The main problem there is you then donât get any nuance, and often have no idea whatâs really going on. Well, as much as you possibly could know whatâs really going on.
This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.
It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I canât imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individualâs interpretation of it. The solution canât be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.
Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editorsâ biases, the advertisersâ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they arenât covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.
It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We werenât built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.
This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the authorâs book? It seems reactionary for no reason.
A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. Whatâs relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.
Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then â later â investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.
I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.
Anyone try to click the link to the study on how âlinks are badâ â the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, âmagazine/â, I got a working link: www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/
Replying to myself: the last time the news mattered in my daily life was this week when I considered flying to Fairbanks, Alaska and discovered that prices are significantly higher than a year ago. I suspect the hike relates to the grounding of planes as seen from that video of the door plug failure and the FAAs subsequent grounding of that type of plane (and possibly a second type now, but last I heard that was not yet a hard grounding, but only inspection). This gives me a general idea that perhaps prices will drop when the planes are back in service and Iâm better off waiting until then.
The car and bridge one, is an example of âhuman interestâ news, which some reporters, and news channels, try very hard to push for (âafter seeing your son ripped to shreds and your husband fall into a volcano⊠tell us, how did that make you feel?â). Call me a monster, but I donât care about that. Or rather, I already know that theyâll feel devastated, no need to rub it in.
Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events?
Unfortunately, yes. There are whole news channels which, as soon as they get done with one emotional trigger news, they switch to the next one.
The article is oversensationalized, but it does hide a grain of truth: avoid that kind of sources, and youâll be better off.
Funny, I was just thinking about posting this, even though itâs like ten years old! For anyone whoâd like to read more on this topic from the articleâs author, have a look here (PDF).
After I freaked out during the last couple elections, I basically stopped most news. Itâs pretty unclear what I could do with it anyway. The theoretical benefit was mostly around politics, but the vast masses just do it as a team sport, so my being âinformedâ by the news isnât helping hold politicians accountable or affecting elections. Outside of politics, except for the information about COVID during the pandemic, most specifically the vaccines, I have a hard time thinking of any useful information.
Even local news usually isnât too relevant. I guess the âavoid this intersection because of power out to lights, flooding, icing or whateverâ could be helpful, but usually I donât get it till itâs later on anyway.
If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong
Is that a thing about neurotypicals, or just people without any selfcontrol?
I know I can compensate all the rhetorics, because I can spot most of the techniques by name, never get âpulled inâ by the news, extract only the facts (if there are any), then contrast them with other sources, before âmaking my mindâ about anything. Iâm not afraid of saying âbeats me, I donât know enoughâ, until I do learn enough to build a consistent picture without holes or contradictions (doesnât mean Iâm always right, just coherent). Most times when I look at news, I end up taking away maybe a single sentence, which almost never is the one being highlighted.
There is also picking which news sources to care about. Right now I only know about two sources that are somewhat impartial: one of them is the weather channel, and the other a news meta-debate where they like inviting people with opposite points of view, without letting it turn into a cage match.
As for the rest of the article⊠itâs just describing the techniques used to produce what I like to call ânews for toddlersâ: fake human interest, full of rhetorical resources, cut down into tidbits easy to chew and swallow, aimed at eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one (BTW, theyâre the same techniques used by trolls).
You shouldnât care about âthat kindâ of news. There are other kinds, like scientific breakthroughs, investigative reports, or news meta-analyses, that you might want to care about. Or whether to take an umbrella tomorrow.
For the last several months I reduced my news intake and unfollowed a lot of stress-inducing accounts on social media. I have been happier and more relaxed. Can recommend.
No more than the more common types of viruses and other steadily-evolving microbes though, plus humans have not changed genetically all that much from chimps even from 6+ million years ago, so most of this is clickbait hype.
We do need to maintain science funding around the world though - the next pandemic could strike at any time, without warning (as the last one showed us), and gee it sure would be good if we could be ready, with modern tools to meet whatever challenge comes our way.
Otherwise it is all too easy to fall for bait traps such as what happened with GISAID, which said the words that people wanted to hear but then were not skeptical enough to look at the source behind who was saying them. So now thatâs a treasure trove of data lost to the public as a result.:-(
i donât drive often, maybe once or twice a week, and the car always has NPR on. other than that, iâll skim headlines, but donât tend to read them unless itâs something positive or local.
i do read up on the candidates nearing election day.
Detaching yourself from the reality of whatâs happening in the world is certainly one way of coping, but IMO unless youâre doing it to protect your mental health (in which case I highly recommend reducing your news consumption), it is just a form of isolationism at best, and an abdication of our shared human responsibility to protect and help each other at worst.
Let me reiterate: if you are seeing your mental health decline as a result of news consumption, you should reduce that consumption, or at least make changes to which news sources you consume.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
I strongly disagree with the person in this articleâs recommendation of detachment for the average person. This is akin to advocating for political non-participation, because how can you intelligently assess who is best to represent you in the world if you donât know the state of the world?
We on the Left (rightfully) criticize people who cannot seem to care about an issue unless or until it personally affects them⊠well guess how they got there; not being informed about anything external to their own immediate lives.
Itâs quite the privilege to be able to cut off externalities and be happy; many people do not have the luxury of being able to do that, because those externalities will intrude into their lives whether they like it or not, like Roe being overturned.
/rant
Since you asked for recommendations, I only really have one that worked for me, which was to cut off social media news (i.e. ditching Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit).
All 3 of those were news⊠combined with some of the worst takes on that news by the horrible people on those sites. I donât need to hear a bunch of conservatives and white nationalists and misogynists and racists (apologies for the redundancy) give their takes on the news, especially because we know that they gain an outsize representation on social media due to âinteractionâ being rewarded, good or bad.
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. I bet some of it is because people were skimping on heating last winter. Now that the prices are back to normal I think people will heat (and cool) more again. I know I have not watched my heating as scrupulously as last winter (even though I use very little energy đ)
Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.
The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.
This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. Itâs only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then itâs both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.
While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take whatâs an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.
Just for starters, thereâs almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. Thereâs a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the studentâs advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.
Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say âHmm, thatâs interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,â or even âI wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.â
For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in donât resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. Thereâs less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.
Iâm very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldnât ride too far on this particular horse.
On a tad bit related note I remember reading that it was common for people to be buried with all of their possessions and that women occasionally had hunting equipment buried with them.
Iâm just adding it here because I feel itâs connected to the idea that eating lots of meat is naturally manly. Apparently itâs just an exaggerated fantasy thatâs part of our own modern culture and the reality seems to be that we were effectively âflexitariansâ and that women to some extent hunted too.
theguardian.com
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