This post won't be about indie rock! But I do want to pick up on a bigger point made by Amanda in her post on that subject. She writes:

[I]t's hard to tell in the melee what's going to matter. If I was around in 1960, I'd probably dismiss the whole finding that radio listeners and TV viewers of the presidential debate had different takes on who won. That strikes me immediately as a fluffy distraction story. In truth, it became a profound statement about the direction of our politics, sometimes given more profundity than it deserves. No one would have guessed in 1963 that the Beach Boys would be the single biggest influence on indie rock in 2009, either. At a certain point, we have to do our best and worry less about how much we can control the outcomes.

I absolutely agree about our relative inability to control, or even to predict, which stories from our current era will rate as important in history's judgment. But I think we can also agree that even to attempt thinking along those lines will immediately rule out whole swaths of our current news discourse. If you even try to ask the question about your news -- will we care about this in three months, let alone a year, or ten? -- then your sense of "what's going on" will become considerably different.

Readers of my book will notice a few references, here and there, to Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, and it might not come as a surprise to Taleb fans that I found his book very influential on my thinking. One of his central themes -- which he illustrates mostly in financial markets, but also in life more generally -- is that much of what we see as "data" is actually just irrelevant, random noise. But that noise causes us to tell stories about the world that simply aren't accurate.

Which comes back to Amanda's point: how well can we succeed in separating the useful data from the noise, and should we even try? I think the answers to those questions are (a) not especially well, but (b) yes. Yes, because (as I said above) the very act of trying will cull the worst of the chaff; and also because trying in and of itself ennobles the discourse, improves our psychological well-being, and renders us -- in the realm of politics, at least -- more effective.