I have found myself worrying about global politics, climate change, microplastics and whole lot of other things. Things that I have no control over. Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things but constant influx of such information is not helping anyone. It’s critical to regulate what we consume on web because our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume. Our thoughts get influenced by what information we are consuming. Seriously ditch the feed that someone else is curating for you!
I've come to a similar conclusion. I'm reconsidering the relative importance of different kinds of info I consume(timely and otherwise). I've concluded I've become way too passive in that decision, and that's clearly unhealthy.
It's not that I want to be completely ignorant of e.g. US politics, but maybe I try a 30 minutes summary of concrete facts per week, rather than what I used to get when I would drop onto national news sites as a distraction or focus break.
If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
In that vein I mostly consume the Wikipedia current events portal [1] for my global and national news. It’s relatively neutral and the pinned topics at the top give a good overview of the important stuff with the option to dive into more specific articles or primary sources. It still suffers from selection bias (i.e. Notre Dame reopening is at the top while the Syrian regime falling is a footnote at the moment) but it feels like the right signal to noise ratio.
I agree with this approach and would like to hear other ways that people avoid/ameliorate perverse (in the sense of incentives) editorialization in their news consumption
One thing that I do when worrying about global conflict is look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_confli... and sort by e.g. "2024 fatalities". It's not totally objective, or without its own issues, but going by the prior that the lives lost are of equal "importance" it's illuminating to see how well it lines up with mainstream news coverage.
Until the start of the current hot wars in Ukraine and Palestine there was a large gulf between what was ending human lives and what was generating column inches, even allowing for geopolitics and local languages.
My news diet mostly comes from the AP, national broadcasters in the EU, friends, and HN. I find surprisingly little interest in e.g. Sudan, Myanmar, Mexico, Yemen even allowing for the relative poverty and distance.
In response to Wikipedia being “relatively neutral”: “Multiple studies have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia in both article content and editor sanctioning.” [1]
For those of you unfamiliar, he was a well-known and serious political pundit who in recent years has been performing as a character (of the same name) who parodies milquetoast late night centre-left almost-comedy.
If I interviewed someone I considered a "true liberal", and similarly a "true conservative", and we all had lots of knowledge (like scientific studies) and argumentation skills, I expect the liberal would tend to be more correct. I don't know if that should be called "bias".
I think "liberal" and "conservative" are some of those words that were well chosen, perhaps because they are self-enforcing to an extent; I wouldn't know. More or less from first principles: a conservative prefers the status quo and the status quo is at least a local maximum for the conservative. Psychologically, conservatives tend to deal with fearful, uncertain things by clinging closer to the things they know are safe. On the other hand, liberals seek to change the status quo in the hopes of positive progress. They deal with uncertainty by embracing the source and taking a risk. The conservatives cling to the old teachings of the village that warn them to not eat white berries and to heed dreams of nebulous things. The liberals eat the berries and ignore the dreams, and sometimes they die (and bring death to the village) and sometimes they live.
(Don't put too much stock in reading what I am saying using the colloquial connotations of the words. They will only be more confusing.)
I do not say these things to disparage; although I of course have my own beliefs, I prefer understanding and no one is blatantly wrong for being a conservative or right for being a liberal. A conservative holds both right and wrong close to the chest; a liberal seeks them both out. When the conservative is right and the liberal is wrong, when the conservative is wrong and the liberal is right.... Three final points in this vein: most people will be conservatives; liberals will tend towards the truth; to be conservative and liberal are both qualities, with specific purpose and result, and as with all dual qualities there is a harmonious moderation.
To return to the topic at hand, I think it is fairly true of this reality that there is plenty of good that can be, and therefore plenty of riches for explorers to bring back. It does not matter, and it can't be said, if the explorers themselves are foolish or wise; every truth lies exactly in the (conclusion of the) journey. It is what is made of the journey that speaks to right or wrong. For example, we have a lot of evidence that favors modern medicine. It follows that people should not advocate for "healing crystals" and the sort.
To conclude, I will say that although I consider myself to favor being a liberal, and I tend to agree more with political factions that are ostensibly liberal ("the left", whatever that means), oftentimes I seem to align more with "the right". Take multiculturalism: I believe it is ultimately highly beneficial and scarcely harmful, but I agree with most of the short- and middle-term policies of a "right-wing" acquaintance on the topic. My reasoning diverges at some important points and my conclusion is quite different, but I think that is one of the closer agreements I would have with any of my acquaintances on short-term policy for multiculturalism. We each pursue that which we think is right. I admit many psychological biases, but I will say I try to be right and that I am a liberal, if I am to choose. But that is all I will say, and not words others may attribute to me.
> It's not that I want to be completely ignorant of e.g. US politics
For me, given I don't live on the continent let alone the country, I wish I was as ignorant of US politics as of Chinese politics.
US tech news is relevant, and to an extent politics influences tech, but I really don't need to know when e.g. Florida has a fight with Disney.
> If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
Possibly a silly question, but presumably you've tried asking the LLM to write the browser extension?
> I really don't need to know when e.g. Florida has a fight with Disney.
If Florida interferes in Disney's business - a very powerful company, especially powerful and important to the state of Florida - and if they get away with it, then, 1) such interference could have an enormous negative impact on the economy; 2) it empowers and entrenches corrupt people in power; 3) your business could be next by some other government; 4) it could spread to other aspects of your life.
Today many businesses, including even prominent news media, are trying to appease Trump, who appears to be following Florida's precedent.
> such interference could have an enormous negative impact on the economy
My main economic risk right now is that the German government is a mix of people who want to declare the current situation an economic emergency because without that they have a constitutional obligation to not borrow enough to stimulate it, vs. people who don't want to do that.
My second major risk is that if Ukraine and NATO collapses, Russian tanks may not stop until my house is a thousand kilometres in their rear view mirrors.
Not only is the specific fight the state of Florida had with the corporation of Disney not important, the state and the corporation are also not important.
Of course, different things impact different people in different ways. People in Brazil are less impacted by Ukraine than people in Germany are, generally speaking.
Still, other things being important doesn't make the Disney-Florida conflict less important. You denying or not seeing its importance doesn't make it less important.
You saying it doesn't make it so. The precedent of far-right state oppression of economic freedoms, political speech, businesses, and the free market would certainly affect you. Look at how the far right has spread across Germany and the US, and many places in between.
> The precedent of far-right state oppression of economic freedoms, political speech, businesses, and the free market would certainly affect you.
Nothing you do in the US is seen as a role model here. For both better and worse.
I mean, consider that the country I live in required the censorship of Wolfenstein 3D when it came out — it never copied US attitudes to freedom of speech in the first place. Likewise, even the (I think) more relaxed UK attitudes to political censorship are the kind of thing America would never accept, while the UK would never accept US attitudes to guns and even all the flag waving is seen as a bit sus.
Also, by US standards, almost all of us over here are basically what your politics would call communists — not just because of the huge massive statues the actual communists put up that nobody took down, e.g. https://maps.app.goo.gl/qFRPSDec3ujrX79bA, but just because the European (including UK) Overton Windows are almost entirely to the left of the US Overton Window.
The US has (theoretically) separation of Church and State, the UK has a state church, Germany has direct tax collections paid from your wages to your church (unless you ask to be excommunicated). And a few countries to the south (depending how you count the micro-states), there's the actual pope, head of all the catholics, telling people to chill about homosexuality.
The EU is what some of the louder US right wing voices in my lifetime have claimed they want the US federal government to be: only there to make inter-state trade easier, not have any real power over the states themselves. (The right wings within the EU are a lot more complex than that, as there's not much agreement between national politicians over all the member countries).
We're not on the same page about which side of the road to drive on, which units of measure to use, or if we should have conscription.
We're not copying the US, we have better things to spend our time on. Like who should pay to subsidise the Deutschlandticket, or if New Year fireworks should really be allowed to go continuously at full intensity from midnight to 3am plus sporadically from sunset to sunrise, or if we should be allowed to borrow money to resolve our economic depression.
> Look at how the far right has spread across Germany and the US, and many places in between.
And none of that had anything to do with Florida arguing with Disney.
I can tell, because that spread pre-dated the lawsuit by a decade. If anything, causality was reversed.
What did spread from the US and may have precipitated the far-right, was the impact of the misuse of the Black–Scholes model, but even then the biggest pain within the EU was the Greek economy and loans running through it, not Florida.
Disney is a bit different than a normal "powerful company". They are (were?) basically a government. Most companies don't have that sort of control in such a direct way. It is more scary that company had such power than a government stripping such power from them.
The problem is thinking that you have no control, an awful meme that is depressing - almost the definition of depressing - and self-fulfillingly self-defeating.
The most powerful force in the world is public opinion in Western countries, especially in the US - that's why so many powerful parties invest so much to manipulate it. There are many entire news organizations, endless opinion writers/etc., influence campaigns run by everyone from corporations to political organizations to state intelligence agencies, etc. What are they all working so hard at, investing so much in, if it doesn't matter?
Public opinion is formed by you acquiring information (including mis-info or dis-info), analyzing it, and communicating socially with others about it. Because many others don't do that, and most who do just repeat from received narratives, if you do it - if you form narratives - you have even more power.
No single person ever accomplished anything - everything worthwhile has been done by humans in groups. We are social creatures, not lone wolves - that's how we operate; if you act like a lone wolf then yes, you will be mostly powerless. But if you act within a group, and especially if you act intentionally and intelligently, you have significant power.
To support you, I will provide an example. Canada's health care system was started by just one person. His activism and relentlessness is what forced Canada to adopt it.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." — Margaret Mead
Most people don't find a small measure of indirect control equally reassuring as a large measure of direct control. For example I can directly control my water usage but have very little indirect control over the world's water usage. So psychologically things out of direct control tend to be felt like outside of control.
As for the exceptional people who managed to wrestle that small indirect control into direct control and an actual result, there's also the likelihood to consider. Most people aren't exceptional and they realize it, it's right there in the word. Trying and failing to be the exception can lead to at least as much but probably more psychological pressure and suffering as just feeling out of control.
I'm happy that those people exist but for almost everyone else, direct control is the only thing that gives them mental relief. If you follow negative content it just amplifies the initially almost inconsequential realization that you have close to no control into a very consequential bad state of mind.
The short of it is: don't go chasing the things that push your buttons the wrong way, and don't make unrealistic expectations especially about fixing the aforementioned things.
> Most people don't find a small measure of indirect control equally reassuring as a large measure of direct control. For example I can directly control my water usage but have very little indirect control over the world's water usage. So psychologically things out of direct control tend to be felt like outside of control.
I think the evidence is overwhelmingly otherwise. Most people in many, many cultures embrace democracy, for example; they mass protest - a seemingly universal human behavior; they organize themselves to achieve political ends - including over water usage.
As I said, this powerlessness is a meme. I think it's not only self-defeating, it's dangerous to society - it's irresponsible, because we are all responsible and we need the mass participation we have historically had.
You are right about the theoretical capabilities of the populace, but in practice the psychological profile is such that there isn't much weight to your words. Many people could each think no one else cares because collective action is nothing if a collective doesn't form. And to some extent, they're not wrong. If I devote my life to fighting oil pipeline activity, here and now, how much can I achieve? Am I going to be able to reach the critical mass of allies to push against one bill or event? How about n bills? So you're right, but you would be a lot more right if humans could act like unfeeling automatons when necessary.
> As I said, this powerlessness is a meme.
Exactly. And because it is, it has made us powerless. Funny how that works, genuinely.
> You are right about the theoretical capabilities of the populace, but in practice the psychological profile is such that there isn't much weight to your words. Many people could each think no one else cares because collective action is nothing if a collective doesn't form.
It's not theoretical. Collective action happens all the time - it's fundamental human behavior.
> Exactly. And because it is, it has made us powerless. Funny how that works, genuinely.
I am perfectly aware. But if I thought it was easy, I would've done it already. It's not a matter of whether we can achieve something, but whether we will. As it is, I and probably many others find it hard to devote mental and physical energy to causes that are fairly intractable and require sustained, collective willpower that is unlikely to manifest in practice.
Of course it is. Knowing the events shaping your world have repercussions on your personal decisions. What should I eat? What should I learn? What career should I embark upon? What should I invest in?
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
I mostly agreed with your first paragraph, but then the examples killed it for me.
Especially the second one: what a profoundly sad existence that someone would define their learning interests by what their boss recommends, with the sole goal of advancing one’s career. It isn’t even guaranteed the advice would be useful—bosses can be incompetent and petty too. And pray tell, if your boss follows that same advice, where does it stop? When does anyone have one original thought to pursue?
Food in the grocery store is stocked by corporations who have no concern for your health and want to fill you up with addictive fat and sugar. Eat instead natural ingredients, preferably from local growers or a farmer’s market.
Don’t limit yourself to local careers if nothing calls to you. Dare to dream even just a big bigger.
401k is a US concept. Most of the planet doesn’t live there.
Most people don’t consult their family doctors when food isn’t available or when they are confronted with a variation in recipe. It isn’t the case that most people blindly follow their boss’ advice. Most people don’t decide their careers based on short-term local availability. And almost no investor who’s financially literate enough to consider an index fund would consider volatility as a metric of attractiveness of the fund.
I was going to say that your arguments only hold so long as you oversimplify what are inherently complex decisions that require multiple and current information sources, but the very foundation of your line of questioning is just plain wrong.
I'm going to disagee with you there. You are seeing the world through a different lens driven by constant churn in the tech industry.
In many industries if you are just a drone that does their job reasonably well, will work overtime every now and then when it's available and have shown willingness and ability to improve, management will make sure you stay at that company. Your only actual fear would be that the company fails but then very likely you are on the shortlist for that same management at their new company.
Assume incompetence not malice, people aren't out to get you and trying to get the worst for you, they want to best for themselves and if you make it so that making you comfortable also makes them comfortable then you aren't at risk.
Regarding food... Buy what's on the shelf, nobody needs their special kale only diet or whatever is the trend. What the parent was saying is follow general food guidelines, avoid excessive meat, keep portion sizes reasonable, half you plate should be vegetables etc...
Same with the index fund thing, if you start investing with a reputable investor when your are in your 20s even if it doesn't beat the market you will retire comfortably.
You don't need to minmax life. You can hit autopilot and just go where life takes you while just make small course corrections every now and then and you will be fine. You wont have a great life or a bad one. You will fall close to the middle of the bell curve and that's actually good enough.
Focus on the things that are important, spend time with your loved ones etc.
Trust me I understand your point of view as well, that's me I can't be vanilla with these things, my mental health doesn't allow it. I need to shoot for the moon and do it as efficiently as possible. I just know that's not necessary.
You nailed my intent here, although I wasn't really advocating for it either. More just reminding HN readers that we aren't representative, and that (as the replies here confirm) we seem to forget that.
The world is filled mostly with people who read below the 6th grade level. Those people have average life expectancies, average local jobs, and will retire with average savings if they retire at all.
I'm not judging those average lives, just trying to encourage the high achievers here to consider the way the 24 hour news cycle impacts the average, barely literate, person who just wants to survive their day without falling down either slope of the bell curve.
> Whichever index fund option in your 401k is least volatile.
That would be a govt bond fund or, worse, a money market fund. That is no different than telling retail investors to avoid equities, and only buy bonds. That is a terrible investment strategy. Literally: I have never seen an investment professional recommend such a portfolio for any one of working age.
Better advice would a broad based US/Europe equity index, e.g., S&P 500 or FTSE 100 or EuroSTOXX 600.
Given how terrible that advice is, it makes you reconsider the other items. The whole post might be clever satire: "Don't just do what you're told. Don't just eat the crap pushed by Big Ag. Do think."
That seems unwise. The comparison point for me would be 1920s Europe - in hindsight it seems likely they'd have had a lot of telegraphing in advance that things were about to go really badly wrong - disasters of the magnitude that engulfed them aren't easily missed. The average person wouldn't have been aware of it because the lack of an internet would have resulted in an insanely biased view of the data being presented that probably obscured just how bad things were getting. Today we have a much better level of information access available.
The answer in the 1920s if you can see the 1930s and 1940s coming wasn't go local, it was some combination of fortify, fearmonger and/or flee. People needed to be alerted that the situation was really bad and immediate action was required at all levels to avert disaster - but action wasn't taken and we saw an economic crisis unfold, followed by a military one.
The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? How many people do we think were realistically in a position to make a change to the economic conditions and still uninformed? How many were in a place to make a change to the military conditions and similarly uninformed?
Hind sight is 20/20, and its easy knowing a massive war was coming to say people should have been getting the hell out of Dodge. But moving your entire family to a new country let alone a new continent is a massive undertaking. How many people even if they had the warnings would have pulled the trigger on that move rather than wait and see? What sort of huge, global war scale negative things are being telegraphed today and what major life altering decisions on the magnitude of leaving your entire community and extended family behind and seeking asylum in a foreign country do you foresee yourself undertaking to address them in response to your unprecedented levels of modern awareness?
Or does your unprecedented access to that information simply make you feel helpless and hopeless? Are you actually better equipped to attend to the impending doom or do you just know that it's there. One wonders if we had the ability to know the exact month and year we were going to die, would we think our lives were made better by knowing that, or would we find that having that knowledge does little to change the quality of the life we live in any positive way, and largely adds stress or other negative experiences. There's a balance to be struck with any amount of being informed, but like everything else in life, I suspect moderation is the key.
> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation?
Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically.
I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.
> Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things.
Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were.
> The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless.
I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.
The "events shaping your world" are a handful of currently trending narratives promulgated by an engagement-optimizing algorithm or a literal popularity contest, not an epistemologically meaningful sample of reality.
Making quality decisions with incomplete information is a higher order operation than
(as this study shows) surfing whatever has a compatible emotional valence.
I am keeping up with my steady tide pod diet, learning about how much God loves me, training to be a YouTube influencer to make thousands of dollars per month without leaving my home and investing in helping a Nigerian prince move his funds out of the country. Yet I still feel there is something missing. Which Gab group would you guys recommend for knowing the truth about the events shaping my world that they are hiding from us?
Exactly. Use less plastic for food containers. Don’t use plastic cooking utensils, filter your water, etc. This is one you do have some influence over.
Go to a blood donation center. You'll notice the blood bags say "VOLUNTEER" on them. Not because some people are getting their blood stolen. The alternative is "THERAPEUTIC". We still bloodlet today.
> our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume
True, and I use this to my advantage for constructive things. I bias my consumption towards things I aspire to. You can't always change yourself, but you can change your environment, which in turn changes you.
The last part reminds me of this Quote from the movie The End of The Tour about DFW.
“We're going to have to develop some real machinery inside of our guts to turn off pure, unadulterated pleasure, or I don't know about you, I'm going to have to leave the planet.”
“Why?”
“Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and more and more convenient to sit alone with images on a screen, given to us by people that do not love us but want money. And that's fine in low doses. But if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die.”
There's worrying about things, then there's seeing the truth and reacting appropriately, whether you worry or not about it. It's a common refrain to criticize people who spend time on nutrition and health are obsessive or orthorexic or whatever, then subsequently spend 4 hours digging into game of thrones lore or how to host Plex while eating doritos. Health is only the foundation of everything, that's all.
"God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
That is not entirely true. First, you can reduce your personal contribution to pollution. Second, you can vote for parties or candidates that can make the larger change, or the minimal change needed.
What happens if everybody says "there's nothing I can do"? Nothing. It's basically the attitude that got us here.
> Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things
Why?
Why is the problem the feed? Why isn't the problem the very fact of wanting and trying to be informed of things far away out of your control in the first place?
I can say for myself that seeing the wars have had a detrimental impact on my life & faith in humanity. Hearing people try to justify a genocide makes me completely checkout. The algorithms also don't help when you keep seeing kids & families decimated constantly on your reddit, instagram & x feed with genocide drones. I'm convinced that we are living in one of the most regrettable times in our century.
I had to remove reddit, CNN, nytimes, fnews, fb. And honestly I'm a lot happier.
I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion but part of gaining that opinion I would get materially angry at the otherside that they were "being so stupid, obviously you shouldn't think like that".
It got bad enough it was affecting me personally and how I interacted with my family.
I'll start up again eventually because it matters to me but for now I need to stay happier.
> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion
At the same time, you must have been questioning whether you were staying informed, or was used as a democracy puppet by lobbyists. It takes a lot more energy to stay informed than to just read news.
Here in Switzerland, the people vote on lots of things, four times a year. But the participation rates are always 40-60%. It's almost like people only need to stay informed about the particular questions they care about. I find it a refreshing organisation, compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.
In Switzerland you still have to vote for politicians who take decisions on their own. It is only on some specific questions where the population can vote. So it means you have to keep track of more, both the politicians you vote for and some of the questions you can vote on.
A bit of a drawback with having the general public vote on some of these questions is that it is difficult for the general public to be well informed about these questions so they vote to keep things as is or they take the easy path. That's probably why Switzerland often are behind on many questions, for example voting for women, environment etc.
> compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.
I am surprised to hear this. For most parliamentary democracies, political parties publish a political platform statement before each election. Isn't the summary enough to make a decision?
That very strongly depends on which issues are important to you and which aren't. The more nuanced your opinions about any given topic, the harder it is to take anything useful away from a summary. Political platforms as summaries tend to be too broad in my opinion, e.g. reduce this or that or improve this or that, but without saying on account of what. In politics, everything is a trade off and if you want to increase spend on something then that money has to come from somewhere else, whether that's increased taxes, reduced spending on some other topic, or etc. Saying they want to increase the spend on something without saying how they're gonna get there is not useful.
Do you really think your vote matters that much? You are overthinking it. Your vote, while important to a functioning democracy, does not matter that much in an election.
Funny enough, Hacker News is the only place I've been going to get my news for about a year now, and ever since I started experiencing anxiety bad enough to where I needed to start limiting my exposure to it. But like you said, focusing on family, friends, and local things happening in your immediate community definitely help, and only recently have I realized that. A friend and I were discussing this recently, and he put it very succinctly: "the view from high above is great, but it's hard to not worry about falling."
> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion
To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".
Rather, they're opinion is forming your opinion.
I think it's nearly impossible to stay truly informed these days, unfortunately. I've seen some comments in this thread talk about consuming only boring facts, and I think this is our best bet.
Because most of the time, the truth is boring.
So if you find yourself being negatively impacted, ask yourself if you're hearing unbiased facts, or if you're actually just hearing opinionated agenda.
I also think this is a large root of "the otherside being so stupid". Except it happens to all sides.
> To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".
Strong agree. The goal is to make money by keeping your eyeballs on the ads. And they keep you coming back with all this shocking stuff.
What I would like, and probably with the GP would like, was a news source that just stuck to the facts. It could be consumed in a very short time, and if you wanted to know more, you can go find it.
Such a news source is bound to fail in the face of the grab-your-eyeballs news sources. It's just going to be boring because it doesn't hit your brain in the same way.
One thing I noticed when I switched to Mastodon was that it was actually kind of "dull", for lack of a better word. I follow tons of hashtags I'm interested in, and the feed has good stuff in it. But after scrolling for 10 minutes, I kind of feel like doing something else.
I still use Mastodon. That's how I'like my news to be, as well. The closest I found is wikipedia, like some people have said, and the raw news feeds from news syndicates (I'm not sure if anyone hosts these anymore).
Another thing to make news less insane is to just go to the local news. In my town of 100,000, it's news that actually impacts me, isn't sensationalistic, and is low traffic. I have a deep link to get there that just bypasses the front page of the news site. Also their comment section is horrible, so I've turned off JavaScript for it.
Everything is designed to invoke negative emotions because negative emotions are engaging and engagement is money. Be less informed on international affairs and more involved in your own communities.
And stress destroys impulse control, which can lend to users buying things they don't need, spending more time interacting, etc. Doom news and advertising is a sinister combination.
One of the best things someone can do to improve their mental health is to ignore and refuse media, particularly news/"journalism" and "influencers".
Life is short, are you really going to spend it worrying about some guys on the other side of the world you'll never meet in a country you'll never so much as visit just so the Sensation Industrial Complex can make money?
I like knowing what's going on, and I'm not chronically anxious.
I'm especially interested in new historic events and new ideas (including bad ideas). I want to know what people around the world are up to.
The news stories I avoid are human interest stories, local news, and "fluff" pieces. Except when they involve actual fluffy animals, I read those. But generally if something has already happened a million times before, like some murders, an explosion, some pollution, I don't care. Noticing these doesn't make me feel bad, though, unless my time was wasted by clickbait.
Shit happens. A lot of commenters here are saying "if it doesn't affect you, why read about it," but I think that should be understood only as a message for anxious people who are going to feel affected by things they ought to feel blasé about. And often these are stories about the same old grind anyway.
I'm going to flip the message around: "since it doesn't affect me, and I know it, and yet it's globally significant, I'm going to have a cosy time reading about it."
I disapprove of thousands dying in distant wars, but I also expect it as part of normality. But there are people who will get upset by hearing about it. Those people should probably avoid news.
Spoiler: it's all negative content on social media. That's why we all think we're doomed, even though, objectively, we're incredibly lucky to be alive when we are
Related: "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" by Jason Pargin
More seriously, any plans to share it? I've been waiting for someone to build a tool like this, although I expected to use sentiment analysis directly rather than regex.
Personally I'd love to block nitpicking comments here on HN, not sure if that could be done with regex though.
Information is a virus. The cure is censorship. This may sound odd, but it's the truth.
When you read a negative word, even passingly, imagine all sorts of complex interactions that happen with the neurons inside your brain. Ban the words. Block everything. Keep your mouth shut. Create a chamber insulated from negativity.
Negativity is spam. Nobody asks for it and nobody wants it, yet people can't stop themselves from sharing it, forcing negative thoughts onto others' sight. This has to stop.
I don't go to the Internet to hear about the world's problems. The world doesn't have a right to waste my bandwidth to force me to see its propaganda. All I want is cat pictures. If it isn't a cat picture, I don't want to see it.
I don't care how many countries are at war right now. I'll learn about it at my pace, when I want to. Who gave war the right to invade the privacy of my feed? To appear there, unsolicited? To demand my attention, constantly, as if it were entitled to it?
It truly doesn't make any sense when you think about it.
I can't do anything about the world's problems. Go bother someone else.
I do agree that sometimes you have to consume less negative content or else you can become pretty doomy after reading about it.
But dont forget that sometimes you need to feel bad to understand that you are sick. If you were sick without feeling bad, you could die, because you did not take action!
Dont sugar coat the world! If you feel shitty, maybe there is a reason for it, a reason within or outside you!!
the next step is to look for causes of the sickness that you can actually do something about. you probably can't solve global problems but you can help with local ones like racism or other forms of prejudice and intolerance, and you can make small contributions towards some of the global ones, like climate change.
once you have an idea for which kind of problems you would like to work on you can focus your news reading on that and ignore everything else.
I notice a lot of tabloid news websites surface negative local content from across the globe. They make headlines out of "YOUNG/OLD PERSON ASSAULTED IN RISING TENSIONS" and it takes a few paragraphs for me to realise it's in a different country. Every societal imbalance is being trumpeted into every suburb, until it becomes a reality there.
I blacklist all news sites, reddit, all social media sites etc. Completely blocked on my device.
I have switched away from using Google as a search engine entirely.
That still wasn't enough, so I ditched the smart phone for a brick phone. So on that I can only message/call and play Tetris.
That still wasn't enough so I also sold my TV.
That still wasn't enough so I also built an internet content blocker extension to further block mentions of certain words/phrases/patterns (think drugs/war/alcohol/gambling/porn/religion/politics etc).
I'm thinking of building an image blocker next, somehow without "AI".
All this + site blacklisting + ad-blockers + no social media + no TV + no news seems to do the trick!
Financial Times (newspaper) is excellent, but very expensive for an annual subscription. I only need to ignore the opinion section, and that is a good enough filter for click bait. The rest is outstanding.
Maybe with the vast amount of upcoming AI generated content people will finally be forced to realize a thing that was true all along but we seem to have forgotten over the past 25 years.
Nothing on the screen is real. It's just pixels on a screen.
I think I’ve finally cut out Reddit and Threads from my life. I actively ignore looking at anything from those sites unless I’m looking for a product review or something on Reddit.
Reddit constantly had me feeling like life was hopeless, and that I was never gonna be enough, and I could never get excited about anything because I was conditioned to see things through a cynical lens. Sometimes HN does that for me too though, just more intellectually, maybe eventually I’ll quit this place too but it’s a decent news source.
A tangent perhaps, but I've felt this with AI, albeit with nuanced differences. In a nutshell, there's this weird tension between being kind of dismissive of it due to failed personal expectations, but also a desire to be as objective about it as possible, a "fear of missing out" if you will. As such I consume news about AI and engage with the "community" online about it, but I struggle constantly between separating noise from signal, "truth" and bullshit. It's not so much that bad news gets me down so much as the fact that sensationalist hype and bullshit makes me irrationally upset.
The whole OpenAI strawberry thing is kind of a great example. There was vague hype and speculation about it months before it was actually released, and in the end we got a model that is objectively impressive when it comes to benchmarks and is objectively better at certain tasks, but otherwise in my mind fell way short of the expectations being set by more "enthusiastic" commentators.
Now, normally if someone is prone to hype and sensationalism on the internet one would typically learn to ignore them and preserve your mental health, problem is that sometimes OpenAI employees (and other employees of frontier labs) can't resist making sensationalist claims themselves, i.e. claiming that we're a couple of years away from AGI or whatever.
On the one hand, it's a smart and reasonable thing to bet on expert advice, on the other hand, the experts are making very bold claims that I just struggle to see coming to fruition. The idea that you could simply scale an LLM until we achieved AGI always felt a little suspect to me.
Now that LLMs are so readily available it would be interesting to see if there were any browser extensions that could rewrite news articles in a more positive light
Being able to read your normal news website but have the topic being discussed written in a more positive light
Or generate the articles with a balanced view instead of negatively one sided
Best thing I ever did was to quit twitter, even before all the changes. Because everybody, good or bad, was concerned by things and they posted or shared them. A million voices talking is a million problems voiced
A few years back I was looking for science fiction novels that weren't depressing and dystopian. Turns out I'm not the only one looking and there are novels and short stories that cater to this desire but it's all lip service. The stories were all about a particular ideology fighting against the (strawman) system and eventually winning to become the system itself. That's it. The only positive concept that scifi can come up with now is one's ideology winning over all others and suffocating everything else out.
our scifi book club recently had optimistic scifi as a theme. the nominations were:
Matt Haig: The Humans
Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom
*Suzanne Palmer: Finder*
John C Wright: The Golden Age
Ada Palmer: Too Like the Lightning
*Nnedi Okorafor: Binti*
Nicky Drayden: The Prey of Gods
Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Lindsay Ellis: Axiom’s End
and a few months before that we had "feel-good scifi":
Anne McCaffrey: Partnership
Anthology: Adventures in Space
Ginger Booth: Thrive Space Colony Adventures: Skyship Thrive
*Glynn Stewart: Starship Mage*
Meredith Katz: The Cybernetic Tea Shop
Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
*Rob Dircks: The Wrong Unit*
Suzanne Palmer: Finder
I don’t know what sort of not depressing you’re looking for but I’d recommend Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It’s a fun short read. If you want harder sci-fi I’d recommend the Revelation Space series. It’s far future, somewhat negative in that there is war and conflict, but I wouldn’t at all describe it as dystopian.
I find the best uplifting sci-fi deals with high context observations and stories that illustrate how to think not what to think. ST:NG and Futurama are good examples on TV. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a good example in print.
The Liaden Universe series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the best description for this I've heard is "regency fiction in space", which is a reasonable descriptor but the series covers a pretty wide range.
The Honor Harrington series by David Webber. "Horatio Hornblower in Space". Can be a little trite in the latter books as he has to keep Honor alive and advancing while still in a the stories, but eventually picks up enough threads with other interesting characters.
Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia. A very "B-Movie" series of books, with horror monsters being real, and a secret society fighting them. They're not deep literature by any stretch of the imagination, but they're fun, even if the main character can be a bit too "perfect in every way".
i am reading the seafort saga by david feintuch, which is also hornblower in space. i am on book 3 now and i find it rather depressing. their unrealistic depiction of the role of christianity and how they enforce discipline. the latter as far as i can remember is modeled on the original hornblower which i have read as a teen.
i am curious how david webers take is.
btw, the solar clipper series by nathan lowell is also inspired by hornblower, but while the seafort saga seems to very closely follow the original, the only similarity in the solar clipper series is the career of the captain. all in all, the solar clipper series is rather positive though.
Yeah utopian sci-fi always reminds me of the Dr. Manhattan quote “they claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors.”
Digital Diet tool sounds promising, but I wonder how effective it will be in the wild. Will people actively choose to use it, or will the tendency to seek negative content override the desire for help?
>Maybe watching extremely negative content like gory cartel videos from South America could help with desensitization?
Wow, is that a bad idea!
Watching even one "gore" (people or animals getting killed or hurt severely) clip can change you forever. Specifically, it can traumatize you, and psychological trauma disorder can be hard to treat, so that even if you can afford to pay $300 an hour for psychotherapy, you might try 6 different psychotherapists and none of them are able to help you, so you are stuck with the trauma disorder for years.
Also, the clip might unlock what is essentially a fetish for gore with the result that you cannot stop yourself from continuing to search for it and watch it. Then maybe just watching it is no longer enough: you develop a compulsion to act it out.
And what about all those murder movies, the horror movies, the gun shooting movies, the extortion murder rape kidnapping etc, crime in general, intrigue, blackmail, scheming?
We have a subscription to a package that has a lot of US content. HBO, Fox aka Star Channels.
80s & 90s movies were better, happier.
The mood is mostly dark and dire nowadays.
And then there's "news", if you can even call it that anymore.
Mostly political propaganda, hate mongering and FUD.
I'm in a good mood, then I read "the news".
I had a time where I completely ignored them, that was after 9/11 and my mental health was superb.
But nowadays the planet is on fire and everyone in power is just starting more fires.
But "the news" are also pushing a certain mindset, at least in Germany, although there isn't much difference between the outlets.
They all just more or less copy paste the same sources.
Paranoid schizophrenic mindset mixed with some Russian hate and foreign hate and radical right normalization.
Don't know how it is in Germany but in the US, it's hard to escape the reach of "the news". You can choose to not go to news sites and not turn on news channels but news feeds are everywhere and tv are in public places blasting out the fear or outrage of the moment. It's difficult to not end up passively consuming it against your will. Even setting up a new Windows Server box will end up with MSNBC in your face because the first time you open a browser, that news feed is going to be featured on the default home page. You might have been trying to set up a new document server for the accounting department but now your brain is hijacked by the latest details of fighting in Syria. It really is pervasive.
Every hotel I visit in town is a 5 star hotel in that you can at most see 5 stars from the hotel. A hotel at the edge would hopefully have many more stars visible
It's really not, since if there aren't any hills you can watch distant things come into view over the horizon. I believe the standard example is ships.
It's not the platform. It's the time. When Digg was active time was different, there were few people online. I'm afraid the new Digg will suffer same pitfalls as other social networks. The time has change and the crowd online has changed.
It is this toxic platform and the people it attracts. So many down votes and flagged posts because of the type of people here. Drives all the successful happy people away and keeps the negative tone alive here.
Gotta learn to filter the news on various ways. Climate change? You gonna make the earth temp decrease? Then stop worrying. Microplastics? Just drink more from glass and less junk which come from plastic containers. Lots of violence on the news? It’s been like that ever since man has evolved from cells. Stop worrying
For me, none of that stuff bothers me. What gives me the social media heartbreak is seeing the hate. Seeing commenters get so upset with each other over misunderstandings and miscommunications.
I've tried completely avoiding comments, and I admit it makes my life less stressful, but it feels like closing your eyes to solve littering.
So now what I do is try to assume every positive commenter is a human and every negative commenter is maybe a LLM/hatebot. This has given me just enough magical thinking to avoid the stress but not so much as to distort my world view... hopefully..
Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.
Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process.
The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.
> how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Anecdotally, I have not observed an increase in empathy from people who immerse themselves in negative news about faraway places. There's sometimes an increase in the performance of empathy—you'll see them bemoan the various crises, you'll see them wonder aloud how anyone can go about their lives while ${STUFF} is happening—but I haven't observed an increase in their ability to actually be empathetic to the perspectives and needs of people closer to home.
If anything it's the opposite: the more immersed someone is in tragedies and crises on the other side of the planet, the more aggressive and thoughtless they are in response to hot topics locally. Instead of slowing down and developing empathy for those who disagree with them, they lash out. It's like being immersed in extreme crises they can't control causes them to perceive their local crises as more severe than they actually are and triggers fight or flight, which actually stands in the way of empathy.
Dunbar's Number[1] could potentially be playing a role. When you're already so preoccupied caring about people on the other side of the planet, you literally have no cares left to give around you.
What you are suggesting is that there is a locality dimension here which is interesting and probably points to an important consideration.
Even the follow up insight about agency and that the problem is we feel less able to solve these things is good.
But I think that an over-emphasis on local events makes one less able to understand and deal with the things in their own lives as well. It leads to a sort of purposeful ignorance where we don't want to learn what is going on in the world so we are surprised when the consequences become relevant to us.
If you don't know whats going on in Ukraine, you're going to be confused when your local Ukrainian friend is upset because a family member got killed
> Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.
It's still important to repeat and reaffirm studies. External factors are always changing and even if those factors were static, repeated studies strengthen the science.
Okay fine yes. The proper and disciplined answer spoken by someone who appreciates the act of conducting science.
To make the point much more precise. From a philosophical perspective, while reaffirming existing knowledge is good and necessary for the continued advancement of scientific inquiry and the strengthening of knowledge of course, I would rather argue that the scope of the knowledge is too small.
Scientists are so terrified of being accused of going out of bounds of what can easily and reproducibly be quantified, that they end up proving near tautology and it leaves one questioning if this was worth all the time and money for research.
I guess I'm becoming a pragmatist as I age and feel a necessary part of knowledge is application. If scientific knowledge is not being used to improve the world, im not sure if it was worth the time and money.
I know this isn't how universities see it. But I feel that while the authorities on knowledge have become ever-more timid in what they are willing to prove and say, grifters and intellectual charlatans take advantage of the gap and tell people all forms of pseudo-science and dogma which is eaten up by the public because there isn't really an authoritative story to counter many times.
I guess it happens because only small part of world population stay away from negative news. If most population stay away from negative news, I believe the news outlet will change their news tone.
An interesting point. Allot of ink has been spilled around whether or not we are inherently drawn to negative news or if the ecosystems themselves condition us to seek negative news.
You're correct that if negative news was less profitable then they would push less. But that is exactly the problem is that the content itself just seems to attract more eyeballs and even those outlets that want to be better are stuck in the same engagement arms race as all the rest.
I mean most research is trying to figure out things we think are intuitive, but I actually find it somewhat interestingly. It says negative content, not news, so I wonder how this compares to say heavy metal or horror movies where people may use negative offline content in a way that may help process negative emotions.
I’m actually sort of interested in the contrast. I think you’re right, that it is sort of obvious that doomscrolling news is bad for mental health, and it’s a sad change.
The same way humanity has always done it: Get out of your house/apartment and go for a walk. Talk with people actually in and around your life. Touch grass, as the youngsters these days like to say.
Reality is the physical world immediately around you.
Walk that thought through to the end. Because it's become a popular sentiment even on this platform which is interesting. If what you're saying is true, the internet itself is toxic to mental health, and the only sane thing to do is to keep away from it at all costs, as you suggest.
However, we are on a hacker news, an overwhelmingly technical message board. Are we all just modern poison pushers then? Is the very nature of what we do somehow toxic to the flourishing of human life?
I don't think so. I want to see a more critical analysis of what in particular is driving mental health outcomes down. Don't mistake this for me saying there is nothing to do. I was in support of the ban on social media in schools for example. But as modern people who use technology regularly to live our lives, surely atleast we understand it is more nuanced than just "use the computer less"
The beauty and horror of the internet is that we can access all the information; the internet provides us information from everywhere. Meanwhile, there is scientific theory to suggest that our mental capacity to handle information is ultimately finite; for example, Dunbar's Number[1] and the Paradox of Choice[2].
This means unfettered use of the internet can lead to information overload. In addition, because information from the internet most likely concerns things far away[3], you quite literally have no fucks left to give to concerns local and actually relevant to you (see: Dunbar's Number[1]).
The answer is, of course, the same as everything else we consume: In moderation.
Use the internet in moderation. Too much internet is bad for you just like too much water or oxygen is bad for you. Stop doomscrolling through sensation after sensation and running your brain literally dry of mental fuel; instead, get out into your reality and live. Touch grass, because that grass is more relevant to you than whatever the fuck the Sensation Industrial Complex is peddling onto you via the internet.
Kneejerking as you suggest ("keep away at all costs") is, well, kneejerking and doesn't actually look at the problem.
>what in particular is driving mental health outcomes down.
When you subject yourself to an endless onslaught of sensational negative "news", the logical conclusion is you end up depressed and mentally ill. You are what you consume, this includes non-tangibles like information.
This has actually been pointed out since long before even the internet[4], because "journalism" has always preferred sensational hit pieces that pull on viewers/readers' emotional purse strings since they garner more revenue. The internet enabling easier distribution of and access to information simply exacerbated this problem. Good news isn't good business.
[3]: War in Ukraine! Uprising in Syria! Oppression in China! Congress in turmoil! The EV revolution in Scandinavia! Here's what King Charles had for dinner!
RSS is all you need https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-rss/
P.S. I haven't been able to ditch hacker news like I wanted to.