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> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important. This seems like the au

> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important. This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes. Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested. If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?

bkohlmann 6y ago
My understanding is that the Arbery murder became widely known because of Twitter, not the "news." The news reported on it after it became a phenomenon, not as the original source. And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Given the angle the author is taking here, I can hardly believe that he'd be saying "yeah but spending your time on Twitter is good and productive", considering its reputation as a source of constant outrage seems even worse than for internet or TV news. So, the same reasoning applies. You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement? The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
  - brmgb 6y ago
    > The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment. I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      Hard disagree. Look at his own reasoning: > But to what end? > Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction. > “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!” > Do you really? > When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”? > I’ll answer for you: probably never. > If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important. > Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage. He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore. Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
There are many similar cases where the outrage was wrong, the facts of the case weren't as originally reported, and the resulting outrage couldn't be rolled back or productively channeled. My heart breaks at the idea of a guy being murdered with no consequences, but that can't mean that we embrace anything and everything which delivers those consequences.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Yes, but what's the ratio where harm was done there, vs where the public outrage was entirely reasonable and good? Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong? Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I would guess the ratio isn't much below 1:1, which I don't find acceptable. If a friend told me shocking stories about my coworkers, and 50% of them or even 25% of them were wrong, I'd stop listening to her. As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      You think the news that causes widespread public outrage is substantially inaccurate 25-50% of the time? I'd be shocked if it was even 5%.
samdamsamm 6y ago
Completely agree. Sacrificing engagement with the social structures and historical progression that we as a species depend on is not an option that can deliver a healthy society. No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The author isn't proposing checking out entirely - documentaries are one of his suggested replacements. Disengaging with the news is just about not being flooded daily.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Exactly. An argument about better vs worse news sources I could totally understand. Checking out when it's anything that's not explicitly a local issue? That's...not great. Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold: > When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”? > I’ll answer for you: probably never. > ... > But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away. Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.
Arun2009 6y ago
> This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes. There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news. This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts. Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  This would be a better take. If you genuinely feel that being more informed about current events doesn't outweigh the psychological damage involved, especially if it stops you from being a contributing citizen in other ways, I could see an argument for checking out. My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  > Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse. He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.
rubber_duck 6y ago
>If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement? Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc. It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.
deleted 6y ago
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cellar_door 6y ago
It takes mental energy to suppress and control emotional outrage, which is bad for your overall mental health and personal productivity. >Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. -- Daniel Kahneman I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  It's actually up for debate whether ego depletion is a real thing. > Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6] > ... > In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33] > A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34] > In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5] > Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?
zests 6y ago
I have nothing to add except some commentary describing why or why not certain issue go viral. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage... The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.
- Reedx 6y ago
  Along these lines, CGP Grey's video about Anger Thought Germs is an excellent breakdown of why anger spreads like nothing else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.
globular-toast 6y ago
But if you actually watch the news you'll see that most of what is reported won't get better with any amount of being "wound up". Natural disasters, crime, accidents etc. There is no sense at all in learning about such things.
GhostVII 6y ago
There are definitely benefits to the 24 hour news cycle, like the Ahmaud Arbery case you mentioned, but I don't think it is clear that those benefits are worth the cost to society as whole. For every case where the outrage is justified, there are cases where there was public outrage that was based on completely false information, or directed to the wrong individual. And this also can motivate people to do things like mass shootings, since you know that the story of what you did will be talked about around the country for days. Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective. I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
The entirety of human civilization and progression up to the last decade or so happened without being constantly outraged by the news and social media. At some point I have to choose my own health over whatever people think they are achieving by getting pissed off.
- untog 6y ago
  That’s not true at all. TV, and newspapers before that have inspired outrage when they expose wrongdoing for a very long time now. No, it’s not constant like social media, but it’s still been a powerful force. There’s a reason the printing press is regarded as such an important invention!

bkohlmann 6y ago

My understanding is that the Arbery murder became widely known because of Twitter, not the "news." The news reported on it after it became a phenomenon, not as the original source. And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Given the angle the author is taking here, I can hardly believe that he'd be saying "yeah but spending your time on Twitter is good and productive", considering its reputation as a source of constant outrage seems even worse than for internet or TV news. So, the same reasoning applies. You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement? The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
- brmgb 6y ago
  > The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment. I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Hard disagree. Look at his own reasoning: > But to what end? > Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction. > “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!” > Do you really? > When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”? > I’ll answer for you: probably never. > If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important. > Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage. He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore. Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

There are many similar cases where the outrage was wrong, the facts of the case weren't as originally reported, and the resulting outrage couldn't be rolled back or productively channeled. My heart breaks at the idea of a guy being murdered with no consequences, but that can't mean that we embrace anything and everything which delivers those consequences.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Yes, but what's the ratio where harm was done there, vs where the public outrage was entirely reasonable and good? Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong? Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I would guess the ratio isn't much below 1:1, which I don't find acceptable. If a friend told me shocking stories about my coworkers, and 50% of them or even 25% of them were wrong, I'd stop listening to her. As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    You think the news that causes widespread public outrage is substantially inaccurate 25-50% of the time? I'd be shocked if it was even 5%.

samdamsamm 6y ago

Completely agree. Sacrificing engagement with the social structures and historical progression that we as a species depend on is not an option that can deliver a healthy society. No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The author isn't proposing checking out entirely - documentaries are one of his suggested replacements. Disengaging with the news is just about not being flooded daily.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Exactly. An argument about better vs worse news sources I could totally understand. Checking out when it's anything that's not explicitly a local issue? That's...not great. Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold: > When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”? > I’ll answer for you: probably never. > ... > But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away. Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.

Arun2009 6y ago

> This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes. There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news. This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts. Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
This would be a better take. If you genuinely feel that being more informed about current events doesn't outweigh the psychological damage involved, especially if it stops you from being a contributing citizen in other ways, I could see an argument for checking out. My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
djsumdog 6y ago
> Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse. He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.

rubber_duck 6y ago

>If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement? Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc. It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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cellar_door 6y ago

It takes mental energy to suppress and control emotional outrage, which is bad for your overall mental health and personal productivity. >Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. -- Daniel Kahneman I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
It's actually up for debate whether ego depletion is a real thing. > Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6] > ... > In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33] > A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34] > In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5] > Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?

zests 6y ago

I have nothing to add except some commentary describing why or why not certain issue go viral. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage... The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.

Reedx 6y ago
Along these lines, CGP Grey's video about Anger Thought Germs is an excellent breakdown of why anger spreads like nothing else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.

globular-toast 6y ago

But if you actually watch the news you'll see that most of what is reported won't get better with any amount of being "wound up". Natural disasters, crime, accidents etc. There is no sense at all in learning about such things.

GhostVII 6y ago

There are definitely benefits to the 24 hour news cycle, like the Ahmaud Arbery case you mentioned, but I don't think it is clear that those benefits are worth the cost to society as whole. For every case where the outrage is justified, there are cases where there was public outrage that was based on completely false information, or directed to the wrong individual. And this also can motivate people to do things like mass shootings, since you know that the story of what you did will be talked about around the country for days. Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective. I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

The entirety of human civilization and progression up to the last decade or so happened without being constantly outraged by the news and social media. At some point I have to choose my own health over whatever people think they are achieving by getting pissed off.

untog 6y ago
That’s not true at all. TV, and newspapers before that have inspired outrage when they expose wrongdoing for a very long time now. No, it’s not constant like social media, but it’s still been a powerful force. There’s a reason the printing press is regarded as such an important invention!