No news is good news

Listening to an interview with psychologist Steven Pinker today I was shocked by an idea that I have anticipated many times in one way or another, but I had never heard so clearly expressed: good things, progress, advance is normally a gradual process that happens over a long period of time, but catastrophes and setback can happen in a second. Thinking more deeply, it is nothing but another manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics: everything in the universe has a much stronger tendency to chaos than to order, and left to its own devices it will naturally end in the former, sometimes rather suddenly; only through careful work can a system reduce its entropy (and always at the cost of an even greater increase of entropy outside that system). In layman's words, it is so much easier to destroy than to create.

This asymmetry in duration and the psychological fact that losses are felt more negatively than the pleasure we derive from equivalent gains (the so-called risk aversion) explains why the mainstream media (and also our social networks) are filled with bad news. Picturing a casual conversation between two conversations outside the pub of a small farming community, it is easy to imagine that the conversation circles around who fell sick or died, who lost part of the harvest or a cow, whose tractor broke down or whose field got flooded with the last rains. That makes good the saying that "No news is good news", because if anything bad had happened, the news would already have reached you. And it is remarkable that this idiom can be traced all the way back to King James I of England in 1616, but it probably had been of common use already for centuries.

Photo: ProfDEH

 

The flip side of the expression is that good news are no news. In a sense, they are rarely real news, because they normally have a long time coming, and they certainly lack the shock and fear factor of bad news. This explains, on one side, our tendency to doom scrolling, reading a never-ending stream of bad news, each one giving us a fleeting impression of dread that we quickly forget to get the next bitter bite.

It also explains a quote often attributed to Mark Twain:

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

A significant portion of our daily news feed is composed of click-bait: headlines explicit enough to sound sensational while retaining enough to pique your curiosity. This kind of news thrives on scandal, fearmongering and twisting the truth, but feeds our appetite for news, in particular for bad ones. And this hunger is neither new nor limited to Anglo-Saxon societies. Already in 1585 the Neapolitan friar Giordano Bruno wrote in his Heroic Furies "Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato (If it is not true, it is very well invented)" which already conveys the idea that good stories do not necessarily need to stick to reality.

However, there is another conundrum of equally difficult solution: what to do with the truth once we find it? Shall we expose it for everybody to know or shall we choose the right location and time to reveal it? This question can be seen as a fight between democracy, where everybody will have a say, even if many are uninformed or disengaged from the discussion at hand, and benevolent despotism, where a single person, hopefully with good counsel, will take the decision for everybody. This conflict is vividly displayed in the 2011 book Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey, where detective Joe Miller advocates for carefully assessed dissemination of the information while captain Jim Holden supports the idea of "the right to know". I finished reading this book, which is the first part of The Expanse series, a few days ago and was very pleased because, as is the case in many books that are turned into movies or series, it not only contains the overall arc, which has been followed very closely in the filming, but also very rich insights into what the characters think and feel, elements that would have no place in a movie, but are delightful when read.

Over the length of the book I have teetered among the two positions, understanding and supporting each one in turn, but in the end I decided for the materialistic approach embodied by Miller, which in the end is not all that different from the Triple Test of the ancient Greek Socrates: if what you are going to say is neither demonstrably true, nor kind to the listener, nor useful to one of you, you'd better keep it to yourself. I leave you with that idea tonight. Have a nice evening.