Why The News Isn’t Helpful, And What To Do Instead.

The news is the definition of a high noise, low signal media source. Here’s what you can do instead.

Introduction

Here’s a potentially unpopular opinion. Reading the news is one of the worst ways to spend your time.

Broadly, we spend our time on two types of activities, being productive, or being entertained. The news has limited application for either.

Regarding productivity, the news gives shallow insights with articles or opinions that, are either irrelevant or will be in a short amount of time. The news is high noise and low signal, a mental model we’ll explore in this article.

As far as entertainment goes, the news is designed to pull us with headlines or imagery that invoke reactive emotional states, leaving us feeling anxious, angry, or depressed.

Perhaps one of the only reasons people read the news is so they can feel ‘informed’ so they don’t look like a fool at dinner parties.

I haven’t read the news for about 5 years, but can still hold a conversation about most topics with my friends, in this article I’ll share my approach, and how it could work for you.

Signal v Noise and the News

An Overview

To understand why the news is so unhelpful in helping us gain a holistic understanding of problems, we first need to quickly explore the phenomenon of signal v noise.

Signal v noise — or more correctly the signal to noise ratio is the measure of the desired signal compared to the background noise. The easiest way to explain this is through the idea of an audio recording. The diagram below shows the waveform of someone talking, you can see that as the person stops talking there is still a level of background noise. This noise is always here, it’s just that it’s usually masked by the signal.

The calculation for signal v noise is a very simple one — the signal:noise ratio is just the desired…