Random Stuff - Chapter 314

Try this: only get your news from the current events page of Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia language has a Main Page where they list current events and notable historical events. This will give you the bare minimum facts if you feel you must stay informed daily (which is debatable). And, if for some reason you want to dive deeper into whatever is happening, you can click on the article to, again, get the bare minimum facts.

Wikipedia is curated to remove bias, political leanings, and false statements. That is no longer 100% true of almost any news source these days.

Getting my news from Wikipedia is two things: 1) a breath of fresh air, and 2) completely boring.

It’s a breath of fresh air because it actually gets at what’s going on. Just to give a current example, I’ve seen headlines for days about attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Pretty much every news headline I’ve seen has revolved around Trump blaming Iran and whether he’s right to do so or not, whether he’s over-reaching or not. In fact, if anything is true of US news media since 2016, everything is always viewed through the lens of Trump, which is not only annoying and unhelpful, but unfairly characterizes a lot of these issues. But pop onto Wikipedia and within three sentences, I learned more about the situation than all of the news articles I had read, combined.

Wikipedia is also boring. Which is good, partly because facts have a tendency to be boring, but also because boredom has no bias. If an article gets you angry or excited, you will become biased about its content. On the other hand, if reading it feels like you’re reading a TV repair manual, then you’re probably just getting the facts and nothing else.

But best of all, making the news boring again encourages you to only read about what is truly important or impactful for you. The truth is that most of what passes for “news” is disguised entertainment—information that is only impactful or important for a small group of people or far removed from your ability to influence anything and then exaggerated to make you feel outraged or angry or excited based on your specific identity group. The only way to win at this game is to not play, and by using Wikipedia as your resource for current events, you’re opting out of that game.

But, there are important long-term issues like climate change and civil rights and economic inequality that require lots of information and critical thinking. What about those? Well, glad you asked…

LONG-FORM CONTENT

Long form content should be your bread and butter for news content and the majority of your entertainment content. Long-form content means any medium—Books, Podcasts, long-form articles, doc.u.mentaries—the key is that shit takes a long time.

There are two benefits of limiting yourself to long-form content. The first is that (on average) it’s going to portray far more research, nuance, and thought than short-form content. Stupidity in a tweet can sound deep. Stupidity repeated for 12,000 words quickly makes itself apparent.

The second benefit of long-form content is that it hones our attention span and gets us accustomed to sitting with topics for extended periods of time. It helps us to not fall prey to our immediate knee-jerk responses. It gives us the space to wonder, “What if my assumption is wrong? What if I’m the one with d.i.c.k breath in this argument?”

The long-form content applies to entertainment too. Don’t just watch sports clips all day, watch a doc.u.mentary about your favorite player. Don’t just listen to a hit song over and over, put on the full album. Don’t just play a dinky iPhone game over and over, find a video game you can immerse yourself into and think critically about its elements and story. The idea is to regularly stretch your attention span and ability to focus and exercise it like a muscle.

Longform.org is a great place to find long-form content. I’m also a fan of Aeon.