I don’t have any sensible way of learning about current affairs. I don’t consume broadcast or print news. Most news stories reach me through social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research, and I will independently follow up on the ones I think are worthy of interest. This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.
Regular news outlets seem to be messy, noisy attention traps, rather than the austere factual repositories I wish them to be. Quite importantly, there seems to be a lot of stuff in the news that isn’t actually news. I’m pretty sure smart people with different values will converge on what a lot of this stuff is.
Has this problem been solved already? I’m willing to put in time/effort/money for minimalist, noise-free, sensibly-prioritised news digest that I care about.
ETA: Although I haven’t replied to all these responses individually, they seem very useful and I will be following them up. Thanks!
What sort of current events do you want to find out about how quickly, and why?
You should consider, if you haven’t already, the possibility that the value of learning about such things quickly is almost always almost exactly zero. Suppose e.g. there’s an enormous earthquake half-way around the world from you, and many thousands of people die. That’s a big deal, it’s very important—but what immediate difference should it make to your life?
One possibility: you might send a lot of money to a charity working in the affected place. But it seems unlikely to me that there’s much real difference in practice between doing so on the day of the disaster and doing it a week later.
Another possibility (albeit a kinda callous one): it may come up in conversation and you may not want to sound bad. But I bet that in practice “social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research” do just fine at keeping you sufficiently up to date that you don’t sound stupid or ignorant. In any case, what you need to know about in order to sound up to date is probably roughly what you get from existing news sources, rather than from a hypothetical new source of genuinely important, sensibly prioritized news.
I appreciate the distinction you make between urgent and non-urgent news.
Finding out about things quickly isn’t necessarily my priority. In fact, one of my problems with “regular” news outlets is that they have poor sense of time sensitivity, and promote news that’s stopped being useful. The value of knowing about Icelandic volcanoes grounding all northern European air traffic is actually very useful to me when it’s just happened, but in a week’s time I may as well read about it on Wikipedia.
I’m more concerned about finding out about things at all. My ad hoc news accretion drops the ball more often than I’d like. My ideal wish-upon-a-star would be a daily digest saying “here are a list of things that have happened today in two sentences or less”. I can then decide whether to follow it up or not.
(I have a secondary motive of wanting to associate events in my memory to improve the granularity of my recall. I know, for example, that Eyjafjallajökull erupting was concurrent with the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election, which helps me position it in time quite accurately, as well as position personal events that I remember happening around the same time.)
Hilariously, a good option for you may be an actual newspaper. Made out of paper.
It comes once a day, it summarizes a few dozen major events in a reasonably succinct way, and many of them try to minimize reporting bias. You could consider specific papers based on size and editorial style (most offer free or cheap trials), and then sign up for a short subscription to see how you like it.
But it has a lot of the same stuff you’d have found beyond the hyperlinks—right underneath the headlines, without even needing to click. I’m not sure that’s a win.
No additional clicks from there, though, so still bounded. You can read through all the interesting stories in a paper (I used to do this) and then you’re done; with the web there’s no obvious stopping place.
I get The New York Times, and I find it pretty good in those regards (depending on your definition of “reasonably succinct”). And as a bonus, its science reporting is not hair-rippingly terrible at all generally.
I find daily takes up too much time, and the reporting doesn’t have enough distance. So I’d recommend reading a Sunday paper instead—or, better still, a weekly or monthly magazine. If you’re in the UK then Prospect is fantastic; I also read TIME (I’ve heard allegations that the US edition is dumbed down, so try to get a European or Asian edition).
Do you have some examples in mind of things you never found out about but would have been better off for knowing?
(Of course if you literally never found out about something you can’t know. But I’m guessing there are things you did find out about but not until much too late.)
A couple of semi-recent examples would be the referendum on Scottish independence and the Islamic State business in the middle east. I obviously found out about them, but it felt like I found out about them a lot later than I would have liked. It’s not so much that these have an immediate impact on my life (Scottish independence does, but it’s not like I’d be able to remain ignorant by the time it’s resolved), but they’re massive news events that I basically didn’t notice until everyone else was talking about them. This suggests I’m probably missing other events that people aren’t talking about, and that makes me want to up my game.
I can’t find it, but I once read an article from a guy a trust about how he just stopped following news, assuming that if anything sufficiently important happened, he’d find out about it anyway. His quality of life immediately rose. Having followed this approach for a few years now, I would suggest consuming zero news (is minimalist, completely devoid of noise, and exceptionally well-organized).
“Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.”—Bruce Schneier
But rare events matter too. For example, the big news in July 1914 was the outbreak of a massive war involving all the major European powers. I suggest that someone taking Bruce Schneier’s advice (“World wars are rare events, so you don’t need to worry if one breaks out”) is substantially misguided.
The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.”
This is a very good heuristic but it does have a few exceptions, e.g. astronomical, meteorological, and similar events. Lots of people assume that if the news are talking about the supermoon then it must be an exceedingly unusual event.
I remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb claiming exactly this in an interview a few years ago. He let his friends function as a kind of news filter, assuming that they would probably mention anything sufficiently important for him to know.
Get an RSS reader and read only the headlines. That way you can process hundreds of news in a few minutes and only open the ones that seem seriously important.
A trivial inconvenience which could make a huge difference—if there was a software which would put all those headlines in plain-text format, to reduce the temptation of clicking. (There is still google if something is irresistible.)
In a similar vein: How do I find out what to read and what to learn more generally? I don’t care about reading the latest Piketty but I want to read the best summary and interpretation of a philosopher from the last 10 years instead of the original from 500 years ago. Same goes for Physics text books and so on, and literature.
I scan google news headlines, top stories section and click on the items of interest. Yes, there are still attention grabs and non-news, but this is usually fairly clear from the article names.
My foreign news comes almost exclusively from the CFR Daily News Brief, which sounds like exactly what you’re looking for. The daily briefs also link to their Backgrounders, which are excellent and relatively short summaries of the backgrounds to many hot-topic issues.
This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.
Meh. Sufficiently big natural disasters or political events find a way onto my Facebook feed anyway.
Once in a while when I’m bored I check out the Android app of my country’s wire service (I think the American equivalent would be the Associated Press) and/or the box in the top right of the English Wikipedia’s home page. But it’s a rare week that I spend more than half an hour seeking out news deliberately.
Why would the knowledge of who won the World Cup or how many kids Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have any relevance at all when deciding whom to vote for?
(I jest, but LeechBlock is going to get me the hell out of here in a minute and a half so I don’t have time to write a more serious reply.)
In what way? Do you wish you spent more time following current affairs? I don’t follow them, but don’t see any problem with it—if anything, I occasionally have to resist the urge of looking up what’s going on in the world, which I put in the same mental bucket as the urge to look at the top entries of /r/funny.
I don’t think in ten years time having read one more news item on the Gaza Strip will change my life more than having seen one more picture of a cat stuck in a bowl.
(I do however sometimes go more into a binge of “reading up on something and trying to understand it”, but I rely more on Wikipedia than on news for that; “breaking news” tends to repeat the same points over and over again, and doesn’t put much focus on the big picture)
I used to read the wikipedia current events page, which I found a nice summary of what’s going on without going into too many details.
I trust my brain to collect facts and raise them to my attention when they’re important. “Current affairs” describes a class of fact that I don’t think is being adequately collected.
The Wikipedia current events page is a very good example of what I’m looking for.
I don’t wish to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but for sixes-and-sevens benefit, I’ll note that Instapundit is a highly ideological libertarian (alternatively, in the view of many progressives, a partisan Republican pretending to be a libertarian). If you use him as a news source, you should balance with a progressive source.
ETA: This advice holds even if you are skipping narrowly political articles and reading about crises/disasters, etc., since ideology informs what kinds of crises people consider salient.
Looks like, but isn’t. The goal isn’t that you take one viewpoint and take another viewpoint and find “something in the middle”; the point is that having multiple independent viewpoints makes it easier to spot mistakes in each.
It feels natural for us to think critically when our preconceptions are contradicted and to accept information uncritically when our preconceptions are supported. If you want to improve the odds that you’re reading critical thought about any given topic, you need sources with a wide range of different preconceptions.
I agree and wouldn’t have objected if Prismattic advised to read multiple sources from a variety of viewpoints. As it is, he just said “you need to read progressives as well” and that’s a different claim.
I’m not arguing that the views should be averaged, but that the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias. A libertarian/fusionist source is likely to devote more coverage to, say, stories of government corruption and less to stories of corporate wage theft or environmental degradation; a progressive source to do the opposite. All of those stories might be important (in general or to sixes-and-sevens in particular), so the combined news feed is in that sense better.
the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias.
So why did you recommend progressives and not, say, news coming from the Roman Catholic Church, from marxists, from PETA, from infowars, from Al-Jazira, etc. etc.?
Well, taking those specific examples as non-rhetorical: PETA, the Catholic Church, and Infowars are various kinds of insane in ways that extend beyond ordinary political mindkilling, so I’d be unlikely to recommend them. Al-Jazeera English is actually pretty good as a news source, but its website is an adjunct of being a broadcast news source, which is less helpful from a time-investment perspective. I predict that a center-left news source will provide coverage on a broader range of issues than a far-left news source, but your mileage may vary.
The center-left source is also most likely to compensate specifically for the coverage holes in a center-right source. That still isn’t averaging their factual claims.
I would argue that this summing, not averaging exposure. There’s a difference between saying “You should read both GreenNetNews and BlueCast” and saying “To save time, read GreenNetNews on odd-numbered days and BlueCast on even-numbered days”.
I’ve heard it it as synonymous with “good,” “new” and anti rich tax policy. Can you make a recommendation? Either just left or, since libertarian is socially liberal fiscally conservative, a good source that is fiscally liberal and socially conservative? I asked the DNC for the former and just got on their mailing list. Not impressed.
The US “left” is considerably to the right of the European left, and LW has a broad international readership, so I think just saying “left” would be more confusing (“liberal” would even more confusing, given the dispute between libertarians and progressives over who is the legitimate heir of 19th century liberalism). But yes, in this case, I meant progressive in the sense of “mainstream center-left.”
The US “left” is considerably to the right of the European left
Some of the US “left” (notably, the mainstream Democrats) are considerably to the right of the European left. “Left” encompasses a rather large landscape.
I’ve heard it it as synonymous with “good,” “new” and anti rich tax policy.
Of course a progressive will think that progressivism is good, and part of progressivism is that it is good becuase it is new (the clue is in the name). Those who are not progressives will hardly agree. And anti rich tax policy is a straightforward left-leaning policy.
It is tempting for progressives to define the word to mean “good” and “new”, as it saves them the trouble of defending the ideology. The ideology can then be treated not as any set of beliefs about the reality, but as reality itself.
part of progressivism is that it is good becuase it is new (the clue is in the name)
No, that’s not it. It doesn’t mean you can’t have new things happen that are bad. It does refer to a time derivative, but it’s more of a goal than a statement of fact: government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That’s ‘progress’. (Note: this summary is not an endorsement)
Progressive tax structures are not named so due to this time derivative. They are named so due to the derivative in income. Regressive tax structures exist, but they aren’t named so due to being more like the past.
government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That’s ‘progress’.
That is progress, but that is not what is meant by “progressive” in the political sense. The belief that government can be engineered to improve things is shared by everyone except those in despair of it ever happening. Moldbug has proposals to do that—is he a “progressive”?
No, “progressive” means certain specific views about what is valued as an improvement, and specific beliefs about what policies will make those improvements. These values and views are accurately summarised as “left-leaning”.
I thought about that, but I decided that reducing the government and doing away with it counted as engineering the government. For the libertarian, the task is complete not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
Yes, there are specific things it’s aiming at. I was justifying the word choice. And either way we’ve moved past the ridiculous notion that it is good because it’s new. If you’re going to try to correct me for being overly general you can at least own up to having been far more overly general just a few hours previously.
As someone else already pointed out, “progressive” doesn’t mean “approving of all new things” (and in the context of taxation it’s only a verbal coincidence that progressive politics tends to go with liking progressive taxation). Having said that, and in full awareness that anecdotes are little evidence: Hi, I’m a political progressive who has no objection in principle to GMOs and thinks we should be moving to nuclear power in a big way. (I have some incidental concerns about GMOs; e.g., they interact with IP law to provide exciting new ways for unscrupulous corporations to screw people over, which is a pity.)
and in the context of taxation it’s only a verbal coincidence that progressive politics tends to go with liking progressive taxation
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that progressives around 1900 called the method of taxation they favored progressive taxation.
Having said that, and in full awareness that anecdotes are little evidence: Hi, I’m a political progressive who has no objection in principle to GMOs and thinks we should be moving to nuclear power in a big way.
I haven’t said something about objections in principle, my statement was much weaker.
More to the point, I expect that a bunch of people on LW are pro-new-technology but that’s not true for the average left person and pretending that being pro-new-technology is something that’s an essential feature of progressive thought in the 21st century ignores the political realities.
On the other hand it was an essential feature of progressive thought 50 years ago.
In Marx idea of history, it’s a natural law that history moves in the right direction.
progressives around 1900 called the method of taxation they favored progressive taxation
The OED’s earliest citation for the term “progressive” in reference to taxation is from Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man” in 1792. Its first citation referring to a person who favours political or social change or reform is from 1830. It’s possible that the latter meaning is older than 1792 (explanation on request) but, to say the least, it doesn’t appear that the term “progressive” as a description for taxation systems that tax richer people more dates from “around 1900″ or was chosen by people who identified themselves as “progressives” in anything like the modern US sense.
pretending that being pro-new-technology is something that’s an essential feature of progressive thought in the 21st century ignores the political realities.
I agree. I rather doubt that anyone—at least anyone using “progressive” in its current US-political sense—actually thinks otherwise, despite RichardKennaway’s remark above. (In any case, it seems clear from what he wrote that he doesn’t himself identify as progressive, and his description of progressives’ thought processes doesn’t appear to be the result of a serious attempt to understand them sympathetically.)
to say the least, it doesn’t appear that the term “progressive” as a description for taxation systems that tax richer people more dates from “around 1900″
Google NGram does show an uptick over that time period for “progressive taxation”. It’s the time known as the Progressive Era
I agree. I rather doubt that anyone—at least anyone using “progressive” in its current US-political sense—actually thinks otherwise, despite RichardKennaway’s remark above.
Have you read Moldbug? I do think that Moldbug argues that progressivism is about favoring the new. Cthulhu always swims left.
On LW there are a bunch of people that don’t actually agree with Moldbug about wanting to reinstate monarchy but who still accept Moldbug way of thinking about issues.
It’s the problem with history. Moldbug tell his history about the progressives of the progressive era and then proclaims that today’s left thought (the thought of the cathedral) is the same.
I do think that Moldbug argues that progressivism is about favoring the new.
So much the worse for Moldbug, at least if he makes a strong claim along those lines rather than something weaker and less controversial like “people who identify as progressive tend to be more positive about new things than people who identify as conservative”.
But I haven’t devoted a lot of time or thought to Moldbug, or to neoreaction generally.
I’m slightly lost track of what, if anything, we are actually disagreeing about here. I think it may at this point simply be about why various words have the definitions they do, which probably isn’t something that’s worth putting much further effort into.
You said you doubt that anybody thinks otherwise. I wanted to illustrate that there are people who do think otherwise. That’s means talking about the issue matters.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: What I’ve largely lost track of is what “the issue” actually is. I do understand that at this particular point in the thread we’re talking about whether and to what extent progressivism is about liking new things. But I’ve forgotten (and haven’t much motivation to go back and figure out) why—if at all—that question is relevant to anything that matters. I’m pretty certain (and I’d guess you agree) that on the whole being a “progressive” (in the sense in which that term’s used in present-day US politics) is about other things more than it’s about liking new things.
But I’ve forgotten (and haven’t much motivation to go back and figure out) why—if at all—that question is relevant to anything that matters.
Understanding the political thought of the last few decades is useful and showing preconception to be wrong is also useful.
Particularly it’s useful to understand that the relationship of self identified progressives towards liking new things changed in the last 50 years.
(In any case, it seems clear from what [RichardKennaway] wrote that he doesn’t himself identify as progressive, and his description of progressives’ thought processes doesn’t appear to be the result of a serious attempt to understand them sympathetically.)
I confirm that this is accurate.
And I stand corrected that the virtue of newness in progressive thinking has got old, while the word “progressive” persists. What do they think of “progress” these days? “You can’t stop progress” was the saying back then. I haven’t heard it uttered seriously for a long time, and if it’s said at all, it’s more likely to be as a criticism of the opposite side by imputing it to them. First relevant Google hit here.
I’m fairly sure the majority of LW regulars who identify as progressives (myself included) would agree with these views about GMOs and nuclear power. However, I’m also pretty sure this is not true of the progressive movement at large, sadly. This is particularly frustrating because these two technologies are probably the most promising tools currently available for solving the problems many progressives purport to care most about.
“Christian” covers a lot of ground. That’s a fair description of the mainline Catholic viewpoint, but looking up a random Christian news source in the US could get you fiscal viewpoints ranging from lukewarm left to hardline right to more or less apolitical.
(It’s reliably socially conservative, though, generally speaking.)
That comes with some theological baggage, of course. You don’t want a news source that interprets everything in terms of the end times and looks forward to a nuclear war to annihilate the damned.
I’ve heard good things of the Christian Science Monitor (which obviously has even more questionable baggage), but I haven’t read it myself. Also Al Jazeera, which has other baggage (owned by a government), and which I also haven’t read.
I’ve heard good things of the Christian Science Monitor (which obviously has even more questionable baggage), but I haven’t read it myself.
Try reading it. Despite the name it doesn’t have an obvious Christian Science Bias. Although I’ve heard it is running into financial problems due to a principled refusal to resort to clickbait and fluff stories.
When I was in college, I took a class taught by the head of the polisci department—Cuba-loving socialist type—who had a habit of recommending it during lectures.
Sure, but all news sources come with some baggage—mostly ideological, sometimes theological, and often enough just batshit crazy. That’s why you don’t want a news source, you want lots of them.
The American Conservative is definitely socially conservative and, if not exactly fiscally liberal, at least much more sympathetic to economic redistribution than mainstream conservatism. But it is more composed of opinion pieces than of news reports, so I don’t know if it works for way you want.
As others suggested, Vox could be a good choice for a left-leaning news source. It has decent summaries of “everything you need to know about X” (where X = many current news stories).
I don’t wish to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but for sixes-and-sevens benefit, I’ll note that Instapundit is a highly ideological libertarian (alternatively, in the view of many progressives, a partisan Republican pretending to be a libertarian). If you use him as a news source, you should balance with a progressive source.
Any particular reason you didn’t make a similar reply to Christian’s suggestion of the ideologically progressive vox dot com?
As it happens I also read Steve Sailer, although he isn’t so much news as editorial cometary whereas instupundit is more “list of headlines” of the kind sixes-and-sevens was asking about.
I don’t have any sensible way of learning about current affairs. I don’t consume broadcast or print news. Most news stories reach me through social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research, and I will independently follow up on the ones I think are worthy of interest. This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.
Regular news outlets seem to be messy, noisy attention traps, rather than the austere factual repositories I wish them to be. Quite importantly, there seems to be a lot of stuff in the news that isn’t actually news. I’m pretty sure smart people with different values will converge on what a lot of this stuff is.
Has this problem been solved already? I’m willing to put in time/effort/money for minimalist, noise-free, sensibly-prioritised news digest that I care about.
ETA: Although I haven’t replied to all these responses individually, they seem very useful and I will be following them up. Thanks!
What sort of current events do you want to find out about how quickly, and why?
You should consider, if you haven’t already, the possibility that the value of learning about such things quickly is almost always almost exactly zero. Suppose e.g. there’s an enormous earthquake half-way around the world from you, and many thousands of people die. That’s a big deal, it’s very important—but what immediate difference should it make to your life?
One possibility: you might send a lot of money to a charity working in the affected place. But it seems unlikely to me that there’s much real difference in practice between doing so on the day of the disaster and doing it a week later.
Another possibility (albeit a kinda callous one): it may come up in conversation and you may not want to sound bad. But I bet that in practice “social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research” do just fine at keeping you sufficiently up to date that you don’t sound stupid or ignorant. In any case, what you need to know about in order to sound up to date is probably roughly what you get from existing news sources, rather than from a hypothetical new source of genuinely important, sensibly prioritized news.
I appreciate the distinction you make between urgent and non-urgent news.
Finding out about things quickly isn’t necessarily my priority. In fact, one of my problems with “regular” news outlets is that they have poor sense of time sensitivity, and promote news that’s stopped being useful. The value of knowing about Icelandic volcanoes grounding all northern European air traffic is actually very useful to me when it’s just happened, but in a week’s time I may as well read about it on Wikipedia.
I’m more concerned about finding out about things at all. My ad hoc news accretion drops the ball more often than I’d like. My ideal wish-upon-a-star would be a daily digest saying “here are a list of things that have happened today in two sentences or less”. I can then decide whether to follow it up or not.
(I have a secondary motive of wanting to associate events in my memory to improve the granularity of my recall. I know, for example, that Eyjafjallajökull erupting was concurrent with the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election, which helps me position it in time quite accurately, as well as position personal events that I remember happening around the same time.)
Hilariously, a good option for you may be an actual newspaper. Made out of paper.
It comes once a day, it summarizes a few dozen major events in a reasonably succinct way, and many of them try to minimize reporting bias. You could consider specific papers based on size and editorial style (most offer free or cheap trials), and then sign up for a short subscription to see how you like it.
And the greatest advantage is that it has no hyperlinks to click. Thus, you only spend limited time reading it.
But it has a lot of the same stuff you’d have found beyond the hyperlinks—right underneath the headlines, without even needing to click. I’m not sure that’s a win.
No additional clicks from there, though, so still bounded. You can read through all the interesting stories in a paper (I used to do this) and then you’re done; with the web there’s no obvious stopping place.
That hasn’t been my experience with newspapers.
I get The New York Times, and I find it pretty good in those regards (depending on your definition of “reasonably succinct”). And as a bonus, its science reporting is not hair-rippingly terrible at all generally.
I find daily takes up too much time, and the reporting doesn’t have enough distance. So I’d recommend reading a Sunday paper instead—or, better still, a weekly or monthly magazine. If you’re in the UK then Prospect is fantastic; I also read TIME (I’ve heard allegations that the US edition is dumbed down, so try to get a European or Asian edition).
Interesting, so the European edition of TIME is not a complete insult to their readers’ intelligence?
Do you have some examples in mind of things you never found out about but would have been better off for knowing?
(Of course if you literally never found out about something you can’t know. But I’m guessing there are things you did find out about but not until much too late.)
A couple of semi-recent examples would be the referendum on Scottish independence and the Islamic State business in the middle east. I obviously found out about them, but it felt like I found out about them a lot later than I would have liked. It’s not so much that these have an immediate impact on my life (Scottish independence does, but it’s not like I’d be able to remain ignorant by the time it’s resolved), but they’re massive news events that I basically didn’t notice until everyone else was talking about them. This suggests I’m probably missing other events that people aren’t talking about, and that makes me want to up my game.
What about the recent Swedish election results?
Incidentally, it was disturbingly hard to find an article about them that didn’t put a misleading spin on the results.
I can’t find it, but I once read an article from a guy a trust about how he just stopped following news, assuming that if anything sufficiently important happened, he’d find out about it anyway. His quality of life immediately rose. Having followed this approach for a few years now, I would suggest consuming zero news (is minimalist, completely devoid of noise, and exceptionally well-organized).
“Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.”—Bruce Schneier
But rare events matter too. For example, the big news in July 1914 was the outbreak of a massive war involving all the major European powers. I suggest that someone taking Bruce Schneier’s advice (“World wars are rare events, so you don’t need to worry if one breaks out”) is substantially misguided.
This is a very good heuristic but it does have a few exceptions, e.g. astronomical, meteorological, and similar events. Lots of people assume that if the news are talking about the supermoon then it must be an exceedingly unusual event.
I remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb claiming exactly this in an interview a few years ago. He let his friends function as a kind of news filter, assuming that they would probably mention anything sufficiently important for him to know.
I think this is it: http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/
Wikipedia’s current events portal is relatively minimalist and low-noise. It’s not prioritized very impressively.
The Economist has a Politics This Week and Business This Week section. Both are only a page each and are international in scope.
Get an RSS reader and read only the headlines. That way you can process hundreds of news in a few minutes and only open the ones that seem seriously important.
A trivial inconvenience which could make a huge difference—if there was a software which would put all those headlines in plain-text format, to reduce the temptation of clicking. (There is still google if something is irresistible.)
In a similar vein: How do I find out what to read and what to learn more generally? I don’t care about reading the latest Piketty but I want to read the best summary and interpretation of a philosopher from the last 10 years instead of the original from 500 years ago. Same goes for Physics text books and so on, and literature.
I scan google news headlines, top stories section and click on the items of interest. Yes, there are still attention grabs and non-news, but this is usually fairly clear from the article names.
I don’t think it’s a problem. Social media is good enough to tell you about significant events in world politics.
When a new topic bobbles up were I want to have an informed opinion I found vox.com or the Wikipedia summary to be good.
My foreign news comes almost exclusively from the CFR Daily News Brief, which sounds like exactly what you’re looking for. The daily briefs also link to their Backgrounders, which are excellent and relatively short summaries of the backgrounds to many hot-topic issues.
Did you mean to link here?
Yes, thanks. Apparently didn’t copy/paste correctly. Fixed now.
It was quite an entertaining copy/paste error.
:). Was the CFR stuff what you were looking for?
Oh, yes, thanks. I’m making a collection of news-digesty bookmarks, and it’s in there.
Meh. Sufficiently big natural disasters or political events find a way onto my Facebook feed anyway.
Once in a while when I’m bored I check out the Android app of my country’s wire service (I think the American equivalent would be the Associated Press) and/or the box in the top right of the English Wikipedia’s home page. But it’s a rare week that I spend more than half an hour seeking out news deliberately.
I’m not sure how much one should trust the news filter in one’s country’s wire service.
Trust it for what purposes?
Trust to not be politically biased.
Given the way I use it I don’t care whether they’re politically unbiased, just whether they’re less addictive than blogs and Facebook.
So another voter defects in the rational ignorance collective action problem.
Why would the knowledge of who won the World Cup or how many kids Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have any relevance at all when deciding whom to vote for?
(I jest, but LeechBlock is going to get me the hell out of here in a minute and a half so I don’t have time to write a more serious reply.)
In what way? Do you wish you spent more time following current affairs? I don’t follow them, but don’t see any problem with it—if anything, I occasionally have to resist the urge of looking up what’s going on in the world, which I put in the same mental bucket as the urge to look at the top entries of /r/funny.
I don’t think in ten years time having read one more news item on the Gaza Strip will change my life more than having seen one more picture of a cat stuck in a bowl.
(I do however sometimes go more into a binge of “reading up on something and trying to understand it”, but I rely more on Wikipedia than on news for that; “breaking news” tends to repeat the same points over and over again, and doesn’t put much focus on the big picture)
I used to read the wikipedia current events page, which I found a nice summary of what’s going on without going into too many details.
I trust my brain to collect facts and raise them to my attention when they’re important. “Current affairs” describes a class of fact that I don’t think is being adequately collected.
The Wikipedia current events page is a very good example of what I’m looking for.
I get my news from instapundit.
I don’t wish to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but for sixes-and-sevens benefit, I’ll note that Instapundit is a highly ideological libertarian (alternatively, in the view of many progressives, a partisan Republican pretending to be a libertarian). If you use him as a news source, you should balance with a progressive source.
ETA: This advice holds even if you are skipping narrowly political articles and reading about crises/disasters, etc., since ideology informs what kinds of crises people consider salient.
This looks like the classic grey fallacy.
Looks like, but isn’t. The goal isn’t that you take one viewpoint and take another viewpoint and find “something in the middle”; the point is that having multiple independent viewpoints makes it easier to spot mistakes in each.
It feels natural for us to think critically when our preconceptions are contradicted and to accept information uncritically when our preconceptions are supported. If you want to improve the odds that you’re reading critical thought about any given topic, you need sources with a wide range of different preconceptions.
I agree and wouldn’t have objected if Prismattic advised to read multiple sources from a variety of viewpoints. As it is, he just said “you need to read progressives as well” and that’s a different claim.
I’m not arguing that the views should be averaged, but that the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias. A libertarian/fusionist source is likely to devote more coverage to, say, stories of government corruption and less to stories of corporate wage theft or environmental degradation; a progressive source to do the opposite. All of those stories might be important (in general or to sixes-and-sevens in particular), so the combined news feed is in that sense better.
So why did you recommend progressives and not, say, news coming from the Roman Catholic Church, from marxists, from PETA, from infowars, from Al-Jazira, etc. etc.?
Well, taking those specific examples as non-rhetorical: PETA, the Catholic Church, and Infowars are various kinds of insane in ways that extend beyond ordinary political mindkilling, so I’d be unlikely to recommend them. Al-Jazeera English is actually pretty good as a news source, but its website is an adjunct of being a broadcast news source, which is less helpful from a time-investment perspective. I predict that a center-left news source will provide coverage on a broader range of issues than a far-left news source, but your mileage may vary.
The center-left source is also most likely to compensate specifically for the coverage holes in a center-right source. That still isn’t averaging their factual claims.
You’re not averaging factual claims, you’re averaging exposure to viewpoints.
I would argue that this summing, not averaging exposure. There’s a difference between saying “You should read both GreenNetNews and BlueCast” and saying “To save time, read GreenNetNews on odd-numbered days and BlueCast on even-numbered days”.
I think it’s averaging because your capacity to absorb news/viewpoints is limited.
Are you using “progressive” to mean left-leaning, or in the usual way? Just for clarity; if you meant the latter disregard.
I thought “left-leaning” was the usual way? What else, in the political sphere, does “progressive” mean?
I’ve heard it it as synonymous with “good,” “new” and anti rich tax policy. Can you make a recommendation? Either just left or, since libertarian is socially liberal fiscally conservative, a good source that is fiscally liberal and socially conservative? I asked the DNC for the former and just got on their mailing list. Not impressed.
The US “left” is considerably to the right of the European left, and LW has a broad international readership, so I think just saying “left” would be more confusing (“liberal” would even more confusing, given the dispute between libertarians and progressives over who is the legitimate heir of 19th century liberalism). But yes, in this case, I meant progressive in the sense of “mainstream center-left.”
Some of the US “left” (notably, the mainstream Democrats) are considerably to the right of the European left. “Left” encompasses a rather large landscape.
Right right, thanks. Any source you’d recommend?
Of course a progressive will think that progressivism is good, and part of progressivism is that it is good becuase it is new (the clue is in the name). Those who are not progressives will hardly agree. And anti rich tax policy is a straightforward left-leaning policy.
It is tempting for progressives to define the word to mean “good” and “new”, as it saves them the trouble of defending the ideology. The ideology can then be treated not as any set of beliefs about the reality, but as reality itself.
No, that’s not it. It doesn’t mean you can’t have new things happen that are bad. It does refer to a time derivative, but it’s more of a goal than a statement of fact: government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That’s ‘progress’. (Note: this summary is not an endorsement)
Progressive tax structures are not named so due to this time derivative. They are named so due to the derivative in income. Regressive tax structures exist, but they aren’t named so due to being more like the past.
That is progress, but that is not what is meant by “progressive” in the political sense. The belief that government can be engineered to improve things is shared by everyone except those in despair of it ever happening. Moldbug has proposals to do that—is he a “progressive”?
No, “progressive” means certain specific views about what is valued as an improvement, and specific beliefs about what policies will make those improvements. These values and views are accurately summarised as “left-leaning”.
A lot of libertarians would beg to disagree there.
I thought about that, but I decided that reducing the government and doing away with it counted as engineering the government. For the libertarian, the task is complete not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
Yes, there are specific things it’s aiming at. I was justifying the word choice. And either way we’ve moved past the ridiculous notion that it is good because it’s new. If you’re going to try to correct me for being overly general you can at least own up to having been far more overly general just a few hours previously.
These days, how many of the people who call themselves progressive think that GMO’s are really great because they are new technology?
Half a century ago progressives really liked nuclear power because of the hope that it brings wealth. These days not so much.
As someone else already pointed out, “progressive” doesn’t mean “approving of all new things” (and in the context of taxation it’s only a verbal coincidence that progressive politics tends to go with liking progressive taxation). Having said that, and in full awareness that anecdotes are little evidence: Hi, I’m a political progressive who has no objection in principle to GMOs and thinks we should be moving to nuclear power in a big way. (I have some incidental concerns about GMOs; e.g., they interact with IP law to provide exciting new ways for unscrupulous corporations to screw people over, which is a pity.)
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that progressives around 1900 called the method of taxation they favored progressive taxation.
I haven’t said something about objections in principle, my statement was much weaker.
More to the point, I expect that a bunch of people on LW are pro-new-technology but that’s not true for the average left person and pretending that being pro-new-technology is something that’s an essential feature of progressive thought in the 21st century ignores the political realities.
On the other hand it was an essential feature of progressive thought 50 years ago. In Marx idea of history, it’s a natural law that history moves in the right direction.
The OED’s earliest citation for the term “progressive” in reference to taxation is from Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man” in 1792. Its first citation referring to a person who favours political or social change or reform is from 1830. It’s possible that the latter meaning is older than 1792 (explanation on request) but, to say the least, it doesn’t appear that the term “progressive” as a description for taxation systems that tax richer people more dates from “around 1900″ or was chosen by people who identified themselves as “progressives” in anything like the modern US sense.
I agree. I rather doubt that anyone—at least anyone using “progressive” in its current US-political sense—actually thinks otherwise, despite RichardKennaway’s remark above. (In any case, it seems clear from what he wrote that he doesn’t himself identify as progressive, and his description of progressives’ thought processes doesn’t appear to be the result of a serious attempt to understand them sympathetically.)
Google NGram does show an uptick over that time period for “progressive taxation”. It’s the time known as the Progressive Era
Have you read Moldbug? I do think that Moldbug argues that progressivism is about favoring the new. Cthulhu always swims left.
On LW there are a bunch of people that don’t actually agree with Moldbug about wanting to reinstate monarchy but who still accept Moldbug way of thinking about issues. It’s the problem with history. Moldbug tell his history about the progressives of the progressive era and then proclaims that today’s left thought (the thought of the cathedral) is the same.
So much the worse for Moldbug, at least if he makes a strong claim along those lines rather than something weaker and less controversial like “people who identify as progressive tend to be more positive about new things than people who identify as conservative”.
But I haven’t devoted a lot of time or thought to Moldbug, or to neoreaction generally.
I’m slightly lost track of what, if anything, we are actually disagreeing about here. I think it may at this point simply be about why various words have the definitions they do, which probably isn’t something that’s worth putting much further effort into.
You said you doubt that anybody thinks otherwise. I wanted to illustrate that there are people who do think otherwise. That’s means talking about the issue matters.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: What I’ve largely lost track of is what “the issue” actually is. I do understand that at this particular point in the thread we’re talking about whether and to what extent progressivism is about liking new things. But I’ve forgotten (and haven’t much motivation to go back and figure out) why—if at all—that question is relevant to anything that matters. I’m pretty certain (and I’d guess you agree) that on the whole being a “progressive” (in the sense in which that term’s used in present-day US politics) is about other things more than it’s about liking new things.
Understanding the political thought of the last few decades is useful and showing preconception to be wrong is also useful. Particularly it’s useful to understand that the relationship of self identified progressives towards liking new things changed in the last 50 years.
I confirm that this is accurate.
And I stand corrected that the virtue of newness in progressive thinking has got old, while the word “progressive” persists. What do they think of “progress” these days? “You can’t stop progress” was the saying back then. I haven’t heard it uttered seriously for a long time, and if it’s said at all, it’s more likely to be as a criticism of the opposite side by imputing it to them. First relevant Google hit here.
I’m fairly sure the majority of LW regulars who identify as progressives (myself included) would agree with these views about GMOs and nuclear power. However, I’m also pretty sure this is not true of the progressive movement at large, sadly. This is particularly frustrating because these two technologies are probably the most promising tools currently available for solving the problems many progressives purport to care most about.
Amen. Just saying I’ve heard that use from other moderates as well who don’t think too hard about it.
Anyway, the other question is the more interesting to me. Any good left-leaning or socially-conservative-fiscally-liberal (short name?) news source?
Short name = Christian.
“Christian” covers a lot of ground. That’s a fair description of the mainline Catholic viewpoint, but looking up a random Christian news source in the US could get you fiscal viewpoints ranging from lukewarm left to hardline right to more or less apolitical.
(It’s reliably socially conservative, though, generally speaking.)
Depends on the church.
I honestly had not considered a Christian news option.
That comes with some theological baggage, of course. You don’t want a news source that interprets everything in terms of the end times and looks forward to a nuclear war to annihilate the damned.
I’ve heard good things of the Christian Science Monitor (which obviously has even more questionable baggage), but I haven’t read it myself. Also Al Jazeera, which has other baggage (owned by a government), and which I also haven’t read.
Try reading it. Despite the name it doesn’t have an obvious Christian Science Bias. Although I’ve heard it is running into financial problems due to a principled refusal to resort to clickbait and fluff stories.
CSM is very well-regarded.
When I was in college, I took a class taught by the head of the polisci department—Cuba-loving socialist type—who had a habit of recommending it during lectures.
Sure, but all news sources come with some baggage—mostly ideological, sometimes theological, and often enough just batshit crazy. That’s why you don’t want a news source, you want lots of them.
The American Conservative is definitely socially conservative and, if not exactly fiscally liberal, at least much more sympathetic to economic redistribution than mainstream conservatism. But it is more composed of opinion pieces than of news reports, so I don’t know if it works for way you want.
As others suggested, Vox could be a good choice for a left-leaning news source. It has decent summaries of “everything you need to know about X” (where X = many current news stories).
Thanks!
Any particular reason you didn’t make a similar reply to Christian’s suggestion of the ideologically progressive vox dot com?
Because I hadn’t seen it.
I find the implied accusation of bias amusing. I’ve actually tweeted at Matt Yglesias once to complain about the quality of an article on Vox.
Instapundit is highly ideological libertarian, so you should balance it out with a reactionary news source like Theden.tv or Steve Sailer.
As it happens I also read Steve Sailer, although he isn’t so much news as editorial cometary whereas instupundit is more “list of headlines” of the kind sixes-and-sevens was asking about.