I was in the same room as a lit television on Wednesday evening.

[Cainad (dec.)]

            I feel like I'm missing some key element of that line of reasoning... anybody?

You have to take into account the context that it was made in; that is, related to Black Swan events.

If you read the newspaper as a way of predicting what is or will be important, you won't be able to be very accurate, as the news reports on the past.

Or something like that.  I was up late last night, and am a bit fuzzy this morining.

I finished Fooled By Randomness recently; that's pretty much it, except for a few points:

1) Many journalists are dunderheads who barely know what they're writing about
2) Getting a rapid-fire stream of information (i.e. reading the business news every day) will drive you nuts with anxiety because losses are more emotionally painful than an equivalent gain can make up for, by a significant margin.
3) Something else that I also am forgetting

[Cain]

true, but also seems to invite the middle ground fallacy

The American media is guilty as hell of this, at least as a mode of operation.  No-one is really right, or wrong.  Just pick two narrow, yet opposed viewpoints and treat them as equally valid, with the truth elevated as some sort of mystery that probably lies between the two, but can never be discovered for sure.

Which is how you end up with Birthers being treated as serious debaters, on a level with people involved in making public policy.

[Rumckle]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of Black Swan) says you shouldn't ever read the paper or watch the news. Because they're reporting directly on an event, you have no choice but to inherit their filter/opinions/framing. Much better to hear about the news from your friends, who have already aggregated what they think is important.

            I feel like I'm missing some key element of that line of reasoning... anybody?

The thing I get there is that there is (from reading an article of his and an interview of him) that so much shit is reported in the news, most of which is either a) unimportant or b) just being repeated (ignoring the whole opinion side of things), that following all the news is just a waste of time, and you can get by on just what your friends are talking about. Kinda like the Brave New World thingy, drowning out all the important information in a sea of unimportant stuff.

Of course if all your friends did this it would just become a game of Chinese whispers.

[Triple Zero]

dont read article or interview, read "fooled by randomness". it's good stuff.

[Brotep]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of Black Swan) says you shouldn't ever read the paper or watch the news. Because they're reporting directly on an event, you have no choice but to inherit their filter/opinions/framing. Much better to hear about the news from your friends, who have already aggregated what they think is important.

            I feel like I'm missing some key element of that line of reasoning... anybody?

Hm.  Obviously Taleb is not endorsing/talking about group polarization...
I guess all the discussion and satire that ensues helps parse information, so by the time a story makes its way to you by way of your friends, it is divorced from the strictures of the news broadcast, converted into free-floating fact(oids).

One more thing to consider is, there's tons of shit going on in the world constantly, and most of it doesn't make the news.  Even the act of deciding whether something is newsworthy introduces a fundamental bias.