My wife and I used to
enjoy watching the news, particularly Morning Joe on MSNBC. She loved drinking her coffee while listening to the show, and I enjoyed the banter and dialogue.
It started to become apparent that her favorite morning activity was affecting her mood, and mine, and not in a good way. The debates and bantering between the anchors and their guests made for some entertainment, but it also surreptitiously induced a pernicious low-grade level of anxiety. It clearly made Lea Ann much more anxious. And then there were the times when it was not so subtle and surreptitious - and it could foul my mood dramatically, especially over the recent past.
End result? The news virus was infecting us and spreading its DNA (or RNA - you get the idea).
A few years back, we realized the impact watching the news was having on us. So we cut out all news except the paper on Sunday, and even then, we usually just check the headlines, if that.
I bring all this up because I recently came across this observation by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a mathematical statistician, former options trader, and risk analyst) in his book Antifragile that really hit home:
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio.
And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations.
But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
Not just suckers, but one step below!
There is a lesson here for the tsunami of shit (news, facebook, Instagram, email, and the like) coming at all of us day in and day out:
What You Focus On Grows
The vaccination: to be as intentional every day about what you focus on, over time, and ignore the daily noise. Focus on connecting with people at home and work. Focus on what really matters most to you and what brings you a sense of fulfillment and joy, since the energy it creates will spread to others, and this becomes the vaccination that can help cure our powerful genetic tendency to focus on who and what is wrong in the world.
It works, and it is powerful.
