A note from Daniel

A not-insignificant number of people who see a plane crash on TV stop flying for a while - even though these events are extremely rare and do not justify such a fundamental shift in behaviour. Surely it's enough to be aware of this fact, I hear you say, and bear it in mind as we consume the news? Wrong. We can't compensate for this tendency to overplay gripping stories with deliberate contemplation and sensible assessment. Our brains are too weak. They can't cope with the distinction. Even bankers and economists, who have tremendous incentive to assess risk realistically, aren't able to do so. By now you'll have realised that there's only one solution: disconnect completely from the news. Don't try to outsmart your skewed perception of risk. Just get rid of it.

Daniel Stop Reading The News, page 46 · November 4, 2024 Save to shelf
Notes like this take four seconds in Booksense. Scan the paragraph, it lands on the right page, and comes back for review later. Take your first note

More from readers of Stop Reading The News

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

See their profile
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

Stop losing the best parts of what you read.

Booksense pushes your highlights back to you for review, so a note from page 174 is still yours a year later. Free on iOS.

Get Booksense free
Daniel on Booksense 5,999 notes 387 hours of reading