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.
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”.
The solution is more guns, or so I'm told. If only more people were "packing heat" then surely criminals wouldn't dare to commit crimes.
Just disregard the circular firing squads that too often occur when these would-be heroes start overreacting to everything, including each other.
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.
And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.
Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.
In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.
There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
Perhaps folks are also upset the DCs will host AI that may affect their job prospects or at least compensation?
Isn't the salt lake an environmental disaster waiting to happen, especially as it is drained for more development?
Not strictly true for presidential elections.
My vote cast in CT literally matters more than someone else's vote cast in CA. Yay electoral college!
For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?
At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.
For ICE it’s kinda a big stretch can we agree? And in this case the person does have control. This person does have agency over the issue and should regularize their situation as soon as possible.
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.
Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.
A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.
To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.
That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.
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).
I think it would be good for democracy if lawmakers had to put in writing what the law is supposed to accomplish AND if that were something legally binding.
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.
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.
As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)
“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.”
- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.
- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.
- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.
Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
- to persuade
- to develop my worldview (speaking, typing, thinking all use different neural pathways)
- to collect feedback and be challenged
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”
Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.
I also would acknowledge the intent of offering neurotypical as an alternative might be kind.
However I also agree "normal" works quite well. It is especially distinguished by the quotes as "normal" and subjective, not normatively valued.
What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.
I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.
They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?
On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
Mental health is important as well.
I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.
Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)
Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.
The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.
By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").
Perhaps someone should clarify though that most of us are looking for legal means to rattle the shackles of our (Tr/B)illionaire overlords.
The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.
It’s like Down’s paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting). Being a paradox doesn’t make it untrue.
Bicycles and public transportation.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally. So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
I never debated that.
"And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city."
But this is not correct. You can get a 4 room apartment in Leipzig for 750 € a month (but of course you won't be the only one applying).
Also you may want to email dang about your rate limitation. Your recent comments seem fine enough to me to fix that.
in poorer places people use more bikes, or just walk.
the car based spots are from wealth, and many had bicycle friendly infrastructure that was torn down to build super highways for cars
On what planet is getting your groceries on a bike "more privileged" than driving?
I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
So, not entirely nothing.
However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
Media only gives you super-hearing.
Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.
And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).
Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).
So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
isnt that leaving out the current only nuclear power in the region?
But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.
At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.
On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.
Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
As far as I'm aware there is no reason to believe so
I remember Bennett's shuttle diplomacy between Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and he struck me like a person who values peace more than Netanyahu does.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
Such an option was offered to him and was refused.
A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
People don't do that.
Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.
Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.
You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.
People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.
The US has an extreme case of it, with their 2 parties system, but most countries can't keep 4 different issues actively guiding politics.
The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.
You vote for who you were told to vote for.
He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
(Unlike the meme-puppets who now believe that some genocides are better than other genocides).
it would be a different case, and very likely a different iranian response if israel had started the war, and the US did its more typical "is nearby and shoots down missiles flying overhead"
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
America has a lot of Iran hawks, especially in goverment/military circles. They got their way.
Trumps military/war track record so far is a.) Iran war b.) Venezuela kidnapping c.) pro-Russia stance in Ukraine d.) board of peace composed of dictators and murderers e.) regular boatsmen murders f.) trying to steal Greenland. The Harris "refuses to take pro-palestinian side and refuses to abandon Israel entirely, but still not enough for pre-Israel side to accept her" is weak sauce.
Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.
world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen
the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive
fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
Is this referring to the flotilla full of food sailing towards Gaza that was invaded and kidnapped by Israeli pirates inside the national waters of Greece?
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
if you want to be able to have say, cheaper government, you need to be elect local officials on the palestine side, so that folks other than just the pro-israel ones can bid
But a company boycotting others for political/religious agendas is not going to be able to provide the cheapest/best service, it’s therefore not optimal to go with companies that practice BDS.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?
So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.
There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...
In fact most people have, in some way.
Neither are a positive finding.
I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.
Was he a fascist during that time?
Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
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 know some people who moved to Delaware beaches and they told me that there the local news is just folks talking about government administration stuff, which was pretty mind-blowing to me. I would like to check this out.
I more and more identify with that ethos. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be miserable from the bombastic 24/7 news cycle being shoved in my face when I can't do much about any of it.
So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it.
That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.
But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen.
Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but I can predict it will be stupid.
If there's a way to find happiness without social media, unfortunately, it won't be posted on social media.
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...
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.
"Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
> 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.
I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.
Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it all starts falling apart again.
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.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
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.
>the people benefitting
>them
What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.
It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality.
The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.
Didn't think that was needed to be pointed out.
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.
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.
There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.
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?
A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years.
However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough.
I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
> I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
Thanks ! It's a bit sad D.Kahneman was already of pretty old age when the replication crisis hit the field. I saw a few of his talks from a few years later but don't remember him addressing any of the underlying research being put into doubt.
Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.
Then the answer is more clear as yes and no. Obviously much of our tech today adapts to modern innovations and standards, but it would not be hard to quickly find examples where even the most cutting edge tech are still being affected by the earliest decisions or natural limitations.
The interesting part to me is that we have many relics of earlier choices, but the reason they were set that way and the reasons we kept these choices around are completely different.
For instance choosing to start time at 1970 was to work around space limitations IFAIK, but we're still using that norm out of inertia and compatibility concerns.
I think that kind of logic applies to many human things as well, for instance at one point physical differences between men and women had a huge practical impact on the kind of "work" they could optimally do, yet the same kind of labor segregation today would come from a totally different place.
Sparks my imagination. Like sibling relations when you’re old. You must go back further and further to a time of innocence and ignorance to find agreement and common ground.
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.
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.
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.
I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).