A heretical thought for a journalist

It's like marathoners who die because they drink too much water during the race, fatally diluting their blood.

It's not just that there's too much information, but also that creating a filter to allow you to process the information is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

Also, I have this nagging sense that since the "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to reporting is dominant, I'm not getting nearly enough of the countervailing good news, further skewing my ability to process it.

"Information poisoning" is the perfect description.

Interesting points you raise. I think is speaks to the sudden revulsion I get when I'm watching cable news continuosly for more than 30 mins. I will have to check out that book.

The phenomonon of information overload with inadequate knowledge is something business leaders are looking at in how they run their enterprises. A big message last year from my company's CEO was the company that will lead in my industry is the one that can focus on the signal rather than the noise. Life is like that.

Maybe Timothy Leary was right: turn on, tune in, drop out. Too bad he was talking about dope.

I always liked the following observation by C.S. Lewis on the value (or more precisely, the non-value) of newspapers:

"I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand."

if having more information about the whole wide world at our fingertips, instantly, is not making us smarter and stronger, but in fact dumber and weaker?

I don't think Taleb believes information itself is bad, that's for sure. He's a huge fan of getting information through reading...he just doesn't believe everything he reads, and struggles to remain skeptical of what he thinks he knows. In fact, he has sort of retired to merely reading and acquiring new information.

But anyone with half a brain knows one can't get any meaningful information through the newspaper, tv, or radio. The media entertains, it doesn't seek to transmit real, objective information. Even media like public radio are so biased and dumbed down it's a simple waste of time. Personally, I haven't listend to the radio, read a physical newspaper, or watched tv for years now, and can't see what I'm missing. The only reason I scan web media (columnists only, not news) is to see what the enemy is up to, so to be aware of what foolishness everyone is believing.

Would you be better off canceling The New York Times and committing yourself to reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner instead?

I don't think there is any doubt here. One would certainly be far "better off" studying biology, thermodynamics, the history of the computer, or the new revolution in genetics...than say reading Faulkner, etc.

I once read a story about a guy who quit using media after reading the entire last weeks newspaper (which he had already read) again front-to-back, only noticing when he put the paper away. He then realized how little real meaningful information is in a newspaper.

And of course the media is dangerous to one's soul as well. To quote Frank Duff in "Can We Be Saints?":

We are inclined to think it necessary to read the daily papers in order to keep in touch with what is going on in the world. Let us beware lest they place us in the world's grip.

The modern newspaper is so well written, so attractive to the eye, that it tends to become an absorbing taste. It is a tendency of the day to wallow in the daily papers.

Endless discussion, a prejudiced outlook, a little scrappy knowledge, a distaste for serious or good literature, loss of power of concentration, faulty memory -- such are the products of those wasted hours during which God's Kingdom could have been so powerfully advanced.

Dang it, though, my most recent post on my blog is about working out. Now I've got to come up with something smart to say.

Too much information is also a factor in retraumatization. The week after 9/11 my husband and I were obsessive news junkies, like of the rest of the population. By the end of a week our heads ached constantly. We broke out of the obsession by doing something unheard of - looking at furniture. Before that, we furnished our home with castoffs.

For the next 18 months we enjoyed discovering the Arts and Crafts movement, pouring over American Bungalow magazine and books, going on house tours and visiting exhibitions and shops. We had to immerse ourselves in beauty and joy to restore perspective.

Every experience of reimmersion in media since then has confirmed the relationship of media exposure to being reactive and quick to anger. I can't say I've ever made a better decision or improved my relationships to people because of the news, delivered in any format.

This is quite interesting. I'm currently reading The Black Swan and I just finished my first Dostoevsky last night. I was reading them in tandem for a while, depending on whether my mood tilted toward fiction or non-fiction. Then I read this post and the comments and see my own life on the page. BTW, I agree with both the value of The Black Swan as a book and the value of spending more time with "stuff like Dostoevsky" -- i.e., stuff that forms your mind rather than merely fills it up.

I listen to news headlines on the radio on the way to work, and sometimes again on the way home. If there is anything earthshaking I will follow up by looking it up online -- there almost never is. I haven't read newspapers for years and have all but given up on talk radio. Funny thing is, I don't feel any less informed about the things that matter.

I guess I find myself more and more in agreement with St. Silouan of Athos -- "newspapers cloud the mind."

Read Dostoevsky and Faulkner, listen to Handel and Bruckner, and subscribe to a couple good magazines or journals (not news magazines!)
That's this poor sinner's advice.

The only dread and unease felt from 9/11 is that felt by the poor devils in the airport security lines wondering if the morons changed the rules again. Nobody else gives a damn anymore.

Is the man who travels around the world constantly and reads several papers and websites a day really more knowledgeable about the way the world works than the farmer who tends his field and takes care of his animals and his little patch of ground in the world?

As I recall -- and it's been quite awhile since I read it -- that's sort of the whole point of Candide.

Would you be better off canceling The New York Times and committing yourself to reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner instead?

Absolutely. A few months ago I canceled my subscription to the Washington Post as well as my cable television (and threw out the TV). It has been the best decision I've made in a long, long time. I am still cognizant of world events (I know about Obama/Clinton, the Iraqi War, etc.) but only on a general level. The details, which are so unimportant, I no longer worry about. This has given me time to read more substantial books (mostly religious non-fiction), as well as more time to actually create, rather than just consume. For example, I have made great progress writing the book I always said I wanted to write, but never found time for. I also am finding time to learn biblical Greek, a goal of mine for years. And my only sacrifice is the mindless drivel that goes for "news" these days.

Sorry, Rod, but your "heretical" thought is spot on.

Meme = an idea virus. Here's your cue, Daniel...

Rod,

Most people never completely "get over" a sudden, traumatic event like Sept. 11, but they do manage over time to put it in perspective, or at least, compartmentalize it. When I think of that day, I still get angry. I am angry that the people who financed and green-lighted the attacks are still alive and at-large. I am angry that the people who hijacked the planes committed this atrocity in the name of a god that doesn't exist.

But I don't share your sense of dread because there is little to nothing I can do about a terrorist attack. These nuts exist. You can kill a thousand of them, but eventually a few of them are going to slip by and find their targets. Should I be worried? I suppose. But, statistically, my Toyota Corolla poses more of a threat to my life than Osama bin Laden.

Actually, I'm grateful that our nation has been largely unaffected by a constant barrage of death and destruction. In the wars we have fought in, we have suffered few casualties compared to other nations. Other than Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, our citizens on homefront have been largely unaffected by even the most vicious wars. Many European nations could not say the same.

You write: "Taleb makes me wonder to what extent much of my own intellectual preoccupations these days, and for the past few years, grow out of a general fear that everything around us that seems solid is really not, and that all this could be revealed to us in a terrible Black Swan moment."

Rod, nothing is solid. Nothing is promised or written in stone. This is something you should have learned as a child. It has nothing to do with "intellectual preoccupations," and everything to do with your perspective. The universe is a cold and uncaring place. It does not recognize you as special. Long ago we understood that we are not the center of the universe, that it all didn't come into being for our benefit and exploitation.

I used to be a daily reader of this blog. I've weaned away from it recently, because I grew tired of all the negativity. It seemed that every post was about how America was the twilight of the Roman Empire; that the culture was evil and corrupt; that we are staring down another Great Depression; that terrorists and Bratz dolls were going to kill us all if the Republicans and Democrats didn't get to us first; that god is smiting us in record numbers. And now here we are with Black Swans and "toxic information."

Good old sandwich-board Rod. What if a giant asteroid is hurtling toward Earth? And what if you are worshipping the wrong god? And what if some super-plague wipes out 3 billion people? And what if the sun suddenly winks out?

Do you ever take a moment to consider that you may be foisting some of this world-crushing direness on the shoulders of your family?

You've got a job you like. You've got a family you love. You live in a civilized nation that is not wracked by war and violent internal conflicts. Yet you still find plenty of time to pee in the punch bowl.

There are serious problems in the country, and they deserve serious debate. But there comes a point where you just sound like Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf all rolled into one.

I dunno. I might have made a mistake coming back here.

Tough love, Rod: Grow a pair, and quit going white as a sheet everytime you see a shadow.

You're absolutely better of reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner rather than the New York Times. And you're better off reading Tolstoy and Conrad rather than the Washington Post, and so on ad infinitum.

Dr'er Rod is running bang up against a number of fundamentals from the Nock-Ortega-Berry critique of Progress, in the need to distinguish between:

1. Formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge; or between education and training

2. The kind of "stress" one endures in hearty physical labor or recreation, of the sort that promotes ready and restorative sleep (Letterman's "good kind of tired") - and the kind endemic to "professional" life, which promotes insomnia

3. Tools that harmonise with your need to engage the fullness of your chosen purpos(es), and those entailing sacrifice of important aspects without enhancing the caliber of the content produced. Wendell Berry's famous essay "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer" served as one man's private illustration of this wholeness, in no way attempting to legislate a blueprint for others - though his infuriated critics, naturally, ignored this fact. Your computer, kept within judicious proportion, might well survive like scrutiny.

When you recognize the inescapable force of diminishing returns in excessive web use or news addiction, you're going to consider sticking to a schedule, because your deepest needs in family life, health and harmony, and long-term projects will demand it. It's no different from the strict discipline you need as an athlete or musician or flab-reducer, or even to get up at the same time each morning. Here's one way to think of diminishing returns: if you had only from, say, 6am till 7am each weekday to surf the web and absorb the day's news (email not included), and then enforced a cutoff at the top of the hour, how would you spend that concentrated time?

It's a bit like Dr. Johnson's old saw: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Go thou and do likewise webwise, before you allow the unruly and infinitely overrated blogosphere slip the ticking noose you've lovingly Windsor-knotted for its (your) own good...

I'd consider also several hours weekly, non-negotiably, up to your elbows in direct care of animals and/or plants, and in unstructured play in the wild, preferably with children, whether your own or others'. That and several sessions weekly of hearty exercise of a sort you enjoy will do wonders for the soul and body alike.

As for a media diet shifted largely from the mindless round-the-clock I.V. drip toward weekly doses and especially books, absolutely. Maybe a weekly scan of The Times Literary Supplement from across the pond for the best general coverage of new books, then back to your serious reading plans. The Hungarian-born Canadian novelist Stephen Vizinczey, himself a "chaos" theorist of before the fact (his little gem The Rules of Chaos from 1969 is a suggestive precursor to Taleb, et al) put it well in a letter from 1998 to the London Review of Books:

lrb.co.uk/v20/n24/letters.html

"Though I was sufficiently anti-Communist to fight in the Hungarian Revolution and had an uncle beaten to death by the Communists during forced collectivisation in Hungary, I realised in 1966 that the Vietnam War could not possibly be won and should be abandoned, simply because I happened to reread War and Peace. The most profound wisdom about everything is in the great novelists and playwrights, but when people want to understand the world and the difference between the desirable and the possible they don’t turn to the greatest minds, which are available everywhere in paperback, they turn to supposed experts like Isaiah Berlin, Henry Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy, who with their limited intelligence and imagination and their unlimited vanity have done as much harm to Western civilisation as all its enemies put together."

One last thing: your hostile critics aren't worth even a second of your time, private or public. Drop them like the plague rats they so obviously are, via any means fair or foul, as though your life depended on it. It does. Then sons of bitches are already sucking the life out of you. Then put the time so liberated toward learning how to shoot.

You'll be a new man, my son, in no time.

Further reading:

The Wisdom of the Stoics. Henry and Frances Hazlitt, eds.
The Way to Will-Power. Henry Hazlitt:

blog.mises.org/archives/007991.asp

Maybe it isn't always done and maybe it isn't always done well, but was it ever possible before this age of information to relieve suffering around the world from disasters either natural or man-made? Two hundred or so years ago what would any of us have been able to know about the effects of an earthquake here or a tsunami there to have made a difference to the victims? What the information age (and modern transport) has done is to make us all our "brothers' keepers" in a way which would never have been possible in earlier times not for lack of means or will to relieve suffering but for lack of information about suffering elsewhere. The "I was hungry" etc. and the lesson of the Good Samaritan parable are now capable of being applied worldwide as never before in human history. Information makes us all more responsible for everyone else on the planet than ever before. This is not good and according to the will of Christ????

Is it wanting to shelter from the responsibiity which makes us want to hide from the information out there? I don't mean hide from every detail reported--no one has time to hear it all or read it all and much of it is repetition--but the broad picture.

Whoah there Jungherr-yonkers-Yankee! Don't jump on the wrong bandwagon... Consider that the Black Swan may not be a bad thing for all people.

The FT Economist's Forum reported last month:
blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/03/why-today%E2%80%99s-hedge-fund-industry-may-not-survive/
on the difficulty of investors in hedge funds recognizing a swindler from a canny trader:

" We can identify two huge problems to be solved. First, many investment strategies have the characteristics of a “Taleb distribution” after Nicholas [Nassim - ed.] Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness. At its simplest, a Taleb distribution has a high probability of a modest gain and a low probability of huge losses in any period.

Second, the systems of reward fail to align the interests of managers with those of investors. As a result, the former have an incentive to exploit such distributions for their own benefit. "

What makes it bad for some people? ....the malfeasance of others aka sin.

I commented at a recent Patrick Deneen posting that we are inclined to favor the argument_from_reason for pro-life natural law, but in actuality the truth is the baseline of all applied knowledge - especially mathematics, statistics, and economics. However in your case, the key concept to make ones own in natural law is that reason (as opposed to an arbitrary ideological interpretive "model" or superstitious faith such as voodoo) is a means for man to attain his end, it is NOT the end itself.

A motu proprio:

Do not fear Black Swans.
Use what you know about Black Swans to defend society virtuously
from those who know as much, or more, than the average person about Black Swans
and would selfishly apply that knowledge to exploit society viciously.

Whoops that FT attribution should not include my own opinion, it oughta look like this:

The FT Economist's Forum reported last month:
blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/03/why-today%E2%80%99s-hedge-fund-industry-may-not-survive/
on the difficulty of investors in hedge funds recognizing a swindler from a canny trader:

" We can identify two huge problems to be solved. First, many investment strategies have the characteristics of a “Taleb distribution” after Nicholas [Nassim - ed.] Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness. At its simplest, a Taleb distribution has a high probability of a modest gain and a low probability of huge losses in any period.

Second, the systems of reward fail to align the interests of managers with those of investors. As a result, the former have an incentive to exploit such distributions for their own benefit. "

What makes it bad for some people? ....the malfeasance of others aka sin.

I commented at a recent Patrick Deneen posting that we are inclined to favor the argument_from_reason for pro-life natural law, but in actuality the truth is the baseline of all applied knowledge - especially mathematics, statistics, and economics. However in your case, the key concept to make ones own in natural law is that reason (as opposed to an arbitrary ideological interpretive "model" or superstitious faith such as voodoo) is a means for man to attain his end, it is NOT the end itself.

A motu proprio:

Do not fear Black Swans.
Use what you know about Black Swans to defend society virtuously
from those who know as much, or more, than the average person about Black Swans
and would selfishly apply that knowledge to exploit society viciously.

No alarmist me but if you have any gift cards from retailers - use 'em quick since their credit is evaporating as we speak (er, read):

"... changes may force companies to pay suppliers before paying wages or honoring obligations to customers, like redeeming gift cards," said Sally Henry, a partner in the bankruptcy law practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the author of several books on bankruptcy. As a result, “it’s no longer reorganization or even liquidation for these companies. In many cases, it’s evaporation.”

I hate to be a voice of dissension, but I for one would miss the NY Times' headlines being e-mailed to my inbox every day. The headlines alone generally provide some decent amusement, and there's always the chance that some particularly fatuous headline will lead to a story in which the writer's inconveniently transparent biases and careful construction of ideologically loaded sentences will not fail to disappoint.

Truly, the only danger in reading newspapers comes from taking either the newspaper itself, or one's act of reading one, entirely too seriously, as the brilliant writer Saki observed quite a long time ago:

eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/MappLife.shtml

Current events are only dangerous to those who lack a sense of history and philosophy, an appreciation for the art of the past--and theology and geometry while we're at it. Observing that gas prices are increasing might, for instance, be uselessly alarmist information, or it might be information which, when connected to similar shortages in the past and put in context of the current situation in the Mideast and our not altogether successful history of involvement in that region, will provide the opportunity to reflect on one's own level of dependency and consumption and might even stir one to take some fruitful if radical action to reduce one's own personal need of the stuff.

Or, to put it more simply, it's not the information--it's our ability to filter potentially useful data from useless fluff, and act on the useful stuff when possible.

Of course, to do this means that one has a certain level of self-knowledge and has cultivated the ability to detach from the information as it is presented, to the extent that this is necessary--which is where the notion that we can't take either the newspapers or ourselves too seriously comes from.

Is it wanting to shelter from the responsibiity which makes us want to hide from the information out there?
Posted by: Caroline | April 15, 2008 4:55 PM

I think it is our instinct of self protection and balance, to keep from being submerged and lost in any 'other', when we literally see in our lives damage caused from the distress of too much information. And I can't agree with the assumption that just because something has come about, in this case the rapid spread of information globally, that it is a good thing for us. Who is to say that if we were instead engaged in prayer and good acts in our home environments, during the hours we sit like vegetables in front of televisions and computers ingesting all this information, that so many of the hardships in the world could not be prevented by God's grace from happening in the first place? Maybe most people do not believe things like that anymore.

Erin, my sister wrote that comment and has left now, but I think it was in the sense that you seemed to contrast yourself as against many people commenting here who apparently to you lack a sense of history and philosophy, an appreciation for the art of the past--and theology and geometry, and also lack a certain level of self-knowledge and have not cultivated the ability to detach from the information as it is presented. If your comments were directed instead at the writers rather than us readers, that may not have been clear.
I feel that when reading the news it is not the writers or any art or culture of the journalism that involve or over involve me, but caring very deeply about the people affected by the events and issues. I am not sure how this is just a matter of "taking it too seriously" or virtue of detaching from it all, when these words spent are concerning issues that affect fellow human souls.

Erin, the only danger in reading newspapers comes from taking either the newspaper itself, or one's act of reading one, entirely too seriously

I get your point and almost agree, but would counter:

1) the media is an empty vessel; the NYT won't provide any real information worth knowing

2) it's harmful to be continuously exposed to a prejudiced outlook and a little scrappy knowledge over and over...like a man going to a strip joint every week with the guys, where he chuckles at how silly it is, but doing it over and over, normalizing the experience, takes its toll

3) I do think this world is a serious place, where good and evil vie for my attention, and the NYT definately falls in the evil camp

above by west coast Caroline at 7:11pm and not a San Francisco liberal

Two points of view about the concept of information overload:

1. Religious: St. John Chrysostom, a lifelong celibate, wrote some of the most incredibly sage, balanced and even practical advice about marriage. And St. Mary of Egypt learned the Scriptures during 47 years of solitude in the desert without the aid of any book or human teacher. So no, I don't think you have to be wired to the latest news and taking part in global discussions in order for your thoughts and ideas to be relevant.

2. Secular: Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful book, "blink," explores the idea that while information helps our decisions to be better informed, an abundance of information may result in poorer judgment. The example study he quotes is in a hospital: when doctors know too much information about their patients, it clouds their natural "instincts," which are themselves based intuitively on the factors that are the most important. When too many voices are talking at once, it's hard to decide which one to listen to.

We have a ready-made source for HMII, Stefanie. We are called neo-pagans. ;-)