What's a better way of staying up to date, than following news?

Follow blogs by the sort of people who like to try to explain to laymen. For example, Andrew Gelman's blog for topics surrounding statistics. Or simplystatistics.org/posts/2020-04-29-amplifying-people-i-trust-on-covid-19/

Following news sucks because

• The selection of news you see today is a nonrepresentative selection of what happened today, muddling the waters for your Availability heuristic and inner simulator.
• The selection of news you see today is what I might call counterfactually-arbitrary… I mean that from your perspective, a given day looks perfectly compatible with many different possible sets of news articles, without changing which world you live in. The information has low value because you don't have any idea of the process underlying why this ended up in the news and not other stuff, even if you trusted the editor.

• For academic topics, reliably they're just plain wrong (see Gell-Mann amnesia)! Perhaps it'd be worth reading if the news is actually good, but you can't judge this for yourself in most domains.

  From Gell-Mann Amnesia:

  If you or your company has EVER been the primary subject of a newspaper article, you know exactly what Crichton is talking about. The article is simply wrong. Not just wrong in minor detail, but wrong in motivation, cause, implication, fundamental facts … everything.

Also you need to read www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rvpEF2mBLeZE9j53n/how-to-bounded-distrust.

A trick may be to follow content-producers that don't put the idea of news itself as their product. Direct news made sense in the era of newspapers, it doesn't in the internet era. By its very nature, news will find its way to you in the course of your normal interactions with people and what they've written.

In fact, waiting for them this way ensures relevance to you, and it's more likely you hear it when you're working on something associated and thus you may be in a better position to act in response to the news.

I suspect there's one field for which you'll still want to explicitly follow news: geopolitics. Or new laws. You don't hear about all of it from your friends, and sometimes it's relevant sooner than later.

• volt - Alessandro Volta
• watt - James Watt
• ampere - Andre-Marie Ampere
• ohm
• angstrom
• becquerel - Henri Becquerel (who shared a Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie (1867–1934) for discovering radiation)
• newton - Isaac Newton (1642–1726)

Sometimes it's useful to talk about what an ideal reasoner would do in a situation, but isn't it subjective? No, if by "ideal reasoner" we're talking about a being that, as efficiently as possible, solves the problem of satisfying their desires.

Sidenote: That can be confusing, because as humans, when we hear a person using language such as "efficiently optimize for my desires" we may picture an egotistical sociopath. And that may be reasonable in everyday contexts… but think yourself into philosophy discussion at the university, where they use words very exactly. What does it mean to optimize for your desires or goals?

It just means the same thing we all try to do all the time: a vegan optimizes for the goal of lessening animal suffering, etc.

Human goals may be often fuzzy and self-contradictory, but rarely can a human's set of goals be described as completely selfish. So "efficient optimization" or "ideal reasoning" is not about that.

Ideal reasoning just means, if for example you want to rule the world, figuring out the shortest path to do so that's still aesthetic to you (destroying the world with nukes can be a quick way to rule it, but that may not be what you actually want, so you rule that path out). Or if you want to end animal farming, then ideal reasoning means figuring out the shortest way to bring about that result. Or if you want good friends, then ideal reasoning is finding a practical way to get good friends into your life. And so on.

With that definition in mind, there are all sorts of logical proofs about how an ideal reasoner would treat the information they have and any new information received. Failing to act according to these proofs opens up for taking sub-optimal actions (Dutch-booking)… and human beings can and often do act so sub-optimally that they fail at their quest!

Yet, we do know many basic principles of ideal reasoning! They just tend to hard to apply faithfully, due to computational limits, cognitive biases and self-defeating psychology.

How do we know about those principles? There's a whole tower of prescriptions arising from probability theory, decision theory and game theory, resting atop a small set of mathematical axioms and consistent with them and each other. Philosophers have thought about this sort of thing for a long time, and the only real way to reject a given prescription of probability theory is to reject one of the axioms it rests on, such as the staggeringly basic axiom of modus ponens: "if A implies B, and I learn A is true, then I also know B is true". As you can imagine, it'll look pretty ridiculous to try to deny any of them. And then, upon not denying any of them, the rest follows.

• In Dune, a Truthsayer learns to tell truth from lies by speaking only truth so much that they detect its absence. While not realistic, it's a beautiful idea.
• Reading 2001 (the book aged better than the film) was a magical experience. Part of learning Joy in the Merely Real
• Hard sci-fi in particular helps against the Fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence.
  • Greg Egan writes totally possible worlds. Part of Binding yourself to reality, one of those hidden-core-of-rationality things. We should not have to hear about impossible worlds to feel wonder. The fact it seems so many people have a habit of only turning on their wonder-emotion when hearing impossible fiction seems tied to the fact almost no-one "looks at the world as if they've never seen it before". Someone said: "When people praise me for that, it's a nice compliment, but wait – actually, I haven't seen it before. What, did everybody else get a preview?"
• Move past "savannah poets". The ability to write hard sci-fi (let alone rationalfic) makes for a litmus test on authors: the main reason authors don't write hard sci-fi, is that they can't: they are savannah poets, retelling the same old Great Stories that find a form or another in every culture that has ever existed: stories on love, loss, vengeance, jealousy et cetera. Savannah poets can anthropomorphize Jupiter just fine, but fall silent if forced to regard Jupiter a spinning ball of gas, knowing not what to do with that. It takes a developed and scientifically up-to-date mind to begin to have a chance of describing a possible world rather than yet another impossible world—the latter is easy. You're liable to draw moral lessons from the fiction you read (even just subconsciously, see availability heuristic), so if you're gonna read fiction anyway, why not minimize exposure to authors with the same old systematic misunderstandings of reality that's been all too common over the past thousand generations?