Why I don't read articles about the election

There's so much information out there in the world. What's worth reading?

Information translates into knowledge, and I give information a weight based on how valuable the knowledge will be to me. Knowledge can be built on other knowledge; so information which adds and builds up knowledge is more valuable to me than information which gives me a distinct bit of knowledge; especially if that knowledge has a short timeframe for being useful.

Some types of knowledge which are pretty much permanent, and can be constantly built upon:

Intellectual - Philosophy, spiritual, things that add to my thinking processes.

Scientific - how things work, physical, chemical, biological knowledge that adds to my understanding of the universe and the world.

Practical - programming skills, learning to use a technology, how to manage people, how to cook, etc. Adds to skill base; can be constantly refined and improved over time, but each step adds value and experience.

On the other hand, news information about politics, economics, and general goings-on are generally either snapshots, or historical analysis. Historical analysis can be extremely interesting, and adds to understanding about human nature and many other things. On the other hand, snapshots of information, which almost all daily news falls into, often present incomplete pictures of what's going on, so are unreliable, and usually have a very short timeframe of valuable knowledge.

For example - let's say you read 10 articles before the election about the latest poll or political activity. How does this information translate to valuable knowledge in 3-6 months time from now? Probably no value at all. In a few weeks we'll know the actual results and what people actually did, and 90% of the 'forecasts' and extensives articles about how people think will be proven incorrect.


Compare that to reading a single article (or even book) after the election analysing the ups and downs and relating that to actually what happened. It will give you an overall picture and show how individual events fitted into the wider scheme of things. It doesn't really matter about the length of the respective articles - just that the latter would add to your permanent knowledge base, and so have a high value, whereas the 10 snap shots would be almost meaningless, probably wrong (we'll find out soon anyway) and most likely forgotten six months out (unless you work in politics and care about the minutae, or are the journalist writing the analysis).

There's so much information in the world, I think it's useful to think about how much time you spend studying information that in the scheme of things doesn't add any value to your life. That's why I refuse to read any daily newspapers, I just selectively read articles from The Economist each week, which at least picks out only the most important news and gives an objective analysis, often dipping into history to give a background. Even then, I only read articles that I find particularly interesting or I think add value.

Just my thoughts.