6 ms·

> The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it. Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also vi

> The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it. Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. Our cognition is heavily biased towards saliencing and preserving the scary bits, and being exposed to a planet scale showcase of those bits does not necessarily make us wiser (e.g. better decision makers). At least for me personally it took a decade before I regretted having watered those flowers of morbid curiosity. The redeeming quality of LiveLeak might be, however shocking the content was, it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media. The former is ultimately bound by rules of reality but the latter is only bound by what people are willing to believe in.

moralestapia 5y ago
>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  But LiveLeak doesn't help anyone understand the constant crushing stress of being unable to afford necessities. OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    Actually, a significant portion of the videos portrayed the life of the homeless, the sick, people under the influence of drugs/alcohol, and other things that you don't usually find on the usual platforms.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.
  - laoganmaplz 5y ago
    Is this to mean "People aren't killing themselves, ergo everything must be pretty good for them generally"? Because, if that's what's meant here, I have to pretty vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Yes, the premise of what you read is correct, but the conclusion you make seems different. People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out. The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy. I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
      - tnzm 5y ago
        The self-preservation instinct and general human will to live is strong enough to keep you going even in the absence of "enough good things". But good things aren't the only thing that balances out bad things, as anyone who has seen authoritarianism first hand could tell you. Bad things squared can work just as well. For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
      - thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
        Yeah I don't think people or animals have a built-in "suicide if life sux" instinct built into them. Most will just suffer and suffer until it ends.
        timeslip1523 5y ago
        Weird that people do commit suicide, then.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- acituan 5y ago
  > People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    >Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong. Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
    - lazide 5y ago
      Hardly - rather that we normalize to whatever is going on in our environment, perceiving risk, danger, ok or not ok, etc. in a relative sense not an absolute one (minus adaptation time). There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
    - acituan 5y ago
      In the case of depression and anxiety, at least in the view of CBT, there is always some sort of cognitive distortion at play. In other words, if the mental anguish originates from having taken a distorted view of the world, it wouldn't tell us anything if the world was an OK place or not to begin with.
      - tnzm 5y ago
        The question that bothers me is whether the existence of such distorted views of the world tells us something about the world. After all, they did not arise in isolation - what distorted that person's perception and what's preventing it from correcting itself?
        5y ago
- NL807 5y ago
  Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.
  - wwn_se 5y ago
    1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things. The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that. Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate. If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        I absolutely agree with your points, but at the same time we can only worry about a fixed amount of things, and stress is very unhealthy — so from a purely mental well-being point of view, constantly thinking of all the bad things around the globe is not a good thing to do. Especially when we have a hard time actually effecting the given thing. I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
    - NL807 5y ago
      Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.
- austhrow743 5y ago
  What are you comparing the world to to say a regular existence in it is not ok? That you think being a regular joe is not ok and worse than neutral tells me more about you than the other commenter imo.
- coulix 5y ago
  You are right and things can revert backward very fast.
- papito 5y ago
  I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.
- haswell 5y ago
  The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this. Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been. You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on. This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that. Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged. - [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814 https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
  - MattSayar 5y ago
    The start of that book starts with a great quiz you can take online[0] to see how accurate your perceptions of the world are. [0] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/
ezconnect 5y ago
There are a few places in the world with little violence you are lucky to be in that place that you don't have to worry too much about your life everyday.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  Compared to what? There are very few places in the world with the kind of violence that has been commonplace for most of world history. Yes, violent things happen everywhere, but most people in most places don't have to worry for their physical safety most of the time. That's a relatively new phenomenon.
  - forgetfulness 5y ago
    The thing is that people living in these places that are unprecedentedly peaceful, in the way that HN likes to trot out whenever someone points out the ugliness of the world, may end up voting apathetically for leaders that have their war machine making the world far less peaceful in places that are out of sight and out of mind. Sites like Liveleak may remind you that war isn't the choreography that your governments want you to think it is.
    - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
      Oh, no, I'm 100% on board with you there. But in terms of total violence in real terms, even with imperialist violence of world powers, we're a smidge away from historic lows of global violence.
  - ezconnect 5y ago
    You need to go explore the world some more if that is your point of view.
    - quenix 5y ago
      That's super vague. Do you have any particular examples in mind?
boomboomsubban 5y ago
>it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media I disagree. It will only show one side of the bare reality, as the actions taken by more organized militaries will prevent their footage from ending up there. An Al Qaeda execution could end up on there, but the video of the execution of someone like Bin Laden rarely would.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  LiveLeak was essentially ISIS propaganda.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Not really. Though they often did want a method to spread their videos, the West lacked any of the real context behind such videos turning it into outrage fueled Western propaganda. I expect the videos sparked far more Islamaphobia than radicalization.
    - Biganon 5y ago
      Creating or fuelling islamophobia has always been one of ISIS's tactics
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        I don't see how you can make that claim. The only possible benefit I can think of for them would be that more bigotry towards Muslims might sway more people towards their point if view, but they were already in close contact with a population thoroughly abused by the West in Iraq.
      - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
        I don't see that. That's like saying radical evangelicals have always wanted to increase hatred against Christianity. The relation between the 2 is that one acts as a recruiting ground for the other. Radical evangelicals like radical Islam think they are the "pure form" of their religion.
neatze 5y ago
World is not ok OR ok OR neutral, word just is at same time morbid and beautiful, and only sure thing is we all going to die in some point in a future, for some unfortunate souls world was made an hell by others humans, events, or genetics.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. and credits for this statement are real life experience or academic? Those who have actually seen the world would not make such an utterly ignorant statement. I much recommend volunteer work with refugees, a soup kitchen, working with disabled, etc to help alter this perspective. much recommend!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

moralestapia 5y ago

>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.

Dylan16807 5y ago
But LiveLeak doesn't help anyone understand the constant crushing stress of being unable to afford necessities. OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Actually, a significant portion of the videos portrayed the life of the homeless, the sick, people under the influence of drugs/alcohol, and other things that you don't usually find on the usual platforms.
Aeolun 5y ago
> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.
- laoganmaplz 5y ago
  Is this to mean "People aren't killing themselves, ergo everything must be pretty good for them generally"? Because, if that's what's meant here, I have to pretty vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Yes, the premise of what you read is correct, but the conclusion you make seems different. People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out. The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy. I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      The self-preservation instinct and general human will to live is strong enough to keep you going even in the absence of "enough good things". But good things aren't the only thing that balances out bad things, as anyone who has seen authoritarianism first hand could tell you. Bad things squared can work just as well. For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
    - thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
      Yeah I don't think people or animals have a built-in "suicide if life sux" instinct built into them. Most will just suffer and suffer until it ends.
      - timeslip1523 5y ago
        Weird that people do commit suicide, then.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
acituan 5y ago
> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong. Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
  - lazide 5y ago
    Hardly - rather that we normalize to whatever is going on in our environment, perceiving risk, danger, ok or not ok, etc. in a relative sense not an absolute one (minus adaptation time). There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
  - acituan 5y ago
    In the case of depression and anxiety, at least in the view of CBT, there is always some sort of cognitive distortion at play. In other words, if the mental anguish originates from having taken a distorted view of the world, it wouldn't tell us anything if the world was an OK place or not to begin with.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      The question that bothers me is whether the existence of such distorted views of the world tells us something about the world. After all, they did not arise in isolation - what distorted that person's perception and what's preventing it from correcting itself?
      - 5y ago
NL807 5y ago
Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.
- wwn_se 5y ago
  1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things. The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that. Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate. If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      I absolutely agree with your points, but at the same time we can only worry about a fixed amount of things, and stress is very unhealthy — so from a purely mental well-being point of view, constantly thinking of all the bad things around the globe is not a good thing to do. Especially when we have a hard time actually effecting the given thing. I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
  - NL807 5y ago
    Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.
austhrow743 5y ago
What are you comparing the world to to say a regular existence in it is not ok? That you think being a regular joe is not ok and worse than neutral tells me more about you than the other commenter imo.
coulix 5y ago
You are right and things can revert backward very fast.
papito 5y ago
I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.
haswell 5y ago
The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this. Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been. You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on. This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that. Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged. - [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814 https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
- MattSayar 5y ago
  The start of that book starts with a great quiz you can take online[0] to see how accurate your perceptions of the world are. [0] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/

ezconnect 5y ago

There are a few places in the world with little violence you are lucky to be in that place that you don't have to worry too much about your life everyday.

Matticus_Rex 5y ago
Compared to what? There are very few places in the world with the kind of violence that has been commonplace for most of world history. Yes, violent things happen everywhere, but most people in most places don't have to worry for their physical safety most of the time. That's a relatively new phenomenon.
- forgetfulness 5y ago
  The thing is that people living in these places that are unprecedentedly peaceful, in the way that HN likes to trot out whenever someone points out the ugliness of the world, may end up voting apathetically for leaders that have their war machine making the world far less peaceful in places that are out of sight and out of mind. Sites like Liveleak may remind you that war isn't the choreography that your governments want you to think it is.
  - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
    Oh, no, I'm 100% on board with you there. But in terms of total violence in real terms, even with imperialist violence of world powers, we're a smidge away from historic lows of global violence.
- ezconnect 5y ago
  You need to go explore the world some more if that is your point of view.
  - quenix 5y ago
    That's super vague. Do you have any particular examples in mind?

boomboomsubban 5y ago

>it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media I disagree. It will only show one side of the bare reality, as the actions taken by more organized militaries will prevent their footage from ending up there. An Al Qaeda execution could end up on there, but the video of the execution of someone like Bin Laden rarely would.

an_opabinia 5y ago
LiveLeak was essentially ISIS propaganda.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Not really. Though they often did want a method to spread their videos, the West lacked any of the real context behind such videos turning it into outrage fueled Western propaganda. I expect the videos sparked far more Islamaphobia than radicalization.
  - Biganon 5y ago
    Creating or fuelling islamophobia has always been one of ISIS's tactics
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      I don't see how you can make that claim. The only possible benefit I can think of for them would be that more bigotry towards Muslims might sway more people towards their point if view, but they were already in close contact with a population thoroughly abused by the West in Iraq.
    - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      I don't see that. That's like saying radical evangelicals have always wanted to increase hatred against Christianity. The relation between the 2 is that one acts as a recruiting ground for the other. Radical evangelicals like radical Islam think they are the "pure form" of their religion.

neatze 5y ago

World is not ok OR ok OR neutral, word just is at same time morbid and beautiful, and only sure thing is we all going to die in some point in a future, for some unfortunate souls world was made an hell by others humans, events, or genetics.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

> Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. and credits for this statement are real life experience or academic? Those who have actually seen the world would not make such an utterly ignorant statement. I much recommend volunteer work with refugees, a soup kitchen, working with disabled, etc to help alter this perspective. much recommend!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]