Newswork

Here is an unfortunate truth that will nonetheless make your life better if you accept: Being “informed” about something takes a lot of work, and that work is generally not worth it.

Have you ever heard the phrase “know enough to be dangerous?” It refers to the fact that knowing a little bit about something often makes you more consistently wrong than just knowing nothing about something. I don’t know anything about nuclear reactors. If someone asked me a question about nuclear reactors, I would answer that I didn’t know. If someone asked me to make a decision about nuclear reactors, I would immediately demand that they find someone much more qualified. Therefore, I don’t pose much danger in that area.

I know a little about baseball. If you asked me a question about baseball, I’d try to answer it – with a good chance that I’d be wrong. If you asked me to stand in and be an umpire in a minor league game, there’s some chance you could convince me to do it, and I’d certainly foul it up (ha! baseball puns!). I’m aware of this, but that’s because I’m currently thinking about it. I might have missed it if I had been unprepared. That’s “knowing enough to be dangerous.” I know enough to think I know a lot when in reality I don’t know much at all.

Intellectually, you know this. If you think about any topic in which you’re a true expert, you know that it can be fun to talk to people who know nothing about that topic, but incredibly frustrating to talk to people who know “enough to be dangerous.” That level of knowledge is an essential step on the way to true expertise, but you have to maintain intellectual humility while you’re there. It’s also essential to recognize that the first step is only the first step, and only worth it if you plan to go further.

If I read one book on the Spanish-American War, that won’t make me an expert. In fact, it will probably make me more prone to mistakes regarding the Spanish-American War than if I hadn’t read any books on it, for the reasons I explained above. So there are only two good reasons to read such a book: Either I’m just curious and am reading it as entertainment while maintaining a firm grasp of my own lack of true knowledge, or because I intend to go much deeper and become truly informed about the topic.

Here is a bad reason to read just one book about the Spanish-American War: “I want to be informed about the Spanish-American war so that I can discuss it and have opinions on it and maybe even influence others about it, and I think reading that one book is sufficient for this.”

So if learning only a little bit about a topic and then staying there is worse than either learning a lot about a topic or learning nothing about a topic, what would you think about someone who knows only a little about a lot of topics?

That person is definitely not “informed” in any sense of the word. That person is just systematically wrong about a lot of stuff. They don’t even know it.

But what I’m describing is the median person who just casually consumes news. It’s bad enough if they’re reading a range of topics in actual news sources; it’s much worse if they’re getting this “news” from social media or things like that. It’s better to have no opinion on most topics than to have bad opinions on most topics.

So if you spend an hour every day (or more!) reading the news, paying attention to trending stories on social media, or other such activities – all you’re doing is training yourself to be wrong on a wider range of topics. The people who produce those things aren’t any better (journalists aren’t experts in those topics either, after all), and they’re passing their error, bias, and noise onto you.

Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. Listen to me: Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. If you have not worked hard, then you are not an expert. And if you aren’t an expert, then you’re probably wrong about a lot of stuff. You should not consider “a little knowledge” useful for absolutely anything except gaining more knowledge. Reading that one book on the Spanish-American War is a great start to becoming an expert, but it doesn’t qualify me to do anything else.

Now again, remember that it’s also okay to just read a book on the Spanish-American War because I want to, because I find it interesting. There’s no purity test there, and if you just genuinely like watching the news because you find it entertaining, go you. But I’ve never met anyone like that. The people I know who relentlessly consume “pop news” do it because they think it’s making them smarter, more informed, and more justified in having strong opinions on things. I’ve never met anyone who watched two weeks of news coverage on a political event and then calmly said “Well, I don’t actually know enough about the details of this event to form a strong opinion.” Could you even imagine that?

Whatever topics you find important enough to become an expert in will never be covered accurately and in sufficient detail by “news.” In fact, if you’re an expert in something and the news happens to cover a story relating to that topic, you will inevitably laugh at how wrong they got it; that’s the nature of “enough to be dangerous.” So don’t fall into that yourself. Be an expert on a few things, and be humbly and nobly ignorant on the rest. Live a happy life.