I have been listening to an audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. It’s full of interesting concepts and engaging writing.
In one passage, Taleb describes the anxiety of the investor who feels the need to constantly check on how well an investment is doing. Has the value risen or fallen over the last month? Day? Minute? Second?
He describes a number of statistical and psychological features of such situations, but one seems possible to apply to estimating the ideal frequency of news-checking.
Taleb argues that with the investment, we generally see smaller jitters in value when we choose to look up the current value more often. Furthermore, and critically, we are likely to suffer more every time we see a drop in value than we are to celebrate when we see a gain — one of the ways in which people are demonstrably not ‘rational’ in the sense of valuing mathematically identical outcomes differently for emotional reasons.
Something similar may accompany the temptation to open a browser window to check Google News, open Twitter on your phone, glance at Facebook, or otherwise deliberately seek a new set of general updates about the broader state of the world. Given additional biases in the media, the odds are probably under 50% that any news story you have not seen before will be ‘positive’, at least for people who prefer a minimum amount of violence and suffering in the world. In particular, because violence is so emotionally salient to us, it tends to both dominate media coverage and draw the most attention when mixed in with other types of news stories.
If we feel the ‘losses’ in human welfare more acutely than the gains, checking for updates too frequently may lead us to develop and maintain an overly discouraged perspective on the world. This becomes even more likely when we take into account the seemingly irrational way in which our brains excessively prioritize what seems to be happening right now. Reading about the ongoing active shooter situation, with new updates coming in all the time, may be fundamentally more traumatizing than reading about the whole incident once it has been resolved (or at least moved to the next stage — the arrest, the trial, the post-massacre political analysis).
Perhaps it makes sense to intentionally curtail time spent following current news in favour (at least) of waiting for the summary (if any) in a weekly news magazine or, even better, working through the pages of a dusty book that has influenced the thinking of many people.
Stephen Pinker discusses a related phenomenon:
Believing that following the news on a daily or hourly basis makes us well-informed may be wrong, because of the combination of our psychological limitations and the biases of news organizations.
A bit like the question of whether and how to cover mass shootings (with the risk of lending fame to the killer and encouraging more such acts), there is a tricky moral question here about how news organizations and journalists should incorporate the psychology of their audience.
This kind of mass systemic effect, where day-to-day news tends to be bad and news organizations are obsessed with what is most current, couldn’t be remedied by any plausible public policy remedy. It’s probably just the accidental consequence of technological development.
It appears that Facebook did not, however, carefully think through the implications of becoming the dominant force in the news industry. Everyone in management cared about quality and accuracy, and they had set up rules, for example, to eliminate pornography and protect copyright. But Facebook hired few journalists and spent little time discussing the big questions that bedevil the media industry. What is fair? What is a fact? How do you signal the difference between news, analysis, satire, and opinion? Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”
Imagine a news network that lived by the converse philosophy: “Our News is Never Breaking!”
They could analyze the implications of what is already widely known rather than pour forth the endless trivia the “everything new is important” crowd earns their bread and cheese on…
For Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, and John Tierney, a journalist, these are symptoms of “the power of bad”. Their provocative book explores what they characterise as “the universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones”. Their examples make for uncomfortable reading. “One moment of parental neglect can lead to decades of angst and therapy,” they write chasteningly, “but no one spends adulthood fixated on that wonderful day at the zoo.” Other claims are dispiriting: “Successful marriages are defined not by improvement but by avoiding decline.”
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As they examine how Mr Baumgartner and others reverse morbid patterns of thought, the authors set out a rule of thumb: “It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing.” Accordingly, they are less keen on accentuating life’s positives than on trying to muffle its negatives. In part that means reframing adversity, like wounded soldiers who view injury “not as something that shattered their plans but as something that started them on a new path”. On a more parochial note, they advise that people who have to deal with rude customers finish every encounter, no matter how bruising, with a positive gesture—and that if you are likely to be on the receiving end of reviews, you should get a friend to summarise them, to avoid direct exposure to indelibly hurtful phrases.