Hi Lads,

this sub has given me a lot of insight and it's my turn to give something back.

Today I'll tell you about how I overcame my "Information Addiction" a.k.a. Reddit Addiction. All credit goes to Rolf Dobelli (www.dobelli.com)


This post is going to be long and you won't be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people lost the reading habit and struggle to absorb more than a couple of paragraphs straight. This post will show you how to get out of this trap - if you are not already too deeply in it.

Intro - News is to the mind, what sugar is to the body

We are so well informed and yet we know so little.

Why? Because 200 years ago we invented a toxic form of knowledge called "news".

At core, human beings are cavemen in suits and dresses. Our brains are optimized for our original hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small groups with limited sources of food and information. Our brains and bodies now live in a world that is the opposite of what we are designed to handle. And this leads to great risk and to inappropriate, outright dangerous behavior.

Unlike reading books which requires thinking, we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candles for the mind. Today we reached the same point in relation to information overload that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food intake. We are seeing how toxic news can be.

What follows is a list of of the toxic dangers of news. I have gone without news for a couple of weeks and though it is hard at first the upsides are, less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

No. 1 - News misleads us systematically

News reports do not represent the real world.

Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, fast changing, loud graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, complex, slow to develop and quite. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.

News media outles focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can conevy with gripping stories and lurid pictures. News grabs our attention; that's how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn't exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tatsy.

The highly visible misleads us.

As a result of news, we walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads:

  • Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.
  • The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated
  • Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated.
  • Britney spears is overrated. IPCC reports are underrated
  • Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.

The probabilistic mapping we get from consuming news is entrirely different from the actual risks we face. And if you think you can compensate for this bias with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists - who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards - have shown that they cannot.

The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

No. 2 - News is irrelevant

Out of 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that - because you consumed it - allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business - compared to what you would have known if you hadn't swallowed that morsel of news.

The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.

Even if against all ods you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life - compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn't read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindishgt analysis. Looking forward, we can't possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile? Probably not!

The first Internet browser debuted in 1995. The public birth of this hugely relevant piece of software barely made it into the press despite its vast future iimpact. People find it very difficult to recognize what's relevant. It's much easier to recognize what's new. We are not equipped with sensory organs for relevance. Relevance doesn't come naturally. News does. That's why the media plays on the news.

The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the modern man. News floods you with a worldview that is not relevant to your life. What does relevance mean? It means: what is important to you personally. Relevance is a personal choice. To the media, any tale that sells lots of copies is relevant - Paris Hilton, a train crash in China, some idiotic world record. So don't take the media's view for it.

No. 3 - News limits understanding

News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles poopping on the surface of a deeper world. What we really want is to understand the underlying proceses, how things happen. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movement that develop below the journalists' radar.

Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. No evidence exists to indicate that information junkies are better decision makers. They are certainly not more successful than the average Joe, otherwise we would expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case.

Reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything. What's best: cut yourself off from daily news consumptin entirely. Read books and thoughful journals.

No. 4 - News is toxic to your body

News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the relase of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocordicoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel-visionn and desensitization.

No. 5 - News massively increases cognitive errors

News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: Confirmation Bias. We automatically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions.

News not only feeds the confirmation bias, it exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crae stories that "make sense". And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories. Instead of just reporting that the stock market declined by 2%, the anchors proclaim, "The market declined by 2% because of X." This X could be a bnak profit forecast, fear about the EURO, a handshare between two presidents. The fact is, we don't know why the stock market moves as it moves. Too many factors go into such shifts. To a large degree, news reports consists of nothing but stories and anecdotes that end up substituting for coherent analysis. It's irrational and we should stop it from contaminating our thinking.

No. 6 - News inhibits thinking

Thinking requires concentation. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 8). This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.

News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a minimum amount of slippery data (try repeating a 10-digit phone number after you hear it for the first time). The path from short-term to long-term memory is a chokepoint in the brain, but anything you want to understand must past through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing passes through.

News consumers are suckers for irrelevance and online news consumers are the biggest suckers. News is an interruption system.

No. 7 - News changes the structure of the brain

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of cheking the news, you are driven to check it even more often.

Science used to think that our brain, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neuros inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. The human brain is highly plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. When we adapt to a new cultureal phenomenon, including the consumption of news, we end up with a different brain. Adaptation to news occurs at a biological level. News reprograms us.

No. 8 - News is costly

News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant cost.

News taxes productivity three ways. First, count the consumption-time that news demands. Second, tally up the refocusing time - or switching cost. Third, news distracts us even hours after we've digested today's hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

No. 9 - News is produced by journalists

Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some incompetent, unfair practitioners who don't have the time - or the capacity - for deep analysis. And you might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news.

No. 10 - Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always

Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process. Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in a complex world is impossible.

Did the newspapers predict World War I, the Great Depression, the sexual revolution, the fall of the Soviet empires, the rise of the Internet, resistance to antibiotics, the fall of Europe's birth rate or the explosion in depression cases? Maybe you'd find one or two correct predictions in a sea of millions of mistaken ones.

No. 11 - News is manipulative

Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energey consuming. Why go through that?

The publi relations (PR) industry is as large as the news reporting industry - the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated, or at least influence or swayed.

No. 12 - News makes us passive

News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world. Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is learned helplessness.

No. 13 - News gives us the illusion of caring

We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.

Action Step: What to do instead

Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey.

Make news as inaccessible as poosible. Delete the news apps from your phone. Sell your TV. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. Do not pick up newspapses and magazines that lie around in airports and train stations. Do not set your browser default to a news site.

I personally bought a subscription in freedom.io. And got the "Off time" app. And I haven't visited a sub on Reddit except for TRP related subs the last 10 days.

The first week will be the hardest. Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain's built-in tendency. Stick to the cold-turkey plan.