7 ms·

I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media an

I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media? I find myself often wondering: is the whole world anxious and confused and sad right now? Or maybe just my country? Or maybe just highly-online folks? Or maybe just my bubble? Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression. But I don’t know how to calibrate at all, I have infinite information available to me and no way to sift through it, and the global marketplace of information seems to mean that anything that attracts attention is either highly biased or a statistical outlier or is otherwise just taking advantage of some human bias that makes it sensational enough to attract eyeballs and spread.

gmac 7y ago
I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media? My study Mappiness gets closer to that. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wo2M8Z-ULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wo2M8Z-ULM
dilippkumar 7y ago
I once reasoned that I trust my network of friends, family and colleagues to pass along any information to me that might be relevant to me - as long as I maintain a strong relationship with them - through regular meets, phone calls and texting each other fun memes. I figured that I don’t need to consume any information from untrusted and unvetted sources (cable news, new york times, reddit, wsj, late night tv shows) - so I disconnected myself from all of the modern news sources and chose to live in ignorance. Anecdotally, I feel great. I’m at peace, I still find out everything that’s useful - and I don’t waste cpu cycles in my head on things completely outside my sphere of control. And yes, the whole world is doing really well right now - the way I see it - despite what the TV news anchors yell into the camera every hour.
- monkeynotes 7y ago
  It's somewhat sad that we choose ignorance to placate our anxiety. This has to be a symptom of feeling oppressed and under a tyranny that suppresses the people asking for change. People are apathetic because there is nothing they can do, so they turn off. The world is flooded with so much noise, no one can be bothered to figure out the signal any more. It's perfect for government because they can now be elected and govern based on lies and no one cares. Lie your ass off to the remaining people who care to vote, say you'll do everything to fix everything and then just do whatever you want when in power. No one can compete with that, so other candidates have to do the same.
- simplify 7y ago
  Isn't this the sort of attitude that enables bad actors to abuse their positions of power?
  - switchbak 7y ago
    Bad actors are already very much using the aforementioned media outlets to abuse their positions of power anyway. I do agree it's a problem - being uninformed of what's going on around you. Not sure that being misinformed is really any better though. I do despair at our general ability to have an accurate sense of the world around us.
  - objectivetruth 7y ago
    It's the sort of attitude that enables a LOT of bad things in the world: The poster doesn't like "unvetted" news sources like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times (which get lumped in with Reddit and Stephen Colbert in their opinion). Instead, apparently they consider the information they get from their friends and family as adequately "vetted." Now, that's a very unusual definition of "vetted," plus where are the friends/family getting THEIR info? The poster is information-gathering via the old game of "telephone" with all the attendant problems and distortion that invites. Now, the poster also claims they are getting all the info they need. How do they know that? How do they know their trusted friends and family are 100% informed on all of the relevant issues? The world is a fast-changing place so to safely not worry about any of those changes, you have to be: 1) near the top of the socio-economic pyramid, AND 2) devoid of empathy Example: as a white natural-born US citizen, I probably won't have to worry about any upcoming changes to the existing legal permanent resident program personally affecting me. But a recently-approved permanent resident really SHOULD pay attention to the news so that they can learn that many Americans and their representatives want to revoke their residency and kick them out. Same thing for marriage laws: I'm a straight unmarried man, so I won't personally be affected if the GOP re-bans gay marriage, invalidates all of the existing ones, and jails county clerks and pastors for officiating them in the future. But as a human being who cares about the people who ARE affected, it would be incredibly selfish of me to ignore not just their plight, but to go out of my way to avoid learning about what is going on. I feel that being an informed citizen is a critical responsibility, an integral part of citizenship.
noxToken 7y ago
>Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression. I have a hypothesis comprised of two ideas. First, people have been encouraged more than ever to be expressive of their feeling and emotional states. That's the same reason there's a lot of self-deprecating humor with Millennials and Zoomers: it's a way to publicly cope with how you feel while also signalling to others that while everything isn't perfectly alright, let's laugh about it. Second, people reacting to current events expresses feelings towards a particular thing. It is not necessarily an overall indicator of mood or mental health. I'm happy that it's my birthday. I'm upset that the other team won the championship. I'm sad that my grandmother died. Those things tend to be temporary emotions. I'm personally am upset with a lot of things the current US administration does, but it does not reflect my overall status. As I've seen explained: you can cure being alone by leaving your room and taking a stroll in a park; you can be lonely while surrounded by friends and family at your own birthday party.
derefr 7y ago
> conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression These are mostly orthogonal, no matter the scale. "Fear and anger and depression" are much more personality traits determined by genetics and raising, than they are reflections of how pleasant or unpleasant one's life is lately. Due to hedonic adaptation (a.k.a. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_set_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_se...), people mostly act how they act no matter what their environment is currently like. Short, sharp changes (like Christmas, as seen on the Hedonometer site) can make large numbers of people temporarily feel something strongly enough to show up statistically; but long-term environmental states (e.g. recessions, famines, wars) do not cause long-term statistical shifts in reporting on emotional scales. People get used to things, and revert to their emotional set-points. In other words, a great world and a horrible world would be indistinguishable when viewed through the lens of "how happy people are." You can't get global utility from global happiness.
- o09rdk 7y ago
  The evidence surrounding hedonic adaptation you're citing is misleading. The twin studies, for example, cite a 50% heritability, which, ignoring their problems, still suggests far from a preponderance of genetic influence. And those studies are difficult to interpret vis-a-vis their environmental assumptions, as are many other studies. E.g., it's not that impressive to me to show that people return to baseline from some anomalous event, when so much of the environment is structured in a very long-term stable way. The person who gets married still has to return to their same SES background, the same vocational history, the same environment, etc and so forth; conversely, the person who gets divorced still has the same job background, same workplace environment, and so forth and so on. I also feel like the hedonic adaptation hypothesis leads to this kind of absurd conclusion that people are unaffected by anything regardless of severity. That is, it doesn't matter what we do to others because it's their fault how happy they are. In any event, I think these hedonic adaptation studies are really misleading in some ways. This project (the hedonometer project) is somewhat similar. I've done research on similar topics, and one problem you run into fairly quickly is that there's nothing really "attached" to the data you're modeling. The assumption is that the verbal content on Twitter will reflect people's mood on average, which is fairly reasonable, but the content on Twitter is fairly disembodied. That is, someone might tweet about how horrible Alan Rickman's death is, but they themselves are in a fairly good mood. So you see recurring time series patterns with, e.g., Christmas because the positive language is part of what is socially entrained, even though it's disconnected from changes in your mood. You tweeting about having fun with your family this year, when everything is going well, is not the same as tweeting about having fun with you family last year, when everything was going to hell. It's admittedly a complicated topic, but I think this stuff gets radically oversimplified.
citilife 7y ago
You can see how people on HN feel about given topics: https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20Cloud,Azure https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20... We're building the same thing for companies: https://insideropinion.com https://insideropinion.com
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it I personally believe this is influenced by media consumption. I think “Everything is terrible” or “horrible thing happened” headlines are much more likely to get clicks than “world continues to gradually improve” headlines. Combine that with how consistently marketable outrage seems to be to just about everybody, and you end up with a world full of signals that everything is bad.
- chillwaves 7y ago
  We are experiencing a global pollution event that has never been seen before. We are in the midst of potentially unprecedented mass extinction in modern times. Can you consider the possibility that some things can improve while other things can get worse? That the cost of improvement in some areas, technological or the economy, will be a trade off in others like our enviroment? Can you consider that as technology increases, so does the overall impact of humanity, so does the possibility of an extinction event. That there are more nuclear weapons today than ever before and the knowledge of this technology will only increase in the future. I find your comment incredibly naive in its contrarianism. Oh sure, the media wants to scare you but that doesn't mean problems don't exist. This idea that everything always gets better with time is a ridiculous bias. The Dark Ages happened and it can come again. Progress is not a guarantee.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    This kind of catastrophizing is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I also think it’s quite arrogant of you to frame my perspective as naive. You’ve made a single point about climate change, and chose to only focus on the worst way you could possibly interpret everything, including your own speculations about events that you think will occur. On the same topic you could also make points about renewable technologies constantly improving, and renewable adoption in the market. But the perspective you’ve put forward is that everything is all bad, all the time, and always getting worse. The reality is quite far from what you’ve characterised, and I think that one of the more concerning implications of this point of view is that good things shouldn’t be worthy of attention if bad things also exist.
chillwaves 7y ago
> conditions in the world are better than ever before Is it possible that some conditions are improving while some are getting worse? Technological or economic progress at the cost of the enviroment. Things are improving, until they suddenly aren't. Are you paying attention to the weather? This is not normal. We are experiencing a mass extinction event that may be unprecedented in history. Do not tell me that everything is fine.
wpq0 7y ago
To me this shows that Twitter is mostly US-and-Euro-centric.

gmac 7y ago

I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media? My study Mappiness gets closer to that. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wo2M8Z-ULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wo2M8Z-ULM

dilippkumar 7y ago

I once reasoned that I trust my network of friends, family and colleagues to pass along any information to me that might be relevant to me - as long as I maintain a strong relationship with them - through regular meets, phone calls and texting each other fun memes. I figured that I don’t need to consume any information from untrusted and unvetted sources (cable news, new york times, reddit, wsj, late night tv shows) - so I disconnected myself from all of the modern news sources and chose to live in ignorance. Anecdotally, I feel great. I’m at peace, I still find out everything that’s useful - and I don’t waste cpu cycles in my head on things completely outside my sphere of control. And yes, the whole world is doing really well right now - the way I see it - despite what the TV news anchors yell into the camera every hour.

monkeynotes 7y ago
It's somewhat sad that we choose ignorance to placate our anxiety. This has to be a symptom of feeling oppressed and under a tyranny that suppresses the people asking for change. People are apathetic because there is nothing they can do, so they turn off. The world is flooded with so much noise, no one can be bothered to figure out the signal any more. It's perfect for government because they can now be elected and govern based on lies and no one cares. Lie your ass off to the remaining people who care to vote, say you'll do everything to fix everything and then just do whatever you want when in power. No one can compete with that, so other candidates have to do the same.
simplify 7y ago
Isn't this the sort of attitude that enables bad actors to abuse their positions of power?
- switchbak 7y ago
  Bad actors are already very much using the aforementioned media outlets to abuse their positions of power anyway. I do agree it's a problem - being uninformed of what's going on around you. Not sure that being misinformed is really any better though. I do despair at our general ability to have an accurate sense of the world around us.
- objectivetruth 7y ago
  It's the sort of attitude that enables a LOT of bad things in the world: The poster doesn't like "unvetted" news sources like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times (which get lumped in with Reddit and Stephen Colbert in their opinion). Instead, apparently they consider the information they get from their friends and family as adequately "vetted." Now, that's a very unusual definition of "vetted," plus where are the friends/family getting THEIR info? The poster is information-gathering via the old game of "telephone" with all the attendant problems and distortion that invites. Now, the poster also claims they are getting all the info they need. How do they know that? How do they know their trusted friends and family are 100% informed on all of the relevant issues? The world is a fast-changing place so to safely not worry about any of those changes, you have to be: 1) near the top of the socio-economic pyramid, AND 2) devoid of empathy Example: as a white natural-born US citizen, I probably won't have to worry about any upcoming changes to the existing legal permanent resident program personally affecting me. But a recently-approved permanent resident really SHOULD pay attention to the news so that they can learn that many Americans and their representatives want to revoke their residency and kick them out. Same thing for marriage laws: I'm a straight unmarried man, so I won't personally be affected if the GOP re-bans gay marriage, invalidates all of the existing ones, and jails county clerks and pastors for officiating them in the future. But as a human being who cares about the people who ARE affected, it would be incredibly selfish of me to ignore not just their plight, but to go out of my way to avoid learning about what is going on. I feel that being an informed citizen is a critical responsibility, an integral part of citizenship.

noxToken 7y ago

>Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression. I have a hypothesis comprised of two ideas. First, people have been encouraged more than ever to be expressive of their feeling and emotional states. That's the same reason there's a lot of self-deprecating humor with Millennials and Zoomers: it's a way to publicly cope with how you feel while also signalling to others that while everything isn't perfectly alright, let's laugh about it. Second, people reacting to current events expresses feelings towards a particular thing. It is not necessarily an overall indicator of mood or mental health. I'm happy that it's my birthday. I'm upset that the other team won the championship. I'm sad that my grandmother died. Those things tend to be temporary emotions. I'm personally am upset with a lot of things the current US administration does, but it does not reflect my overall status. As I've seen explained: you can cure being alone by leaving your room and taking a stroll in a park; you can be lonely while surrounded by friends and family at your own birthday party.

derefr 7y ago

> conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression These are mostly orthogonal, no matter the scale. "Fear and anger and depression" are much more personality traits determined by genetics and raising, than they are reflections of how pleasant or unpleasant one's life is lately. Due to hedonic adaptation (a.k.a. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_set_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_se...), people mostly act how they act no matter what their environment is currently like. Short, sharp changes (like Christmas, as seen on the Hedonometer site) can make large numbers of people temporarily feel something strongly enough to show up statistically; but long-term environmental states (e.g. recessions, famines, wars) do not cause long-term statistical shifts in reporting on emotional scales. People get used to things, and revert to their emotional set-points. In other words, a great world and a horrible world would be indistinguishable when viewed through the lens of "how happy people are." You can't get global utility from global happiness.

o09rdk 7y ago
The evidence surrounding hedonic adaptation you're citing is misleading. The twin studies, for example, cite a 50% heritability, which, ignoring their problems, still suggests far from a preponderance of genetic influence. And those studies are difficult to interpret vis-a-vis their environmental assumptions, as are many other studies. E.g., it's not that impressive to me to show that people return to baseline from some anomalous event, when so much of the environment is structured in a very long-term stable way. The person who gets married still has to return to their same SES background, the same vocational history, the same environment, etc and so forth; conversely, the person who gets divorced still has the same job background, same workplace environment, and so forth and so on. I also feel like the hedonic adaptation hypothesis leads to this kind of absurd conclusion that people are unaffected by anything regardless of severity. That is, it doesn't matter what we do to others because it's their fault how happy they are. In any event, I think these hedonic adaptation studies are really misleading in some ways. This project (the hedonometer project) is somewhat similar. I've done research on similar topics, and one problem you run into fairly quickly is that there's nothing really "attached" to the data you're modeling. The assumption is that the verbal content on Twitter will reflect people's mood on average, which is fairly reasonable, but the content on Twitter is fairly disembodied. That is, someone might tweet about how horrible Alan Rickman's death is, but they themselves are in a fairly good mood. So you see recurring time series patterns with, e.g., Christmas because the positive language is part of what is socially entrained, even though it's disconnected from changes in your mood. You tweeting about having fun with your family this year, when everything is going well, is not the same as tweeting about having fun with you family last year, when everything was going to hell. It's admittedly a complicated topic, but I think this stuff gets radically oversimplified.

citilife 7y ago

You can see how people on HN feel about given topics: https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20Cloud,Azure https://hnprofile.com/compare?search=AWS,GCP%20|%20Google%20... We're building the same thing for companies: https://insideropinion.com https://insideropinion.com

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it I personally believe this is influenced by media consumption. I think “Everything is terrible” or “horrible thing happened” headlines are much more likely to get clicks than “world continues to gradually improve” headlines. Combine that with how consistently marketable outrage seems to be to just about everybody, and you end up with a world full of signals that everything is bad.

chillwaves 7y ago
We are experiencing a global pollution event that has never been seen before. We are in the midst of potentially unprecedented mass extinction in modern times. Can you consider the possibility that some things can improve while other things can get worse? That the cost of improvement in some areas, technological or the economy, will be a trade off in others like our enviroment? Can you consider that as technology increases, so does the overall impact of humanity, so does the possibility of an extinction event. That there are more nuclear weapons today than ever before and the knowledge of this technology will only increase in the future. I find your comment incredibly naive in its contrarianism. Oh sure, the media wants to scare you but that doesn't mean problems don't exist. This idea that everything always gets better with time is a ridiculous bias. The Dark Ages happened and it can come again. Progress is not a guarantee.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  This kind of catastrophizing is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I also think it’s quite arrogant of you to frame my perspective as naive. You’ve made a single point about climate change, and chose to only focus on the worst way you could possibly interpret everything, including your own speculations about events that you think will occur. On the same topic you could also make points about renewable technologies constantly improving, and renewable adoption in the market. But the perspective you’ve put forward is that everything is all bad, all the time, and always getting worse. The reality is quite far from what you’ve characterised, and I think that one of the more concerning implications of this point of view is that good things shouldn’t be worthy of attention if bad things also exist.

chillwaves 7y ago

> conditions in the world are better than ever before Is it possible that some conditions are improving while some are getting worse? Technological or economic progress at the cost of the enviroment. Things are improving, until they suddenly aren't. Are you paying attention to the weather? This is not normal. We are experiencing a mass extinction event that may be unprecedented in history. Do not tell me that everything is fine.

wpq0 7y ago

To me this shows that Twitter is mostly US-and-Euro-centric.