With investigative journalism and content articles on the decline, what’s left in many news media is noise. Noise takes up your time and attention away from more important things, and can create additional stress and anxieties.
Consider: 50% of what you reading today will be irrelevant tomorrow, and that numbers rises to 90% after one week and 99% after 3 months.
Of course it helps to “know” what is going on in the world, but it’s actually more important to understand what’s going on.
Take inflation. You probably have heard and read about inflation for the last 6 months now.
Despite all this news coverage, most news outlets haven’t even tried to explain the reasons behind inflation. At best they came up with a vague explanation around the likes of “too much money printed during COVID overheated the economy” or the “Ukraine crisis” (not war, mind you, crisis). This explanation is not just vague - it’s wrong.
Joseph Stiglitz and Ira Regmi laid out five causes of inflation: energy and food spikes, supply interruptions, changes in what we want, higher rents – and price-gouging:
The Causes of and Responses to Today’s Inflation
None of these come from workers having too much money. And, on the contrary, executives uses real crises such as the Ukraine war as ready-made excuses for raising prices and then keeping them high, i.e. #Excuseflation:
How ‘Excuseflation’ Is Keeping Prices — and Corporate Profits - High
And this is just one example how you can get the appearance of ‘knowing’ without actually getting to a better understanding.
Give yourself a present. Don’t read daily news, read content articles. You’ll end up much wiser1.
Nassim Taleb arrives at a similar conclusion from the observation that the ratio of signal to noise decreases as you observe a random system more frequently. In his words: “Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal). […] If you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.” (Nassim Taleb, Antifragile) ↩︎
