News: The Quest for Unknown Unknowns
How important are ‘the latest news’? What would it mean to ignore most news and to concentrate on our present goals?
Is there more to news than just curiosity and leisure?
Should every rationalist administer a balanced information diet?
How do we guarantee a healthy exposure to unfocused information?
These days many people are following an enormous amount of news sources. I myself notice how skimming through my Google Reader items is increasingly time-consuming. But by acknowledging that news media consumption is a time killer should we also jump to the conclusion that it is a waste of time?
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things
We know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
— Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
As long as we embed ourselves into the collective intelligence of ‘the sphere of human thought’, as long as we are a part of the growing Noosphere, we will be nourished. But we have to keep care not to be drowned. The balance between an ill-nourished information diet and gluttony is unsteady.
Google and its kind are the first representations of the wonders of our possible future. They are slave-Gods at our disposal, all the time ready to serve us. Google is a literal-minded information genie, there to satisfy our desires indifferently of the consequences that might arise for us.
Thus we have to learn how, when and for what to ask the right questions. But the underlying nature of unknown unknowns does not permit us to question them. The impossibility to know the possibilities that lie ahead is the dilemma we face. For that we know about, or rather assume, the possibility of prospects or possible possibilities that we don’t know we don’t know about.
How much of what you know and do has its origins in some blog post or other kind of news item. Would I even know about Less Wrong if I wasn’t the heavy news addict that I am?
Have I already reached a level of knowledge that allows me to get from here to everywhere, without exposing myself to all the noise out there in hope of coming across some valuable information nugget which might help me reach the next level?
How do we ever know that there isn’t something out there which might trump our current goals? Just one click away a new truth might shift our preferences.
Is there a time to stop searching and approach what is at hand? Start learning and improving upon the possibilities we already know about? What proportion of our time should we spend on the prospect of unknown unknowns?
How I do it:
Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly. – Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p. 216
I mainly get my news from blogs, blogs of experts on different topics who preprocess and refine each of their specialities. That is also my general advice, to focus on private blogs of experts. That way you have a very high signal-to-noise ratio while you can be pretty sure not to miss anything important in that area. For example, if you care about science fiction, subscribe to some blogs of your favorite authors. If you care about genetics, subscribe to a few different personal blogs of experts on that subject. Most important, avoid in-between sources. Do not read what is being made to sound good, to earn money, that which is straightened for a large audience. Everybody is grounding their stuff on the experts, as in ‘science is the only news’. Noise reduction is very important these days. All people out there basically build upon a few underlying unique sources who generate the data in the first place. Those people you have to follow. And everything else will automatically come to you via the same people, since one of them will hear about something you might have missed.
A few well-chosen mainstream networks are good to stay up to date on big events and world news. But the rest has to be experts. As I said above regarding science fiction, I don’t follow SF review sites or the big publishers but a few selected authors. Those authors will know about important stuff happening in the field of SF and post about it. They will also lead you to other unique sources in the same field. And due to their overlapping interests also keep you up to date on other stuff. That’s how it works. Everything else is just deadly noise that will steal your time.
And don’t be fooled by the new trend of Twitter and its kind. I don’t get why people these days supposedly rather use ‘real-time’ services for their daily information diet. Don’t do it. Stay with RSS, especially Google Reader. If you really want to follow somebody on Twitter, subscribe to their RSS feed. If you ask me, all the stuff you can find on services like Twitter ultimately was found by people subscribing to lots of RSS feeds. Without them Twitter would merely be a huge amount of boring one-liners with no information content. RSS is faster, easier and has a lot more features. You also won’t miss what happened when you haven’t been reading updates in ‘real-time’.
Reading the mainstream news can be instrumentally useful. For example, if you have invested money in the stock market, knowing what’s going on in the world can help you predict future trends. The fact that lot of the media is dominated by political squabbles doesn’t make reading about current events entirely worthless.
SarahC already said so as well and I’ve actually stated the same in the OP:
I know. But I thought the stock market was a good example of why it’s important.
Yes, voted up. Surely any heuristic is bound to certain circumstances. I was just trying to pave the way towards a discussion on how not to be drowned by information that are useless, i.e. have no utility and do not help you to get what you want, but at the same time expose yourself to enough noise to stumble upon unknown unknowns that our collective intellect might convey.
Ah, I see. Hmm...perhaps we could divide the news into sections (sports, international, national, entertainment, op-ed, etc.) and try to estimate the utility of each section? Although I fear that the answer my be dependent on where you live.
This should be in the rationality quotes thread, if it hasn’t made an appearance already.
I’m a bit confused by the inclusion of Twitter on this list. To me that’s like saying “Don’t try to get your news through Facebook!” Well, yeah—it’s not a news source. It’s a social site. I use Twitter to keep up on my friends, not the world. Are there people who try to use it for the other thing? (Don’t news sites with Twitter accounts just use them to link to the site?)
You need to read, apart from your professional interests or your entertainment sources, one mainstream news site. Even if it’s just for less than five minutes a day. There’s no universal need to be a current events junkie, but it is important to know which parts of the world are at war, when earthquakes and floods happen, when world leaders die or transfer power. At least, so that you can be aware if something puts people you know at risk, and so that you don’t look too foolish around the water cooler.
I gave up being a news junkie—it was a time sink, and if I want a time sink I want to do it with things that make my brain happy, like science or literature. But I always, always scan the New York Times. What if something really important happened?
You’d glance it in the “In The News” section of Wikipedia on your way to learning actually useful knowledge. :P
Seriously, even that small chunk of world news is more than enough. If something important happens, your friends will tell you. If it’s something in a domain that is important for other reasons, like AGI, then you should have seen it via more specific channels already. It’s not like knowing who the president is actually matters, and you only get embarrassed once when you find out for the first time.
I have rarely found any of these things of any great use, apart from flooding around where I live—that covers 50-100,000 people whereas the mainstream news covers flooding everywhere on the globe—much more information than matters to me.
And as for looking foolish … that’s not a great reason for doing something if you consider it a waste of time.
Well? What if it did? Something really important happened and you missed it … is that so bad?
I don’t read any news sources, though I turn on the radio occasionally. Yet I can’t avoid knowing these things from the blogs I read. I’m far, far from convinced I need to know them, though. There was something recently that I learned it in person, a week late, but I forgot what it was. I was surprised that I hadn’t learned it, so my filter has more holes than I know, but it wasn’t something I cared about.