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I feel compelled to repost a comment I've posted before, so here goes: ---------------------------------- Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching hard

I feel compelled to repost a comment I've posted before, so here goes: ---------------------------------- Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts....The result feels hystrionic to me... it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual facts and statistics. The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself. ---------------------------------- This particular article is strange in the fact even though it presents a bunch of statistics, it doesn't use them well to advance a cohesive argument- it mostly just goes on to state that everything sucks. It just throws spaghetti at the wall, to see what sticks in the mind of the reader, and anything that doesn't stick is hoped to be given a fair pass. This is the sort of divisive thinking that does little to solve problems, because it is so engulfed in the turbulence of pessimistic rage that it cannot correctly identify just what the problem is, if it exists.

alexandercrohde 8y ago
I think the central premise is that faith in the American Dream is dying. I think its goal is to appeal to emotion, and it clearly succeed at it. Perhaps you yourself would be more persuaded by facts and figures, but that's a personal preference thing. Regardless, when I've looked at the figures, I think they agree with the author (concentration of wealth in the .1%, affordability of a house for median-income individual, affordability of college)
moltar 8y ago
It seems like it’s just sensationalism repackaged under disguise for educated masses.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Having graduated in 2008 and being totally unable to find employment in education with a STEM degree, it's not totally sensational to me to say that I spent several years with extremely low earnings as a result of having to take any job that would hire me. There's probably $250,000 of lifetime earnings that I've lost so far because I graduated a year too late. And the things I had to do at that point to survive have made me extremely cautious about building up a safety net and not taking on debt. For reference, school districts in my area were not hiring mathematics teachers. I had to take a job clerking in a warehouse for a technology company, and I spent the next 4 years working my way over to their engineering team. I was incredibly lucky, and I suspect there are a ton of people in my cohort who are still severely underemployed. So no, it's not total sensationalism. It's just not rigorously scientific, which is not the same thing.
  - jorts 8y ago
    Not that it detracts from everything else you said, but graduating a year earlier likely wouldn't have made much of a difference.
    - eaenki 8y ago
      or later for that matter.
  - everdev 8y ago
    I got laid off in '08 when the market crashed. I looked everywhere in SV for jobs and had a solid resume, experience and education but hiring was frozen. To pay the bills I was forced to start my own business which ended up being very successful. I know my experience was a vast outlier from the norm and how seriously the downturn affected mass amounts of people. But the downturn left me no choice but the option I had been too scared to pick before: being an entrepreneur. In a successful economy I would have happily sat in my 5-figure job for years. The downturn helped motivate me like I never had been before. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
    - jschwartzi 8y ago
dTal 8y ago
>Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts Is that not what a 'think piece' is? However I agree with your observation of the general trend, with news in general, and would attribute it to the commodification of raw, unfiltered info. For many types of news, we don't have to watch the news at 10 anymore - the primary sources are available to everyone. Every political speech, every citizen recording of police brutality, every draft legislation - it's all on the internet. Intelligent analysis is the scarce resource that's in demand.
- cirgue 8y ago
  With a "think piece", one would hope for serious thought as opposed to pure id.
chubot 8y ago
This is a great analysis, thanks for saving me some time :) I've noticed this pattern too. You should write a pithy blog post and link it in response to these types of articles. I've thought of doing that for posts on HN that are preaching some technology without showing what the author did with it. In other words, I want to see what you did; I don't care what you say. I ignore "advice"; it often seems to come from someone trying to be a "thought leader". If you show me what you did, then I can decide if that approach is worth emulating.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  Maybe I should call it "Against Histrionic Journalism". To explore your thread of thought a bit, and a bit of my own tangent... Thinkpieces with actionable advice, advocacy of personal economic virtue, or related personal anecdotes, by their nature of advocating for pragmatically solving your own problems, have very conservative-appearing optics in today's political landscape. As such, they are extremely taboo within the same social circle as that of the article above, and taboo at large in many circles. I wish that such pieces were more popular, because I feel that they could reduce the cynicism of our zeitgeist, which is a leading problem in online media. The optics are too poor, though. And I suppose they don't make for a lot of click-driven ad revenue. In my reading of the news, in the long run, I want to be able to develop a feeling for how the world is comparatively changing over time, and to plan and make decisions based off of this. Even in the absense of articles that prescriptively tell you things that are good to do, fact-based, comparison-driven reporting of change in the world should not be laden with histrionic shouting. When we only read this histrionic shouting, perception becomes reality. Cynicism becomes emotional mailaise, and makes the world less dignified. If the book "Enlightenment Now" has even a speck of truth in it, the momentum of the world is a tremendous lot more positive than the zeitgeist feels it to be. The challenge is to change the zeitgeist.
  - YinglingLight 8y ago
    Is such histrionic journalism a byproduct of the current cultural infatuation of "victimization"? Living in a Golden Era doesn't fit the narrative.
iamthepieman 8y ago
This is basically what conspiracy theories (and theorists) do. They make connections between things and then pin that connection on whatever their conspiracy is about. Find a new topic of concern for your intended audience/echo chamber and repeat. Leader of X country is related to leader of Y country. This is evidence of a back room secret cabal, a nepotistic dynasty stretching all the way back to the [American revolution, English Monarchy, time of Christ, Catholic church]. Now that we've cleared up that bit of history it's clear to see that the current situation is designed to [undermine, enslave, confuse, take over, destroy, conceal] the fact that [popular news item, pop culture figure, first world leader, common everyman problem] is actually a secret ... bah I'm tired of this, you get the point.
lkrubner 8y ago
Still, these are true facts which need some explanation, and no simple explanation will do, so we do have a need of deep analysis: ------------------ The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous.
- refurb 8y ago
  The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. That requires some evidence. Is the mood in the US darker than at the peak of the 1930's depression? After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? During the 1960's race riots? I'd say all of those were a darker time for the US than now.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    They were objectively darker times. Was the mood as dark, though? Or were people more optimistic even though the circumstances were worse? I don't know the answer, by the way - I don't go back far enough. But I think the question is interesting.
grosjona 8y ago
As someone who has worked for several corporations and startups over the past decade, the problem of corporate monopolies is very obvious to me so I don't need to see any third party academic references; I've seen first hand how inefficient and wasteful corporations are and how they keep extracting free money out of the system using government regulations, vendor lock-ins and and media monopolies to lock out competition. This article resonates with me on many different levels and it references ideas that are as obvious to me as the theory of gravity. Besides, the current economic system is not founded on rigorous science; so we should not need to resort to scientific proof to point out its many flaws. Social consensus is enough. Also, academic studies require funding; no corporation would fund research which could potentially work against their own interests. It took many decades to collect funding to do the research which linked smoking and cancer... And that was comparatively easy because at least rich people get cancer too. Here we have a disease which is caused by the rich and which only infects the poor... I don't see how such research will ever get funded.
burlesona 8y ago
> It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself. This is such a good description of the problem. Right now it feels like people are angry about being angry, and the mood seems to me somewhat detached from the reality around us. By historical standards things right now are not that bad, but a lot of people act like we’re living through the apocalypse. My personal take is that this is the natural product of the social media / hyper media era. It’s easy to make a lot of money making people angry (“outrage porn”), but there’s no money in calming people down. I wish that weren’t the case.
- ordinaryradical 8y ago
  This is true, but it’s also true (if you are American, at least) that we’re living through a major upheaval in our governing institutions. So another way of reading this outrage is that when your president is permitted to do outrageous things daily, to collude with a foreign power to meddle in our elections, to defend that power on the international stage, and to help his family profit by that power... well, you may start to feel a little panicked, outraged, or out of control. The norms of democracy are starting to show their weaknesses. The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. And it comes with a bizarre dissonance because locally speaking you may be doing just fine, stock market is up, etc. etc. That atmosphere also creates a kind of helpless anger that goes looking for targets and attention. It’s almost an existential coping mechanism, I think.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    > The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. I think that's going too far. They were there. And then, over succeeding presidents of both parties, they were a little less there. And then, with this president, suddenly "reasonable limits" was a totally foreign concept. But the reasonable limits were there, and really did limit behavior.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  We are living through the apocaypse! We aren't totally triumphant over The Other Side like we should be!

alexandercrohde 8y ago

I think the central premise is that faith in the American Dream is dying. I think its goal is to appeal to emotion, and it clearly succeed at it. Perhaps you yourself would be more persuaded by facts and figures, but that's a personal preference thing. Regardless, when I've looked at the figures, I think they agree with the author (concentration of wealth in the .1%, affordability of a house for median-income individual, affordability of college)

moltar 8y ago

It seems like it’s just sensationalism repackaged under disguise for educated masses.

jschwartzi 8y ago
Having graduated in 2008 and being totally unable to find employment in education with a STEM degree, it's not totally sensational to me to say that I spent several years with extremely low earnings as a result of having to take any job that would hire me. There's probably $250,000 of lifetime earnings that I've lost so far because I graduated a year too late. And the things I had to do at that point to survive have made me extremely cautious about building up a safety net and not taking on debt. For reference, school districts in my area were not hiring mathematics teachers. I had to take a job clerking in a warehouse for a technology company, and I spent the next 4 years working my way over to their engineering team. I was incredibly lucky, and I suspect there are a ton of people in my cohort who are still severely underemployed. So no, it's not total sensationalism. It's just not rigorously scientific, which is not the same thing.
- jorts 8y ago
  Not that it detracts from everything else you said, but graduating a year earlier likely wouldn't have made much of a difference.
  - eaenki 8y ago
    or later for that matter.
- everdev 8y ago
  I got laid off in '08 when the market crashed. I looked everywhere in SV for jobs and had a solid resume, experience and education but hiring was frozen. To pay the bills I was forced to start my own business which ended up being very successful. I know my experience was a vast outlier from the norm and how seriously the downturn affected mass amounts of people. But the downturn left me no choice but the option I had been too scared to pick before: being an entrepreneur. In a successful economy I would have happily sat in my 5-figure job for years. The downturn helped motivate me like I never had been before. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago

dTal 8y ago

>Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts Is that not what a 'think piece' is? However I agree with your observation of the general trend, with news in general, and would attribute it to the commodification of raw, unfiltered info. For many types of news, we don't have to watch the news at 10 anymore - the primary sources are available to everyone. Every political speech, every citizen recording of police brutality, every draft legislation - it's all on the internet. Intelligent analysis is the scarce resource that's in demand.

cirgue 8y ago
With a "think piece", one would hope for serious thought as opposed to pure id.

chubot 8y ago

This is a great analysis, thanks for saving me some time :) I've noticed this pattern too. You should write a pithy blog post and link it in response to these types of articles. I've thought of doing that for posts on HN that are preaching some technology without showing what the author did with it. In other words, I want to see what you did; I don't care what you say. I ignore "advice"; it often seems to come from someone trying to be a "thought leader". If you show me what you did, then I can decide if that approach is worth emulating.

CompelTechnic 8y ago
Maybe I should call it "Against Histrionic Journalism". To explore your thread of thought a bit, and a bit of my own tangent... Thinkpieces with actionable advice, advocacy of personal economic virtue, or related personal anecdotes, by their nature of advocating for pragmatically solving your own problems, have very conservative-appearing optics in today's political landscape. As such, they are extremely taboo within the same social circle as that of the article above, and taboo at large in many circles. I wish that such pieces were more popular, because I feel that they could reduce the cynicism of our zeitgeist, which is a leading problem in online media. The optics are too poor, though. And I suppose they don't make for a lot of click-driven ad revenue. In my reading of the news, in the long run, I want to be able to develop a feeling for how the world is comparatively changing over time, and to plan and make decisions based off of this. Even in the absense of articles that prescriptively tell you things that are good to do, fact-based, comparison-driven reporting of change in the world should not be laden with histrionic shouting. When we only read this histrionic shouting, perception becomes reality. Cynicism becomes emotional mailaise, and makes the world less dignified. If the book "Enlightenment Now" has even a speck of truth in it, the momentum of the world is a tremendous lot more positive than the zeitgeist feels it to be. The challenge is to change the zeitgeist.
- YinglingLight 8y ago
  Is such histrionic journalism a byproduct of the current cultural infatuation of "victimization"? Living in a Golden Era doesn't fit the narrative.

iamthepieman 8y ago

This is basically what conspiracy theories (and theorists) do. They make connections between things and then pin that connection on whatever their conspiracy is about. Find a new topic of concern for your intended audience/echo chamber and repeat. Leader of X country is related to leader of Y country. This is evidence of a back room secret cabal, a nepotistic dynasty stretching all the way back to the [American revolution, English Monarchy, time of Christ, Catholic church]. Now that we've cleared up that bit of history it's clear to see that the current situation is designed to [undermine, enslave, confuse, take over, destroy, conceal] the fact that [popular news item, pop culture figure, first world leader, common everyman problem] is actually a secret ... bah I'm tired of this, you get the point.

lkrubner 8y ago

Still, these are true facts which need some explanation, and no simple explanation will do, so we do have a need of deep analysis: ------------------ The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous.

refurb 8y ago
The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. That requires some evidence. Is the mood in the US darker than at the peak of the 1930's depression? After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? During the 1960's race riots? I'd say all of those were a darker time for the US than now.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  They were objectively darker times. Was the mood as dark, though? Or were people more optimistic even though the circumstances were worse? I don't know the answer, by the way - I don't go back far enough. But I think the question is interesting.

grosjona 8y ago

As someone who has worked for several corporations and startups over the past decade, the problem of corporate monopolies is very obvious to me so I don't need to see any third party academic references; I've seen first hand how inefficient and wasteful corporations are and how they keep extracting free money out of the system using government regulations, vendor lock-ins and and media monopolies to lock out competition. This article resonates with me on many different levels and it references ideas that are as obvious to me as the theory of gravity. Besides, the current economic system is not founded on rigorous science; so we should not need to resort to scientific proof to point out its many flaws. Social consensus is enough. Also, academic studies require funding; no corporation would fund research which could potentially work against their own interests. It took many decades to collect funding to do the research which linked smoking and cancer... And that was comparatively easy because at least rich people get cancer too. Here we have a disease which is caused by the rich and which only infects the poor... I don't see how such research will ever get funded.

burlesona 8y ago

> It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself. This is such a good description of the problem. Right now it feels like people are angry about being angry, and the mood seems to me somewhat detached from the reality around us. By historical standards things right now are not that bad, but a lot of people act like we’re living through the apocalypse. My personal take is that this is the natural product of the social media / hyper media era. It’s easy to make a lot of money making people angry (“outrage porn”), but there’s no money in calming people down. I wish that weren’t the case.

ordinaryradical 8y ago
This is true, but it’s also true (if you are American, at least) that we’re living through a major upheaval in our governing institutions. So another way of reading this outrage is that when your president is permitted to do outrageous things daily, to collude with a foreign power to meddle in our elections, to defend that power on the international stage, and to help his family profit by that power... well, you may start to feel a little panicked, outraged, or out of control. The norms of democracy are starting to show their weaknesses. The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. And it comes with a bizarre dissonance because locally speaking you may be doing just fine, stock market is up, etc. etc. That atmosphere also creates a kind of helpless anger that goes looking for targets and attention. It’s almost an existential coping mechanism, I think.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. I think that's going too far. They were there. And then, over succeeding presidents of both parties, they were a little less there. And then, with this president, suddenly "reasonable limits" was a totally foreign concept. But the reasonable limits were there, and really did limit behavior.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
We are living through the apocaypse! We aren't totally triumphant over The Other Side like we should be!