Reading the news every day makes your understanding of the world worse, not better. It's not just that other ways of learning would be more effective—it's that reading the daily news actively worsens your understanding. Several figures helped me realise this, including Tim Harford, David Christian, Hans Rosling, and Nietzsche. For a while I planned to write a polemic about this. Then I realised that Dobelli had [already written it](https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf). I’ve not read anything else by Dobelli. ## Appendix 1: The 2020 news cycle Here's a [visualisation of the 2020 news cycle](https://www.axios.com/news-cycle-2020-google-trends-chart-8a27fc67-2dd0-45b6-ae23-2672c2771c50.html). ![[Pasted image 20210507090926.png]] There are a growing number of new daily publications that take the problems with traditional formats seriously, and are experimenting with ways to do better. [Axios](https://www.axios.com) and [Quartz](https://qz.com) are two examples.