337 - Filtering News

When looking through the daily assortment of headline news (even from decent sources) I generally see 3 dominant categories:

Bull$hit (The primary staple of "AI News"), usually debunked within 48 hours of being published. This debunking is subject to Brandolini's Law (more effort is required to debunk BS than to generate it), so this sadly remains a major net loss for humanity. Even when debunking is carried out quickly and efficiently, only a fraction of those who see BS update their understanding post-debunking.

"Things happened, and nobody took any effective action to resolve the situation (nor is any recommended)". Most material related to politics, war, criminal activity, and similar stories fall into this category. It is a steady flow of apathetic sludge to meet quotas.

Complete fluff, ranging from a Dog show or beauty pageant to sports, between which there is little actual difference. All are activities aimed at entertainment, with no direct real-world impact.

Using this sort of information, you may predict shallow and short-term trends, but this kind of data offers virtually nothing toward purposes such as:

Evaluating the capabilities of actual technology, methodologies, or governance structures, present or future. For example, the PR BS being spread about technology (as it is debunked) offers signal for what specific subsets of technology fundamentally can't do, but tells you nothing about anything not covered in viral BS.

How to solve real-world problems. Often the solutions are absurdly obvious, but with equal absurdity those solutions are discouraged or any mention of them is avoided completely. The closest most media comes to solutions to real-world problems is the inverse formulation of auto-correlation. That is a fancy way of saying that you can subtract everything they propose to help find the actual solutions. This is auto-correlation because you subtract X from the full domain of X+Y, where X is the subset that they cover, and Y are the subset of actual solutions.

Educating people to make wiser decisions tomorrow than the news of today shows them making. With no value added from the missing above two factors, no meaningful education can take place. Instead, some portion of the BS tends to take root, as debunking isn't uniformly distributed or accepted, and so most people are contaminated by it to varying degrees, and the "news" who spread the BS in the first place is ethically and criminally liable for the difference.

Today, such news only really serves one purpose, to answer the question:

"What nonsensical BS is going on today?"

That does serve a purpose, to help people dodge the oncoming traffic of bad actors, but it does nothing to solve the problems being dodged. This makes it a semi-endless and imbalanced game of Frogger, where the game ends when all the lanes line up to form something that can't be dodged.