I stopped viewing all news media companies five years ago. Real news will get to you pretty quickly by other means such as HN which I still frequent a couple of hours a week. Modern news is re-hashing even the trivial in the worst possible way and inviting the extreme idiots on both sides to fight it out in the comment section, I can honestly say I am missing nothing and still find myself informed and happier.

It is hard to abstain from news completely. The mainstream media is becoming increasingly like social media, feeding on shared sentiment and vague feelings of outrage.

If you watch the news, you'd think the sky is falling.

TOOL - Vicarious

"Eye on the TV, 'cause tragedy thrills me

Whatever flavor it happens to be like

Killed by the husband, drowned by the ocean

Shot by his own son, she used the poison in his tea

Then kissed him goodbye, that's my kind of story

It's no fun 'til someone dies

Don't look at me like I am a monster

Frown out your one face, but with the other

Stare like a junkie into the TV

Stare like a zombie while the mother holds her child

Watches him die, hands to the sky, crying

"Why, oh, why?"

'Cause I need to watch things die

From a distance

Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies"

Yes but very possible. I also did it during the latest once the latest election was decided.

Removed all news sites but also stopped looking at facebook, news on youtube, and the biggest one was reddit.

Reddit really affected me. It was so easy to read -> become angry -> engage.

I choose to be less informed to save my mental health, I know I'm way happier.

Maybe it's like a drug? I never read/watched news in my entire life and find it pretty easy. It's impossible to completely shield yourself from getting the news at all, which is a bit unfortunate. I feel I would lead a happier life if I didn't get to know who the president of the USA was, for example. It's completely meaningless knowledge anyway. But for some reason most people are really interested and will tell you, even if you never ask.

It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years, I haven’t had any social media accounts ever, and at this point I use the internet as part of my day job, to do my job.

It is absolutely amazing to be so disconnected and I encourage everyone to try it. People at work tell me about interesting things happening in the world, and my role and my spouses role at her job have the (mis) fortune of keeping me informed about the goings on in the wider world. But there is no spin.

> It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years

It's frequently beneficial to know what's happening in the world around you, even though possessing a sense of empathy can make knowing what's happening in the world around you unpleasant.

I hear this repeated often but I'm not actually sure how or why it's beneficial?

Okay I'll bite, in your opinion what are the benefits?

You're asking me to enumerate the benefits of knowing what's going on the world around you? It's probably not relevant or beneficial if it's something like miners being trapped in a cave on the other side of the planet, but when you get down to your local community you might want to know about things like:

- Road closures - Boil orders - Product recalls - Neighborhood breakins - Weather forecasts and alerts - Updated laws and court rulings that might impact you - Public safety notices - Health inspections - Public works projects - and a zillion other things that happen as a consequence of living in a complex society

Just visiting this site means you're inundated with a lot of news about AI or tech companies, and politics pertaining to those matters. It's hard to remove politics from issues. I think only the most niche of communities avoid politics completely.

You're on HN, that's social media.

A web forum is not social media. Full stop.

Same, I've learned if something is important enough I'll hear about it anyway

The news is virtually never important enough. And my definition of “important enough” is “actionable”.

There’s a pervasive idea, mostly among more educated people, that keeping up with political news is civic minded and responsible. I’m not sure if I’m just cynical or small minded but I just don’t see the point. Getting a daily blast of topics to worry about that I have no control over doesn’t seem like a good use of this life journey.

I agree in general but I guess a counterargument is that you can't know if its actionable if you don't know about it

"He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

–Thomas Jefferson

While my intelligence is ~ constant, my levels of happiness fluctuated during my life and now, at 48, I am maybe twice as happy as I was at 24. There is definitely an upward trend with me...

During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.

IDK what happened, I can at best describe it as if "someone slowly changed the lens I am using to view the world for a less cloudy one".

Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.

I think what you're describing is wisdom, as described in the Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Oh, that would be nice! Thank you.

I think a part of happiness is just knowing that you cannot win the game of life. Even if you could process a thousand times more information, would that make you any happier? If anything, your craving for information would only increase.

It's not the processing that is the problem but the craving.

That said, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. There is a nice middle ground.

pretty sure if you're commenting on here then you're way above average. It's not a compliment, its just that you're misunderstanding how low the bar is.

That seems like some gatekeeping egoistical hi-ground.

I refuse to believe the average person here is any more intelligent than the average person on the street.

I don't think it's egoistical. I understand it's often uncomfortable to compare people by their intelligence, but by many measures of 'smart', people here have it, more often than not.

Nah, people here often have knowledge in varied but very niche subjects, but because this is the place for niche subjects, you can always find a handful of people knowledgeable on any given subject.

Plus, it’s fairly common to see people saying the most amazingly simple things but with big words, fancy terms, heavy phrasing and all that just to sound that little bit smarter.

None of that tells me people here are more intelligent than the average Joe walking by living their life. Just that people here flock on posts with subjects they enjoy or know a bit about.

It’s very easy to sound intelligent, all you have to do is leave people confused with a bit of theatre and misdirection (oh, and a dash of arrogance!). True intelligence, though, is owning what you don’t know. True intelligence is not trying to make everyone around you feel dumber so you can be the clever clogs.

None of us took a test to be here.

There's zero filter that could cause this effect.

> I refuse to believe the average person here is any more intelligent than the average person on the street.

This is a website of words. The average person looks almost exclusively at moving pictures.

I'd suggest we're at least top 5% of some key things that make up intelligence: like curiosity and intellectual bravery.

I directionally agree, but i suspect your 95th-percentile anchoring is wildly optimistic.

Embarrassing admission: I'm probably much closer to the middle of the open-mindedness chart than i pretend. (I wish i was Bertrand Russell.)

Indictment: so are very many commenters here.

I don't think its wildly optimistic at all. Coming here, reading stuff and commenting is such a self-selecting process that it leaves you mostly with people who have extremely high cognitive function and intellectual curiosity and bravery. This is so far away from the fold and is an extremely aggressive filter.

The dread is that even this suggested "5%" contains many idiots (this idea of 5% also being rather idiotic). But if you think 5% is wildly optimistic then I fear you don't appreciate what the baseline is like. People are proper stupid and uninterested in thinking when it comes down to it.

To get a mild appreciation of the bar, at least in technical ability. My source is the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), specifically its assessment of “problem solving in technology-rich environments.”

Around 5% of the sample on average (116k) got to the top level. A top level task was as scary as being able to successfully reschedule a meeting in an email client with multiple participants. That's the sort of bar 5% can clear, which gives me the anchor. So think about that, well over 90% of people really struggle with that level of task, which I'd imagine all of us could clear (even our idiots). Sure its an annoying task, but its really not _that_ hard.

> It's not a compliment

Thanks, you had me feeling all smug and then you had to add that part.

Aw, sorry. I just wanted to sound sincere. Like you're underestimating yourself or well er.... others. Idk I'm sure you're smart. Stupid people think they're _really_ smart, imho being smart is mostly associated with having some level of self-doubt.

I've seen how low the bar is within my family, it can go lower than the bar I've personally seen, it scares me.

Humans simply didn't evolve to be connected to a constant firehose of random information. I firmly believe that even the smartest person will become an idiot if they just scroll X all day

Well, yeah, that's Musk's propaganda outlet. That's not synonymous with "news" though.

> Let’s not pretend X is bad because of Musk alone. HN can be just as terrible too.

I am yet to see racial slurs, hateful speech, scams, porn (consensual and non consensual) or any of the endless things that are okay on X but not on HN. So no, HN can not and will not be just as terrible. The two platforms aren’t even close in terms of the health of the discourse.