So where does that leave this blog post on your high-brow literature vs. low-brow news spectrum?

And of course I don’t read your opinion as ‘zero news’ either. Nobody can do that really. I mean ‘non-trivial levels.’ I argue that unless you are tunnel-vision focused on an obscure and socially non-active intellectual pursuit (where, say, there isn’t even an active scholarly community), you need to keep up with the news. Depending on where between ‘armchair general’ and ‘worker in the field’ you are, the news becomes less/more important. In highly competitive domains, you’d better be watching the news like a hawk, because it isn’t just a question of ‘interesting information’ — it can be ‘actionable information.’

Mainly, I think I was reacting to the unreconstructed tone of ‘high-culture-vs.-low-culture’ in your post. Maybe I was seeing something that wasn’t there or intended .

Venkat

Here’s one way of asking the question — if instead of watching the news each night on television, or devouring the newspaper each morning, you heard only one newscast a week, or read every third or fourth issue of Newsweek. If you reflected carefully on what you did read, I think in some ways you’d understand more about the planet. You’d still be more familiar with what was going on than almost any human being in history — you’d know about the gap between the rich and poor, about ecological threats, about styles and trends, about political shifts and disasters. You’d know from re petition what really counted. And anything you didn’t find out about — anything that flared up for just a day or two and then died out — couldn’t matter much.

I find the current ones not so informative when trying guess what the future will actually be like. I have read detailed reports with different conclusions, but I have found nothing to synthesize the results. So I have to rely on my own judgement supplemented by news, which is very time consuming.

One thing I find valuable is getting a sense of the public pulse and current trends that may shape policy and commercial activities over the next few months. Right now there is an election going on in the U.S. and the papers give me an idea of how the contest is going, and what is likely to be the result. There is also something of an economic crisis in progress and it seems useful to glean what information is available about how bad things are going to get.

Today though there is a good alternative to news, the prediction markets on intrade.com. I follow the election markets there and I figure those are probably more accurate in terms of predicting the actual outcome, but the reasons for why one side or the other is moving ahead are not revealed. There is also a recession prediction market which is helpful. Hopefully in the future there will be more such prediction markets.

The paper is also useful in announcing upcoming local events that I might want to attend, although frustratingly it always devotes more press to an event after it happens than before.