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title: News Sobriety
created: 2024-11-18T09:18:12
modified: 2025-12-17T19:13:45
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> _“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” — Mark Twain_

> _[“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” — A. J. Liebling](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/77035-people-everywhere-confuse-what-they-read-in-newspapers-with-news)_

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[Stop Reading News](https://fs.blog/stop-reading-news/)

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24 hours each day isn’t enough to consume 0.0001% of the world’s events.

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The Paradox of News: The more news you consume, the less informed you are about the world.

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Want to know more about the world? Turn off the news and go spend time in it.

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# Nassim Taleb’s “Noise Bottleneck”

* More data leads to a higher ratio of noise-to-signal
* By consuming more, you end up knowing less about what’s actually going on.

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# Gell-Mann Razor

* Assume every media article contains a certain percent of false information.
* Sandbox the article from your worldview until you’ve:
	* Seen primary sources
	* Spoken to 3 domain experts