3.9 KiB
3.9 KiB
Quotes
Managers need private offices for "productivity" but put their workers in open offices
When they went to open office one of my friends said in the announcement meeting it was asked why managers and higher ups needed offices. Productivity was the answer. Didn't seem to phase them that the people actually doing the producing were going to be producing less.
Avoid News
1) News does not represent the real world [...] the highly visible misleads us.
2) News is irrelevant [...] It’s very difficult for us to recognize what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognize what’s new [...] if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you try to live protected from the news in a cocoon
3) News limits understanding [...] It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them
4-5) News is toxic for your body/society [...] News consumers risk impairing their physical health [...] News leads to collective neurosis [...] **Psychological scars do not heal easily**
6) News massively increases cognitive errors [...] Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality
7) News inhibits thinking [...] **The passageway from working memory to long-term memory forms a bottleneck in our brain** [...] Because news disrupts concentration, it actively weakens comprehension
8) News changes the structure of your brain [...] The more news we consume, the more we are exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply [...] Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them [...] [this] feeds compulsive information-seeking behavior (CISB) [and long term potentiation (LTP)]
9) News is a waste of time [...] Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is.
10) News separates reputation from achievement [...] people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives
11) News is produced by journalists [...] Fewer than ten percent of the news stories are original. Fewer than one percent are truly investigative
12) Reports and forecasts can be or are wrong [...] Incorrect forecast are not only useless, they are harmful
13) News is manipulative [...] News is the perfect Trojan horse. Few bits of news arrive without a hidden
agenda [...] It sets the public agenda
14) News makes us passive [...] **News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence** [...] it can lead to passivity and a sense of victimhood. The scientific term is learned helplessness
15) News gives us the illusion of caring [...] [it] delivers the illusion of care but doesn’t get us anywhere [...] we are not connected because we consume news
16) News kills creativity [...] Things we already know severely impact creativity [...] If you want to come up with old solutions, read news
//Isn’t it inhumane not to care about Haiti? Your shtick feels pretty cold.//
Is it inhumane not to care about horrific things happening on other planets? The point is: You can’t care about everything in the universe, on the earth, in your country, not even in your city. Nor should you.
//Where is the compassion?//
Let me state this even stronger: Caring without action is inhumane. It gives us the illusion of making the world a better place. Truth is, we do it for us. We revel in the marinade of caring. What does it change? It makes us feel good (humane if you like) but doesn’t help a thing. [...] Empathy – if it remains empathy – is useless.
http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180106154431/http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/