an awesome talent but who I didn’t know pre-Vox) a new media powerhouse. I obviously followed a lot of other writers over the decade, but these guys always updated me daily on how to interpret events and their context. I would expect my media consumption to be pretty similar to a lot of folks’ given that this cohort has become as acclaimed as it has. Starting in college, I quasi-trained as and very seriously pretended to be a journalist. I was an editor of the school newspaper and interned at a newspaper in Chile for a summer. For a long time, I could pretend that my media diet was professionally beneficial.

Blogs, Twitter and traditional media figuring out how to transition to digital increased exponentially the amount of news content that was created daily. We truly are living in the golden age of hot takes. And I, for the most part, tried to keep up. Eventually, the daily slog through the even the traditional outlets: NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, WashPost, The Atlantic, Politico and Vox became too much—there was probably a qualitative change to the media in the Trump era, but I think the volume itself was too high. In response, in early summer 2017,I tried to dial it back by deleting Twitter and the Apple News app and only allowing myself to writers/commentators I liked on Twitter in the browser by googling “WRITER NAME Twitter”. This worked for a while. But my world of writers/commentators I liked just expanded. And all too often, I would fall down link black holes.

Despite my best efforts at moderation, the debate over repealing Obamacare in summer/fall 2017 broke me. We all watched it breathlessly—repeal, skinny repeal, whatever the last ditch Hail Mary was called. Countless adrenaline and cortisol spikes, internecine fights about collaborating on a subsidies fix or some other policy detail. And why not? Healthcare is 20% of GDP (and rising)—bending the cost curve is either important or really fucking important. And you know, lives are at stake.

But, as we all know, in the end, nothing changed. Months of debate. Speculation. Rumors. Scoring. And then. Nothing. What killed me then, and I realized more broadly, was that most “news” is essentially speculative. Beyond that, the expected value of most news stories is ludicrously small in comparison to their coverage. What real benefit did spending…hours…per day reading news and commentary really serve me if a large percentage of the time, nothing actually happened.

At the end of it all, sometime in September, I was leaving for a two week trip through France. Lyon. A drive through the Dordogne and Loire Valleys. A stop in St. Emilion. A few nights in Bordeaux. And a few more in Paris in the Marais. I decided the last thing I needed to do in any of these places was read the fucking news. So I didn’t. And then I didn’t when I got back. And I still haven’t.

Here’s what I did and what I found.

Methods
  • Do not go on social media. At all. (This is probably good advice generally, but necessary to avoid the most inflammatory news.)
  • Do not read anything that can be construed as news including event driven blogs, opinion pieces or features from news outles.
  • Do not watch the news (this was pretty easy because I never do).
  • Do not engage in conversation with anyone about the news. UNLESS they insist.
  • The clear exception to this is ACTUALLY IMPORTANT EVENTS. If the expected value of a story is really, really high, then someone will insist on you knowing about it, despite initial protest. And if anyone breached this threshold, I would allow myself to read about it by googling the topic and reading a few stories at the top of Google News.
  • When asked to defend myself, I ask the individual what they think the most important story in the world is. They tell me what they think it is, and unfailingly in turn, ask me. I show them this chart.

Source

And almost without fail, they would admit that they’ve missed the most important human development in the last 20 years.

Findings
  • The news is really addictive. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in three years, two months and eleven days. I can tell you, that our news environment is as addictive as cigarettes. I’ve quit caffeine for six month intervals. The news is far more addictive than caffeine. Receiving little information bursts clearly gives you a dopamine hit.

Most days when I wake up, I want to check the news. I don’t want a cigarette.

  • I haven’t missed much. Every time there was a mass shooting, I would know within a few hours. When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I found out about it the next day and was kept informed of the reckoning with workplace sexual harassment as it happened. I will say that I’m still not very informed about the tax bill that finally passed, but from what I’ve gathered from people I trust—it seems to be made out of spider webs and magic, so I expect negative externalities regardless of its intentional distributional and distortionary effects.
  • The status signaling effects were mixed. People who I had just met seemed to interpret my lack of engagement with the news as a lack of sophistication or civic spirit. Not being able to hold forth on policy proposals had a status lowering effect. Those who knew me before the blackout seemed to think I was misguided but respected the discipline to stay away.
  • I’ve gotten to read a lot more intentionally. The time once devoted to reading political or macroeconomic speculation is now spent on the books I set out to read and the few writers I follow whose work isn’t news-driven.
  • I feel considerably less partisan. I know that everyone thinks they’re less partisan than they truly are, and I’m sure that’s true of me too. But, I can admit, I used to be a party hack—even though I was an avowed independent. I now find myself feeling less passionate about either side, considerably more willing to critique the left and willing to hear out right wing intellectuals. I find this…suspicious at best.

It could be that I can spend more time thinking about political issues rather than applying broad heuristics in a rapid fire manner to the 100 pieces of news that hit each day.

Or the outlets I read are much more effective at shaping my beliefs than I would have liked to believe.

  • I’m continually shocked by how many people are convinced that the world is getting worse, when it has gotten and is getting dramatically better.
  • I want to reiterate: the news feed is more addictive than nicotine. I miss the feed daily in a way that I don’t miss cigarettes.
Conclusion

I’m going to continue on with the news blackout. It’s weird and hard to fight the urge to check the news every day. But the greater control over my time, attention, policy views and blood pressure is worth it.

Top Reads of 2017

These are the texts that caused view quakes or inspired/haunted me to the point where I had to recommend them.

Fiction

The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis

Picked up in Paris on a recommendation as a book that took France by storm. Absolutely gut wrenching, brutal and immiserating. Sort of like a French Hillbilly Elegy, if JD Vance were gay and had no extended family to intermittently rely on. Gave me insight strangely into a lot of rural, French (and maybe Western) culture and how inescapable it is for many. And a clearer idea on the “double consciousness” that those who escape have. My favorite novel since the equally, viscerally dark A Little Life.

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss

It’s brilliant, like all of her work. Deep and generationally intertwined, about impermanence and eternity. Whatever all of her books are about—the power of narrative to tie people together across space and time. If you’re unfamiliar with Krauss, start with The History of Love—my favorite novel and one of the book I buy every time I see it, so I always have copies to give away.

The Chalk Artist by Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman is back to form, writing about tech and its discontents. I’ll always be a Cookbook Collector fanboy, but her latest book is more open about its loyalty to literature and education as a…shield, respite or solution to the modern world.

Nonfiction

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

One line interpretation: focus on easy ways to maximize utility regardless of time, space and personal identity up to the point right before it makes you miserable. This interpretation inspired my Ethical Laffer Curve post.

I hesitate to say that this is the most important book I’ve ever read. But I have the impulse to say it. It’s certainly the most important book I read this year. Parfit makes the case for a utilitarianism that isn’t bound by time, space or personal identity. Parfit’s work is hard to summarize, but I’ll foolishly try: he makes the case that we are wrong to think of different people at the same time as fundamentally different as the same people at different times. Essentially that our past and future selves are as different from our present selves as other people. He then makes the case that if this is true, it affects utilitarian ethics substantially. In the same way that it is wrong to harm a different person, it becomes equally wrong to harm your future self (by smoking for example). I’m going to stop trying to summarize it because it’s a 400 page book of logical proofs and thought experiments.

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

TC once praised another writer as having “courage to look dead-eyed at ideology and all its limitations without lapsing into nostalgia or cynicism” something he called “ice water vision” and wished that to be the quality he cultivated most. Me too. TC is one of the few writers/intellectuals I’ve had the privilege to watch develop because he was so open throughout his career at the Atlantic. If you haven’t followed him since the beginning, this is an absolute must. His most famous work, Between The World and Me is undeniably important, but WWEYIP is a better place to start.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

This is the best business book I’ve read in a while—maybe ever. An admittedly low bar. Ben puts on display the cutting intelligence, compassion and ruthlessness that has made Andreesen Horowitz the greatest venture capital firm of all time. His intro below does better than I could.

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky

This book is an interesting look at why certain markets or institutions fail, and how to recognize failures that YOU can see and fix or exploit (often the same thing). Unfortunately, half of the book is really inside baseball stuff about modest epistemology—but that can for the most part be safely skimmed. Suffice it to say: taking the outside view is often appropriate, but sometimes an individual can do better–the book is about recognizing those times.

Eliezer is a strange dude. He founded one of the world’s foremost AI safety research organizations, but then decided that unless humanity became more rational then his work there wouldn’t matter. So he set about to “raise the sanity water line”. What a fucking insane thing. Strangely, he seems to have succeeded somewhat—his ideas have permeated influential thinkers and think tanks, and MIRI continues to hum and help lead AI safety research.

Online Reads

Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen

The polymath economist of Marginal Revolution fame turns his lens on…ethics, or something like it. He makes the case for economic growth as a moral good above almost all else—excepting certain inviolable rights. And argues for a social discount rate of 0. In the 8 months since I read it, I’ve concluded that the optimal discount rate is non-zero, but very close to zero. Based on this disagreement, but with a lot of respect for Cowen’s framework, I propose a Portfolio Theory for Effective Altruism as a way to think about efforts with different levels of certainty and time scales.

I rank this as his best work, followed by MR, and finally his Great Stagnation series–I wonder whether he would agree.

Update: I asked Tyler and he agrees with my ranking.

Definite optimism as human capital by Dan Wang

This piece theorizes about how optimism might be a driving force of innovation. As in, people literally being optimistic that things can change for the better drives productivity growth. He attacks our current productivity slowdown from multiple weird, creative angles.

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future by Tim Urban

Tim Urban is the writer Elon Musk calls when he wants the world to understand him. If you haven’t read his Elon Musk series, start at the beginning and end with this one.

THE 2017 STRATECHERY YEAR IN REVIEW by Ben Thompson

I’m cheating a little bit because I’m letting him curate his top 5, but Ben Thompson is probably the smartest person writing about strategy and tech (fuck, business in any sense) today. Everything he writes is worth reading.

Top Albums of 2017

Favorite albums (approx. in order of time spent listening):

The Far Field – Future Islands

The Nashville Sound – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

A Moment Apart – Odesza

Rainbow – Kesha

Saw You in a Dream – The Japanese House

Out in the Storm – Waxahatchee

A Deeper Understanding – The War on Drugs

Turn Out the Lights – Julien Baker

A Crow Looked at Me – Mount Eerie

Busted Jukebox Vol 2 – Shovels and Rope

Old, iconic bands that put out new albums I liked but weren’t close to their best work:

Goths – Mountain Goats

Heartworms – The Shins

Crack Up – Fleet Foxes

Science Fiction – Brand New

American Dream – LCD Soundsystem

Best Reissue:

The Spirit of Memphis – Isaac Hayes