The News is Never Neglected

I like reading the Sentinel email newsletter once a week for time-sensitive general world news, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024 (or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025 etc.) once every 3-4 months for non-time-sensitive general world news. That adds up to very little time—maybe ≈1 minute per day on average—and I think there are more than enough diffuse benefits to justify that tiny amount of time.

Why do your teachers, parents and other adult authorities tell you to listen to a propaganda machine? Because the propaganda machine is working.

I forget where I read this, but there's a reason they call it the "news" and not the "importants."

Counterpoint 1: this sounds like a deliberate adoption of the bystander effect. The more people know about a problem, the less responsible I am to do anything about it...

Counterpoint 2: many problems require collective action, which requires the problem be widely known.

Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.

This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire - can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let's say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself "the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn't be helping anybody." - I've convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.^[1]

Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of "okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?" and the current question of "which news should I consume" remains unanswered.

1. ^{^}

   No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
   
   Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn't work because I personally don't believe in that goddess's power.
   
   Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
   
   Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?

I think it's a very bad idea to dismiss the entirety of news as a "propaganda machine".  Certainly some sources are almost entirely propaganda. More reputable sources like the AP and Reuters will combine some predictable bias with largely trustworthy independent journalism. Identifying those more reliable sources and compensating for their bias takes effort and media literacy, but I think that effort is quite valuable- both individually and collectively for society.
 

• Accurate information about large, important events informs our world model and improves our predictions. Sure, a war in the Middle East might not noticeably affect your life directly, but it's rare that a person lives an entire life completely unaffected by any war, and having a solid understanding of how wars start and progress based on many detailed examples will help us prepare and react sensibly when that happens. Accurate models of important things will also end up informing our understanding of tons of things that might have originally seemed unrelated. That's all true, of course, of more neglected sources of information- but it seems like the best strategy for maximizing the usefulness of your models is to focus on information which seems important or surprising, regardless of neglectedness.
• Independent journalism also checks the power of leaders. Even in very authoritarian states, the public can collectively exert some pressure against corruption and incompetence by threatening instability- but only if they're able to broadly coordinate on a common understanding of those things. The reason so many authoritarians deny the existence of reliable independent journalism- often putting little to no effort into hiding the propagandistic nature of their state media- is that by promoting that maximally cynical view of journalism, they immunize their populations against information not under their control. Neglected information can allow for a lot of personal impact, but it's not something societies can coordinate around- so focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else may represent a kind of defection in the coordination problem of civic duty.

Of course, we have to be very careful with our news consumption- even the most sober, reliable sources will drive engagement by cherry-picking stories, which can skew our understanding of the frequency of all kinds of problems. But availability bias is a problem we have to learn to compensate for in all sorts of different domains- it would be amazing if we were able to build a rich model of important global events by consuming only purely unbiased information, but that isn't the world we live in.  The news is the best we've got, and we ought to use it.