为什么你应该停止阅读新闻？
编者按：
村上春树曾经在小说中借人物之口，说过”没死三十年的作家的书不看“。话糙理不糙。如果你看到网上的文章的标题都是蹭热点型的，不看是最好的办法。
与其阅读碎片，不如重温经典。
为了提高罗马大道小伙伴的阅读效率，罗马大道收集了很多旨在留下长期印记、不急于一时的好文章和公众号，今天先分享第一篇《为什么你应该停止阅读新闻？》，来自愉悦资本戴汩的个人公众号“ThinkingSlow缓慢思考”。
你可以把他看作是一个出色的硅谷文化编辑，来仔细琢磨公众号里面很多篇值得反复翻阅的译文。
本文已获得 原作者公众号：ThinkingSlow缓慢思考 授权转载。
如果你想阅读原文或联系转载，可以扫描下方二维码。
愉悦资本 戴汩 ：
原文来自Farnamstreet网站。当每天无所不在的新闻包围我们的时候，你或许以为越多的新闻阅读会让你更加智慧，不幸的是恰恰相反。判断阅读的价值其实很简单，作者花的时间越长，至今留存越久的东西，才值得阅读。Enjoy！
We spend hours consuming news because we want to be well informed. But is that time well spent? News is by definition something that doesn't last. And as news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality has decreased.
我们花很多小时阅读新闻，因为我们想要得到充分的信息。但是这个时间花的真的值吗？新闻的定义本来就是不能持久的某种东西。随着新闻分发越来越容易，新闻的生产越来越便宜，其质量已经下降。
Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we consume: Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time — say, in a week or in a year? Is the person writing this someone who is well informed on the issue?
我们很少停下来问问自己我们消费了什么新闻：它很重要吗？它是否经受得住时间的考验 — 比如一周或一年？写这个新闻的人真的是内行吗？
“[W]e're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”
— Nicolas Carr
“我们被如此多即时有趣的信息包围，以至于我们被无尽的试图跟上他们的压力所吞噬。”
- 尼古拉斯·卡尔 （注释：美国作家）
There are several problems with the way we consume news today:
我们今天消费新闻的方式有几个问题：
First, the speed of news delivery has increased. We used to have to wait to get a newspaper or gossip with people in our town to get our news, but not anymore. Thanks to alerts, texts, and other interruptions, news find us almost the minute it's published.
首先，新闻传播的速度提高了。过去我们不得不等待报纸或者通过和镇上人的闲聊获得消息，现在完全不需要了。由于手机提醒，短信和其他干扰方式，新闻几乎在发表的一分钟内就能到达我们。
Second, the costs to produce news have dropped significantly. Some people write 12 blog posts a day for major newspapers. It's nearly impossible to write something thoughtful on one topic, let alone 12. Over the course of a year, this works out to writing 2880 articles (assuming four weeks of vacation). The fluency of the person you're getting your news from in the subject they're covering is near zero. As a result, you're filling your head with surface opinions on isolated topics. Because the costs have dropped to near zero, there is a lot of competition.
其次，生产新闻的成本大幅下降。有些人每天为主要报纸写12篇博文。一天在一个主题上写出深思熟虑的内容都几乎不可能，更不用说了12个主题了。一年之内，这就写出了2880篇文章（假设留出四周给假期）。这些人作为你新闻的来源，他们对所涉及的主题的精通程度接近于零。因此，你把你的脑袋里填满对不同孤立主题的浅薄的观点。由于新闻生产成本已经下降到接近零，竞争非常激烈。
Third, producers of news attempt to hijack our brains. News producers perpetuate a culture of “tune in, don't miss out, follow this or you'll be misinformed, oh wait, look at this!” As you consume more and more of that kind of news, you have less and less time for what matters.
第三，新闻制作人试图劫持我们的大脑。新闻制作人主张的文化是：“快快收听，不要错过，跟着这个否则你会被误导，嘿停住，看看这个！”。当你消费越来越多这样的新闻时，你越来越少时间花在重要的事情上。
Fourth, the incentives are misaligned. In part, because there is a lot of competition, most news outlets feel compelled to offer free news. After all, everyone else is doing it. However, when the news is free, you still need to pay people, so you move away from a subscription model that was selling static ads to a captive audience to a model that's selling the audience to advertisers. Page views become the name of the game, and the more, the better. For a lot of people who create news (I won't use the term “journalists” here because I hold them in high regard), the more page views they get, the more they are compensated. A lot of these ads aren't just impressions; they're also giving information about you to the advertisers, but that's another story.
第四，激励机制失调。部分由于竞争激烈，大部分新闻媒体都不得不提供免费新闻。毕竟，其他人都在这样做。但是，当新闻是免费的时候，你仍然需要付钱给人，所以你从一个静态广告出售的订阅模式转移到一个向广告商出售观众的模式。网页浏览量成为这个游戏的关键，浏览越多越好。对于很多创造新闻的人来说（我在这里不会用“新闻工作者”这个词，因为我非常尊重他们），他们的页面浏览越多，得到的报酬就越多。很多这些广告不只是展示，他们也在向广告商提供关于你的信息，但这是另一回事。
I could go on, but I think you're starting to see the picture now.
我可以继续下去，但是我想现在你已经开始看到这个画面了。
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
— Herbert Simon
“信息消费了什么是相当明显的：它消费了接受者的的注意力。因此，大量的信息造成了注意力的贫乏，需要在信息来源过多的情况下有效地分配这种注意力。“
- 赫伯特·西蒙
The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not going to help you understand the world. It's not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
重点是，你今天在网上阅读的大部分内容都是毫无意义的。它对你的人生并不重要。它不会帮助你做出更好的决定。它不会帮助你理解世界。它不会帮助你与你周围的人产生深刻而有意义的联系。它唯一真正做的是改变你的心情，也许你的行为。
The hotels, transportation, and ticketing systems in Disney World are all designed to keep you within the theme park rather than sightseeing elsewhere in Orlando. Similarly, once you're on Facebook, it does everything possible, short of taking over your computer, to prevent you from leaving. But while platforms like Facebook play a role in our excessive media consumption, we are not innocent. Far from it. We want to be well informed. (More accurately, we want to appear to be well informed.) And this is the very weakness that gets manipulated.
迪斯尼世界的酒店、交通和票务系统都旨在让你呆在主题公园内，而不是去奥兰多的其他地方观光。同样，一旦你在Facebook上，它会尽一切可能，短暂的接管你的电脑，以防止你离开。但是，尽管像Facebook这样的平台在我们过度消费新闻中扮演一个角色，我们自己并不是无辜的。远远不是。我们太想要充分掌握一切信息。 （更准确地说，我们希望看起来掌握一切信息。）这是我们弱点被操纵了。
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
— Nassim Taleb
“要彻底治愈报纸上瘾，花一年时间阅读前一周的报纸。”
- Nassim Taleb （注释：黑天鹅的作者）
I have a friend who reads The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, her local newspaper, and several other publications. She's addicted. She wants to know everything that's going on everywhere and to have an informed opinion. She's just like the rest of us — we all want to know what's going on and have a well-informed opinion. If we're not well informed, then what are we? I don't want to be ignorant, and that's just how I'm made to feel if I'm not keeping up.
我有一位朋友， 她读“纽约客”，“纽约时报”，“经济学人”，“华尔街日报”，当地报纸和其他一些刊物。她上了瘾。她想知道所有地方发生的一切，并且知道来龙去脉。她就像我们其他人一样。 如果我们不了解发生的情况，那我们是什么呢？我不想成为无知的人，如果我没有跟上这些新闻，我就会有这种感觉。
Despite that, I've stopped consuming news. At first, it was really difficult. When my friends would start talking about something topical and emotionally charged and ask me what I thought, I'd have to say I don't know. This was followed by a “What!?” and “You have to read this” as they took out their phones to text me a link to an article I would never read. One hilarious aspect of this situation is that they often expected me to stop the conversation with them and read the article so I could share in their outrage. No thanks.
尽管如此，我已经停止消费新闻。起初，这真的很困难。当我的朋友们开始投入的谈论一些热门话题，问我我在想什么，我不得不说我不知道。
接着是“什么！？”和“你必须读这个”，然后他们拿出手机用短信给我发那些我永远不会读的文章的链接。滑稽的是，他们经常希望我停止与他们的谈话，阅读文章，以便我可以分享他们的愤怒。不用了，谢谢。
Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. Your first thought on something is usually not yours but someone else's. When all you do is consume, you are not only letting someone else hijack and direct your attention; you are also letting them think for you.
充分了解信息并不是去反刍那些二十来岁没有生活经验的人的意见，让他们告诉我该如何思考或者多么愤怒。你首先想到的东西通常不是你的，而是别人的。当你所做的只是消费，你不仅让别人劫持并引导你的注意力，你也让他们为你思考。
Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so.
避免噪音，因为它与信号混淆。你的注意力是有价值的，那么为什么花这么多时间在这些几天以后就毫不相干的东西？阅读那些经得起时间的考验的东西。阅读那些尊重和珍惜你时间的出版物，那些增加价值而不是浪费的出版物。阅读那些要求你自己思考的东西。阅读更少的文章和更多的书籍。阅读经过时间考验的书，20年后仍在印刷的书。
We're afraid of silence, afraid to be alone with our thoughts. That's why we pull out our phones when we're waiting in line at a coffee shop or the grocery store. We're afraid to ask ourselves deep and meaningful questions. We're afraid to be bored. We're so afraid that to avoid it, we'll literally drive ourselves crazy consuming pointless information.
我们害怕沉默，害怕和思想独处。这就是为什么当我们在咖啡厅或杂货店排队等候时，我们拿出手机。我们害怕问自己深刻而有意义的问题。我们害怕无聊。我们很害怕，为了避免它，我们会疯狂地消耗毫无意义的信息。
Let's close with this quote by Winifred Gallagher: “Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time.”
让我们用Winifred Gallagher的这句话结束：“很少有事情，比你选择如何花费你的宝贵空闲时间， 对你的生命质量来的重要。”
愉悦资本，和本篇没有关系：-）
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