Information Diet

In this era of 24/7 news cycles and digital media saturation, it has become increasingly easy to find oneself consuming news as if it were a form of entertainment.

Headlines compete for our attention, stories are packaged to capture our interest, and the relentless flow of information can easily overwhelm our ability to discern fact from fiction.

Just as food provides the building blocks for physical health, news provides the context, understanding, and perspective necessary for intellectual health.

This makes the quality of our news diet paramount. We must be just as discerning in our news consumption, as we are with our food choices, to ensure that we are nourishing our minds with the information that is beneficial to us.

This is where the “news as entertainment” gets us into trouble.

One key problem with it is that it can lead to a superficial understanding of complex issues. News outlets, competing for viewers and clicks, prioritize sensationalism over depth, leaving audiences with a fragmented and distorted picture of reality. This leads to what has been termed "mean world syndrome," where individuals become overly pessimistic about the state of the world due to their exposure to disproportionately negative news.

Another problem is that the news tends to increasingly focus on the outliers. Since everything is hyper connected, finding one in a million events every day has become increasingly easy. This causes a distorted view of the world. All the mundane (and good!) is left out since it does not sell and instead only the outlandish and rare is sensationalized — giving a very false sense of reality.

Lastly, not only is news fleeting it is also a never ending stream. Every thing is important and everything must be known now. The Trump Trial is a great example of this. Tracking his motorcade to the courthouse to showing sketches of his changes in reaction … a complete sensationalization of the trivial details. All because they have to be and engaging users 24 / 7.

The issue is that we live in a world where

• the speed of news delivery is increasing
• the cost to produce news is dropping
• our ability to deduce fact from fiction is reducing
• the incentives of the producers of the news are misaligned with ours — they want us to consume more, while we want to be informed
• the algorithms are designed to feed our confirmation biases

All of this points to an interesting reality — that we are consuming noise thinking it is information. We are confusing noise for signal.

So what is the solution?

… Stop watching / reading news.

Don’t believe it will help, then take Nassim Taleb’s advice:

… Spend a year reading the previous week’s news.

I know that stopping all news consumption is extremely difficult.

So here are some alternatives:

1. spend less time consuming information and more time thinking.
2. change your information sources by seeking out high-quality sources of information.
3. If you must read the news, take the point of view of a judge listening to an argument. Know there are two sides to every argument, and if you are not seeing the other side, you may be falling prey to the “Broken Window Theory”.

As G. S. Bhogal wisely reminds us,

News is a form of entertainment designed to be enjoyed guilt-free, because it masquerades as education. It is mental junk-food cunningly presented as good for you, despite being no healthier than regular entertainment — and often even unhealthier. It is margarine for the mind.

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