▲ 457 points
back
350 comments
The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.
The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.
[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
> voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent
I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in <thing> events in the future”.
Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.
A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.
It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.
Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation.
Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.
An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.
I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.
So well put!
Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).
This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.
Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.
Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that
This is probably it. It's addictive due to hardwiring in the brain, just like sugar.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind.
Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging.
Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.
"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."
- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.
“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
A past thread about one of the papers linked to in the OP:
Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white.
Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me.
Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.
gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"
closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.
example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.
a cheap way of assessing relevance score.
I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world
This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best.
"Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news.
I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.
One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
> Looking away is not the fix …
> The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. …
> Containing news consumption to defined windows of time …
> Choosing depth over volume
Golden.
TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."
It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.
Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today.
Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion.
But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance.
The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over.
No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance.
Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.
It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news.
But the author missed some key nuances.
- Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person.
- The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization.
- People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.
Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
All this at a time when world poverty is in continual decline, medical science reaches continual new heights, crime is in multi-year decline, etc.
It is often said that the average person today has better food, shelter, health services, etc. today than a king had just a short while ago.
Bad news sells, though. Don’t buy it.
The brain was not designed at all.
If you want all your bad news once a week, you might be interested in: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/, which my team writes.
I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.
I wonder if this applies to seeing successful people as well.
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:
That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution.
Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates.
My focus is insane when adrenaline hits.
I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.
Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.
On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?
On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?
We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.
There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally.
When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning:
> The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry.
The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.
This makes me feel like an alien.
I feel perfectly happy sorting by worst taking the top K and then understanding what can be mitigated etc
Not doing this is immoral IMO.
But I hear and understand certain kinds of people who say they can't deal with hearing about anything remotely unpleasant.
But then these same kinds of people seem to enjoy the kinds of horror or thriller movies I detest.
I feel alone and like an alien.
Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
mp4tomp3.lol
Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists.
I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.