“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.”
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...
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
"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
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...
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.
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).
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.
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things
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.
My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?
> 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 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
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.
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.
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.
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.
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
I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
"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."
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.”
https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...
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
"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.
It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
>We should be aware of current events
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...
If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?
What conclusion? I am talking about not having any conclusions at all.
> You plan to do nothing about them.
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.
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).
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.
Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things
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.
My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.
People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?
Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.
I plan to vote for a Democrat for the rest of my life. You know, the bare minimum to being a good person.
Congratulations, you are everything that's wrong with politics these days.
The two party system is what's wrong with politics, along with social media, bad faith political advocacy, and the GOP.
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
> 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.
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
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented 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.
I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.
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.
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.
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.
Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
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.
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.
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:
https://leash.ax
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475
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
For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
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.
"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)
I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.
A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed.
I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
"Not well adapted to", perhaps.