4 ms·

You know what? He's right. With the world being a bigger, more communicative place, it can sometimes seem like things are getting worse, but the truth is, it'

• pjscott 16y ago
  The bad stuff is more likely to make headlines, so it's easy to get a distorted picture of the world. "We haven't been nuked this year!" is not exciting news. It sure is nice, though.
  • kiba 16y ago
    Maybe we need a section of "good news" and a section of "bad news" that are listed equally.
  • InclinedPlane 16y ago
    The problem here is multi-fold. On the one hand you have the fundamental problem of comparing what did happen with what might have happened. There are too many possibilities and too much complexity in that problem to ever come up with an objective answer. On the other hand, the news media is not about informing people it's about getting as many viewers as possible, so we hear a lot more about exceptional events than we do about ordinary developments. Unfortunately, the human psyche isn't well protected against hearing lots of exceptional news, so people develop quite distorted ideas about the world and events within it (and develop quite distorted risk models as well). The danger of a distorted perception of reality and of excessive and unwarranted pessimism is that it can quite easily lead to devaluation and neglect of the very things that are in actuality making life better.