I Hate the News (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Kiser’s background is in news products — he previously worked as a product manager for Spin , Forbes and Business Insider — and he’s fascinated by how the way information is packaged shapes our experience of it. He’s been particularly influenced by the writer and photographer Craig Mod, who in a 2012 essay coined the concept of “edges”: the ways ph... See more

The haystack-sized pile of AI news needles is intractable. Niche-ing down wasn’t enough for me. That’s why I find Burkeman’s approach to be a better solution:

Treat your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After ... See more

having someone who is not your spouse feed their thoughts to you 5-days-a-week, thoughts that they themselves have only had a day to work on, thoughts which would likely go refined or unexpressed in a publication with longer-time horizons, is probably not good for your brain.

174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2 Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’

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Another huge time-suck is online entertainment, especially when it masquerades as work-related or educational. I was spending easily two hours a day on sites like hacker news and twitter. This is apparently below average.

The opportunity cost is huge - 2 hours per work day is 500 hours per year. Maybe I learned something from that aimless

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