Out
of the 10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months,
did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter
in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. Photograph: Guardian/Graphic
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised
the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes)
and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet
understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is
easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter,
tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking.
That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and
long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow
limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies
for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to
information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are
beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
News misleads.
Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives
over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus
on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned
to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all
irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.
That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in
other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person
(non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to
walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So
terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of
Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated.
Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated. Continue at Rolf Dobelli
