4 ms·

This is my favorite kind of headline. The kind that screams, "No matter what you do, it's wrong!"

kgin 6y ago
Everything in life is an optimization exercise.
remote_phone 6y ago
“Burying COVID victims accounted for an increase in home prices due to less land!” “Cremating COVID victims increased global temperatures by 0.2C”
DoreenMichele 6y ago
All "news" is bad news. I recommend not reading it most of the time. Better to read research papers and raw stats somewhere than commercial "news," in most cases.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  But this assumes some level of knowledge/understanding of the subject at hand. If I read research papers about Covid (assuming I have the time) I doubt I'd be able to follow the arguments or understand the nuances of conclusions, caveats and so on... Time is also a problem as I mentioned above. This approach essentially duplicates the effort needed to analyse and distill the research. To me it kind of reads as "all documentation is bad documentation, just read the code".
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Not all articles that digest the information some are equally bad about making "all news bad news" for the sake of being an attention whore. "Duplicating" effort to do your own analysis is better than drinking the koolaid on shitty ideas that will royally fuck you over if you believe them and then someday having to deprogram yourself from their shitty ideas if you actually want your life to work. Current research on Covid is pretty preliminary. Most of what's being said is sort of speculative to some degree. We mostly aren't getting solid conclusions out of it, which is part of why people are still scared of it and the pandemic rages on. If we actually knew what the hell was going on and how to fix it, we would have put a stop to the pandemic already, just as we put out the oil well fires in just six months instead of taking the predicted years to solve it: Because oil well fires were pretty well understood, so it wasn't all that hard to invent new solutions when we had motive to. The world rapidly forgot that it was honestly and sincerely in a not click-bait fashion predicted to be a global environmental disaster. We just took it for granted when it got fixed and found some new "news" to bellyache about. I'm a former homemaker. I get really tired of people simultaneously dismissing me as an idiot who knows nothing because I chose to be a full-time wife and mom for some years and also telling me my solutions are out of reach for ordinary people because that requires more brains than they have.
    - xenocratus 6y ago
      At the risk of appearing cynical or condescending - do you have any links or references to studies about press consumption and it's impact on views/mental health/general wellbeing etc.? I'd be legitimately interested in reading that (I do read research papers when I want to make sure I understand something well - just not all the time)
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        You don't sound cynical or condescending, just lazy (or desperate for any excuse to talk with someone). This is such a common question that google autocompletes it if you start to type it into their search engine. But here are my first two hits, which both appear to link out to actual supporting studies: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... https://www.lifehack.org/532866/five-reasons-why-consuming-news-excessively-bad-for-your-health https://www.lifehack.org/532866/five-reasons-why-consuming-n...

kgin 6y ago

Everything in life is an optimization exercise.

“Burying COVID victims accounted for an increase in home prices due to less land!” “Cremating COVID victims increased global temperatures by 0.2C”

DoreenMichele 6y ago

All "news" is bad news. I recommend not reading it most of the time. Better to read research papers and raw stats somewhere than commercial "news," in most cases.

xenocratus 6y ago
But this assumes some level of knowledge/understanding of the subject at hand. If I read research papers about Covid (assuming I have the time) I doubt I'd be able to follow the arguments or understand the nuances of conclusions, caveats and so on... Time is also a problem as I mentioned above. This approach essentially duplicates the effort needed to analyse and distill the research. To me it kind of reads as "all documentation is bad documentation, just read the code".
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Not all articles that digest the information some are equally bad about making "all news bad news" for the sake of being an attention whore. "Duplicating" effort to do your own analysis is better than drinking the koolaid on shitty ideas that will royally fuck you over if you believe them and then someday having to deprogram yourself from their shitty ideas if you actually want your life to work. Current research on Covid is pretty preliminary. Most of what's being said is sort of speculative to some degree. We mostly aren't getting solid conclusions out of it, which is part of why people are still scared of it and the pandemic rages on. If we actually knew what the hell was going on and how to fix it, we would have put a stop to the pandemic already, just as we put out the oil well fires in just six months instead of taking the predicted years to solve it: Because oil well fires were pretty well understood, so it wasn't all that hard to invent new solutions when we had motive to. The world rapidly forgot that it was honestly and sincerely in a not click-bait fashion predicted to be a global environmental disaster. We just took it for granted when it got fixed and found some new "news" to bellyache about. I'm a former homemaker. I get really tired of people simultaneously dismissing me as an idiot who knows nothing because I chose to be a full-time wife and mom for some years and also telling me my solutions are out of reach for ordinary people because that requires more brains than they have.
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    At the risk of appearing cynical or condescending - do you have any links or references to studies about press consumption and it's impact on views/mental health/general wellbeing etc.? I'd be legitimately interested in reading that (I do read research papers when I want to make sure I understand something well - just not all the time)
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      You don't sound cynical or condescending, just lazy (or desperate for any excuse to talk with someone). This is such a common question that google autocompletes it if you start to type it into their search engine. But here are my first two hits, which both appear to link out to actual supporting studies: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... https://www.lifehack.org/532866/five-reasons-why-consuming-news-excessively-bad-for-your-health https://www.lifehack.org/532866/five-reasons-why-consuming-n...