I keep seeing posts about all the terrible news stories in the news recently. 2020 is a pretty bad year so far.
But the news I’ve seen people posting typically leaves out most of what’s been going on in India, Pakistan, much of the Middle East as of recent, most of Africa, most of South America, and many, many other places as well.
The world is far more complicated than any of us have time to adequately comprehend. One of our greatest challenges is to find ways to handle all this complexity.
The simple solution is to try to spend more time reading the usual news. If the daily news becomes three times as intense, spend three times as much time reading it. This is not a scalable strategy.
I’d hope that over time more attention is spent on big picture aggregations, indices, statistics, and quantitative comparisons.
This could mean paying less attention to the day to day events and to individual cases.
There’s a parallel development that makes any strategy difficult—it’s financially rewarding to misdirect and mis-aggregate the big-picture publications and comparisons. So you can’t spend less time on details, as you can’t trust the aggregates without checking. See also Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Without an infrastructure for divvying up the work to trusted cells that can understand (parts of) the details and act as a check on the aggregators and each other, the only answer is to spot-check details yourself, and accept ignorance of things you didn’t verify.
I feel most people, including myself, don’t even use the aggregators already available. For example, there are lots of indices and statistics (ideally there should be much more, but anyways), but I rarely go out of my way to consume them. Some examples I just thought of:
Keeping a watch on new entries to and exits from Fortune 500
Looking at the stocks of the top 20 companies every quarter
...
There are several popular books that throw surprising statistics around, like Factfulness; This suggests a lot of us are disconnected from basic statistics, that we presumably could easily get by just googling.
I keep seeing posts about all the terrible news stories in the news recently. 2020 is a pretty bad year so far.
But the news I’ve seen people posting typically leaves out most of what’s been going on in India, Pakistan, much of the Middle East as of recent, most of Africa, most of South America, and many, many other places as well.
The world is far more complicated than any of us have time to adequately comprehend. One of our greatest challenges is to find ways to handle all this complexity.
The simple solution is to try to spend more time reading the usual news. If the daily news becomes three times as intense, spend three times as much time reading it. This is not a scalable strategy.
I’d hope that over time more attention is spent on big picture aggregations, indices, statistics, and quantitative comparisons.
This could mean paying less attention to the day to day events and to individual cases.
There’s a parallel development that makes any strategy difficult—it’s financially rewarding to misdirect and mis-aggregate the big-picture publications and comparisons. So you can’t spend less time on details, as you can’t trust the aggregates without checking. See also Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Without an infrastructure for divvying up the work to trusted cells that can understand (parts of) the details and act as a check on the aggregators and each other, the only answer is to spot-check details yourself, and accept ignorance of things you didn’t verify.
I feel most people, including myself, don’t even use the aggregators already available. For example, there are lots of indices and statistics (ideally there should be much more, but anyways), but I rarely go out of my way to consume them. Some examples I just thought of:
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/results.html
Keeping a watch on new entries to and exits from Fortune 500
Looking at the stocks of the top 20 companies every quarter
...
There are several popular books that throw surprising statistics around, like
Factfulness; This suggests a lot of us are disconnected from basic statistics, that we presumably could easily get by just googling.