I don't read newspapers, or watch news, or follow current events at all, except for hn, and I agree that most if not all news is of completely no consequence to my life but I do have ~130 feeds in my rss reader and derive a lot of value from them.

From 10 or so comics that are pure distraction (but great to steal jokes from), through blogs on fashion and style (at least I now know when I'm terribly dressed) to life-changing, paradigm-shifting feeds like Overcoming Bias (it's about signalling), The Last Psychiatrist (we're all narcissists) or Barking up the wrong tree (science delivered in tabloid style).

So instead of turning the noise down, this advice allows you to pick your kind of noise.

I think you're using RSS very well (unlike what I used to do).

I like Apple products and use/write for them. I used to have MacRumors, 9to5mac, Cult of Mac, TUAW, The Apple Blog, TC, and a dozen more Apple-related feeds in my RSS (among other feeds). When there was a keynote or a new product announcement, all those websites would publish essentially the same thing over and over again, and I had to 'mark all as read'. I was using RSS wrong, and I'm glad I changed my bad habit. You're using it right and I'm sure you derive value from such a diverse collection of blogs!

I ditched rss readers a long time ago and refuse to use any service with an 'unread' counter except email.

I actually find RSS extremely useful for keeping up on scientific journals and blogs. For instance, there's no way I'll check every journal that might have papers of interest to me, but if I subscribe then I'll get thirty papers or so every month. If i haven't seen anything of interest in a few issues (or blog posts) then I remove it. I also subscribe to R bloggers, stats.stackexchange.com and the R tag on Stackoverflow. I've learned a huge amount from these sites, and for me RSS is a way to avoid pointlessly surfing news/political/science sites for hours. YMMV.

could you link me those sci journals and blogs? they'll be useful for a side project I'm working on.

I agree with this. I still keep some news/tech news sites in my Google Reader, but the vast majority of feeds are ones that update infrequently, from once a day and fewer, most of them being developer/designer blogs.