A note from Daniel

The shorter the news report, the more dangerous it is. News has to be extremely short even as it tells a story. This can only be done through a brutal process of simplification. No matter what happened - a straightforward bicycle accident or a worldwide financial crisis - it will only ever be attributed to one or two causes. Nothing will be said of the dozens of other causes, the interplay between them, or the retroactive effects playing out between the event and its causes (intensifying or dampening effects). In this way consumers are given the illusion that the world is simpler and more explicable than it actually is, and the quality of their decision-making suffers.

Daniel Stop Reading The News, page 64 · November 5, 2024 Save to shelf
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Forough p. 55

Bad news is perceived as more relevant than good news. Negative information has twice the impact that positive information does. In psychology, this is called negativity bias, and it can be observed in even one-year-old infants. They respond more sensitively to negative stimuli than to positive ones. Adults are no different. A stock falling by ten per cent makes us twice as unhappy as a stock climbing by ten per cent makes us happy. Negativity bias is innate.
Forough
Forough p. 51

We ought to try and understand the 'generators' underlying these events. We ought to be investigating the 'engine room' behind them. Sadly, shockingly few journalists are able to explain these causal relationships, because the processes that shape cultural, intellectual, economic, military, political and environmental events are mostly invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our brains to digest. This is why news corporations focus on the easy stuff: anecdotes, scandals, celebrity gossip and natural disasters. They are cheap to produce and easy to digest.
Forough
Daniel p. 129

Imagine you're at a football game. A few spectators in front of you stand on their tiptoes to get a better view of the field. Now everybody else is forced to stand on their tiptoes. The net gain is zero, and now everybody's calves are cramping up. It's exactly the same with news production and consumption. The louder one outlet screams, the louder all the others have to scream too. The more outrageous one side's arguments, the more outrageous the other side's counterblast has to be. The consequence? White noise and a polarised society.
Daniel

More from Daniel

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Ultra Successful p. 60

The False Constraints That Limit Your Potential: - How Quickly You Can Scale Whether it's your business or your career, there are unspoken timelines that people accept as gospel.They are all untrue: "You can only really grow at 10% a year." "You need to pay your dues for a decade before getting promoted." These artificial limits keep people moving at a crawl when they could be sprinting or pushing for more. The most successful people I know refuse to accept conventional wisdom about timelines, and oddly enough, they break them all the time.
Daniel

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