Got stress?

Last week, in this space, I mentioned that people have told me the news is making them feel stressed out. By coincidence, I have noticed that on Feb. 16, Bloomberg’s website ran an article titled “How to Stay Sane in a World of Crazy News.” Bloomberg is a name associated with New York City, and the scope of its article pertained to recent political contentions in the U.S. It can, however, remind us of a more general factor in modern life: Too much immersion in the news can induce anxiety.

This applies to Saipan every bit as much as it does in the big city. In fact, it might apply even more to Saipan sometimes. Anyway, if stress can be the cost of indulging the ever-quicker news cycle, then what are the benefits? I don’t have an answer to that, but it’s worth thinking about.

I know professionals on Saipan who find that following CNMI events, particularly the constant stream of intrigues rooted in the CNMI’s idiosyncratic way of administrating itself, so exasperating that they regard news consumption as an unsavory chore. Sometimes they farm it out to subordinates.

Anyway, no matter where you are, you might have a limit on how much news and how many news-related discussions you want to entertain. Then again, you might not have a limit. Preferences vary widely on this note. I think the most common outlook is “more is better.”

I figured I’d see what a couple of philosophers have to say about the matter.

We’ll start with Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1817 to 1862. Thoreau, whose most famous work was the book, Walden, certainly has a fan base on Saipan.

Thoreau was no fan of chatter for the sake of chatter, nor of technology for the sake of technology.

Here’s a quote from Walden: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

That’s certainly a curmudgeonly outlook, but that’s where the charm is, and it is part of a distinct thread in the old-school American outlook.

Next we’ll consult Nassim Nicholas Taleb via his 2012 book, Antifragile. Taleb, who has a serious background in mathematics, understands the nature of data, and, reciprocally, the “noise” that can mask data.

“In science,” writes Taleb, “noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless…”

I’ve seen this in some trade publications that I’ve followed, publications that deal in technical and specialized topics. Much of what is said is just stuff being said about stuff that’s being said. If you’d like to get the attention of your peers so they know how smart you are, then you can chime in and say something about what’s being said about the stuff being said. This noise eventually becomes an Easter egg hunt without that pesky little detail, the actual egg.

If you’ve ever worked for a large business that has gotten swept up in this cycle, as management ranks become ever-more immersed in “data” and ever-more separated from the actual reality at the retail level, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

More Taleb: “A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities.” That sure seems contrary to intuition, but there’s some insightful logic here, namely that being too enthralled with data can tempt us to mess with situations we don’t really understand.

I don’t know if people will be receptive to that observation at an abstract level. I doubt I would have believed it unless I had seen so many examples in the real world. I know that most of the boneheaded business decisions I’ve seen weren’t based on too little data, but were based on too much of it, which made it a convincing imposter that overruled simpler heuristics. To be fair here, perhaps the data itself wasn’t to blame, but the misuse of it sure was. In any event, the absurdity of the situation is that being precisely wrong is often valued more than being approximately right.

The more I see of this, the more I realize that wisdom and knowledge are entirely different things. I doubt they have lunch together more than once a year. Even if they do, it’s probably tense and they’re all phony nicey-nicey to each other, just trying to politely endure the ordeal on the off chance that they’ll need to call the other one for some help someday.

Anyway, the bottom line is that modern life has become the constant grasping for more and more information. Contemporary sensibilities regard this as sophisticated and necessary. By contrast, some ancient outlooks see constant grasping as a path to disenchantment and suffering.

So, which will prove true, the new wisdom or the old wisdom? It’s not for me to say. Hey, maybe the answer will be covered in the news soon. I’ll keep on checking.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at EdStephensJr.com. His column runs every Friday.