IS IT REALLY GOOD READING THE NEWSPAPER DAILY?

 

You want to read newspaper to build a better view of the world, understand how things are going out there. right? yes, we all want that. take a pause. I mean do you really want to say that newspaper helps you to understand the world better and thus to take better decisions? how exactly does it do so? your probable answer will be the by the loads of information that it provides, but most importantly the ‘perfect’ explanations and theories that come along with the raw information to support that we had just predicted what was going to happen, which in most of the cases, is bad. now if it were really the case, if our foresight happened to be this much good, why then didn’t we prevent it in the first place to happen? what made us so reluctant? isn’t it more likely that we are not good, rather pretty bad in such prediction things. we are, actually, the victims of hindsight bias.

Now let us make the assumption that you don’t fully rely upon those ready made theories because you smell something foul in it, rather you make your own hypotheses using its data which you would apply in your field. look back at your previous year. say you took ‘x’ significant decisions in the whole year (which include your lifestyle modification, career, family, financial planning bla bla bla.) now, what percentage of this x decisions were somehow influenced by your hypotheses that you formulated by spending on newspapers for minimum half of a month of the year! did you notice your precious time just grimaced at you?

Another thing to mention- what level of personal harm newspaper is causing us. it’s playing with our psychology and we are letting it play as we forget that it has its own motto to be sold. it’s giving us some distorted part of a whole story and we are having the illusion that it is the whole of the picture. it is not, indeed. and understanding that is quite easy. just look around us.. is the number of bad things happening due to causes that our newspapers are telling us really accountable to the number of things that are happening due to preventable causes? what happens most of the time is it incapacitates us to even address the preventable ones. because the whole day we keep ourselves busy to find evidence that fits in what our newspapers have fed us, serving its own purpose but losing ours. isn’t it disgusting of ourselves?

So here goes my advice. don’t read newspapers to understand your world. save not only your time but also your mind. read books, articles, anything you want or simply observe the crowd. if you are afraid of missing anything important, well, give it a try first and know yourself how noise and signals, as Taleb puts it there, act differently. – Neelanjana Sarkar

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