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title: News Sobriety
modified: 2026-06-10
tags: []
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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”

[@talebAntifragileThingsThat2016]

> **Data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it**. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.
>
> **The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get** (rather than the valuable part called the signal)**; hence the higher the noise to signal ratio**.

* 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

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[@robertsonNegativityDrivesOnline2023]

> For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.

# The Negativity Doom Loop

![](_attachments/a81f2e1b47ec847676a23f23786c35fd.png)