Avoid News Towards a Healthy News Diet By Rolf Dobelli
- Il problema: We are so well informed and yet we know so little. Why?
- 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.
- Un'esperienza personale. 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.
- 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,
- Esempio. 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.
- •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.
- 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
- At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.
- Esempio. In 1914, the news story about the assassination in Sarajevo dwarfed all other reports in terms of its global significance.
- 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.
- No 3 – News limits understanding
- News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes.
- Il difetto di ciò che conta. The important stories are non-stories:
- No evidence exists to indicate that information junkies are better decision makers.
- No 4 –News is toxic to your body
- Stress cronico. 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.
- 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
- exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense”– even if they don’t correspond to reality.
- 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.
- No 6 –News inhibits thinking
- Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking.
- In a 2001 study1 two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increase.
- 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.
- 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. Most news consumers –even if they used to be avid book readers –have lost the ability to read and absorb lengthy articles or books.
- 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.
- No 8 – News is costly
- News taxes productivity three ways:
- First, count the consumption-time that news demands.
- Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost.
- 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,
- No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
- Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives.
- No 10 – News is produced by journalists
- My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative.
- No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong,
- Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies
- No 12 – News is manipulative
- Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions.
- 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).
- 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.
- Una teoria della depressione. Viewed on a timeline, the spread of depression coincides almost perfectly with the growth and maturity of the mass media.
- 14 –News gives us the illusion of caring
- “We may want to believe that we are still concerned. We sing “We Are the World”
- 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.
- Fatti. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.
- Policy. What to do instead Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey. glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Go for magazines that connect the dots
- Morale. Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is relevant in any society.
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