By and large, I think news is a waste of time. If I want to increase my factual knowledge, I read history – or Wikipedia. News, I like to say, is the lie that something important happens every day.
Most people think my position is crazy, even for me. I was surprised to learn, then, that someone even more anti-news than me got to present his arguments at TED...
I hadn’t seen it. I like how Rolf Dobelli makes such a clean argument in his piece.
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 about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news.
―Avoid News by Rolf Dobelli
He makes good jokes too.
Now people push me and and they say “But you have to know if there’s a catastrophe somewhere on the planet.” Really? Do I? There’s probably bad things happening on other planets and I’m quite okay not knowing about them.
―Four reasons you should stop watching the news by Rolf Dobelli
If news gave you a competitive advantage [then] journalists would be the richest people on the planet. They are not.
―Four reasons you should stop watching the news by Rolf Dobelli
In case you haven’t seen it, The Case Against News:
I hadn’t seen it. I like how Rolf Dobelli makes such a clean argument in his piece.
He makes good jokes too.
Yeah, I think he’s got some good arguments in there, that are generally underappreciated.
Btw, I just noticed that the link to the pdf of Dobelli’s full article from Caplan’s blog seems to be broken. Thankfully Gwern has preserved it: https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf. Praise Gwern.