6 ms·

"Yet there's cause for alarm" I find these claims actually dangerous We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary

"Yet there's cause for alarm" I find these claims actually dangerous We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary definition of "cause of alarm". Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that

vmception 4y ago
Just pick whatever timeframe is convenient for your cause Ive lost faith in people’s ability to perceive that so might as well make them your flock
nazgulnarsil 4y ago
Claiming everything is cause for alarm is defecting against the ability to communicate about important things because it means alarms no longer work. Journalists have been crying wolf 24/7/365 on every available bit of bandwidth for decades now and it's time to start treating them appropriately.
- robbedpeter 4y ago
  Run out of the village, into the forest, to fend against actual wolves, preferably.
- seibelj 4y ago
  The NYT is constantly using the words "scary", "terrifying", "afraid", "catastrophe". The sun is still shining and my kids are still playing outside. You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    I do believe that generally the world is not okay. We are currently suffering the consequences of many slowly unfolding tragedies that were well warned about by experts. So I imagine there are quite a few tragedies building up now, warned about, but not yet acted uppon.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      Honestly - don’t care. The internet makes me able to see endless tragedies big and small 24/7. I help my family, friends, and community and pay it forwards. I sleep like a baby.
      - rocqua 4y ago
        I am not talking about tragedies like the war in Ukraine. I'm talking about tragedies like leaded gasoline, PFAS, global warming, air pollution in cities. Things that affect everyone, but slowly enough that we barely notice.
    - xvector 4y ago
      Meh. These "tragedies" are often irrelevant and often the only time you will ever encounter them will be in some news article written by a hand-wringing doomer. Willfully ignoring the news is amazing for mental health. The benefit of cutting the constant stream of doomerism out of one's life cannot be overstated - it's a benefit that far exceeds whatever minimal value to society you could provide by tuning into the news.
      - rocqua 4y ago
        Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law. That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet. These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly. How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
        helloworld11 4y ago
        Also speaking from a European perspective. Virtually all of those problems you mention do exist to some extent, but have existed in many worse forms before. Life in Europe is today objectively, by almost all objective measures, better than at any time in its very long history and it continues to improve in most ways (even with events like the Ukraine invasion). In case you do have children, barring a truly black swan type catastrophe, the overwhelming likelihood is that their contexts when they're adults, in Europe or otherwise, will be still better than those of us today. It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    Don't forget "historic". It seems every day there are approximately 713 new historic events happening, that are totally and completely unlike any other event, evar!
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences. Yeah, the problem is that your children's children will be living with the consequences of 3 °C global warming or worse, while both of us will probably be dead for long at that time. Humans psychologically aren't wired to deal with long-term threats, our brains can't process them and their impact nowhere near as well as short-term threats. Just look at the Ukraine crisis: People raised the bells already in 2014, and no one listened to them. Only when tanks rolled up on Kyiv, the West finally got its collective arse up and started actually delivering serious ammo towards the Ukrainians.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    That is why survey after survey shows that those who consume such media the most are the most harmed by these messages. It’s quite sad when you think about it, because those who have a desire to learn more are then taken advantage of until they cower in fear.
- madiator 4y ago
  This is not a problem with journalists alone. This is human nature. Establish the same set of incentives and structures and this outcome will be very likely.
tjr225 4y ago
Yeah, NPR has been driving me nuts with this crap. There seem to be 0 news sources available that can’t help but slip some alarmist flavor text in. I can’t listen to it anymore.
- labster 4y ago
  That’s just normal news flavor text, like “breaking news” or “storm watch”. There’s no semantic meaning, the words just boost engagement metrics. Which would you click first? “Clock sales dip, wristwatches gain” or “Breaking News: storm watches PUMMEL bedside clock sales, is it cause for alarm?”
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    By now, the first.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    Which would you click? There's this weird phenomena in society where we always attribute different actions than those we'd take to the rest of society, and I think it drives a lot of this stupidity. There was certainly a time that yellow journalism drove interest, but that's because it was more the exception than the rule, which enabled it to exploit naivete more effectively. Now that everything is a historic alarming unprecedented catastrophic dangerous event (or in the equal but opposite direction an amazing groundbreaking miracle cure for cancer), I mostly just yawn and look for the next link. And I've no reason to believe that my tolerance for hyperbole (to describe what's happening kindly) is substantially less than the rest of society. As some sort of quantitative evidence for my argument, I'd also point to the trust in media polling [1]. There is only 1 "media" outlet that more than 50% of Americans rate as at least "somewhat trustworthy" - The Weather Channel. That absolutely all trust has collapsed leads me to believe most people know all of this stuff is, at best, yellow journalism. [1] - https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/04/05/trust-media-2022-where-americans-get-news-poll https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
    - 4y ago
red_trumpet 4y ago
> We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary definition of "cause of alarm". > Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that Could you elaborate on that? What happened to teenage pregnancy after the 1960s (I sounds like the numbers are going up/not going down anymore?), and what did disrupt that trend?

vmception 4y ago

Just pick whatever timeframe is convenient for your cause Ive lost faith in people’s ability to perceive that so might as well make them your flock

nazgulnarsil 4y ago

Claiming everything is cause for alarm is defecting against the ability to communicate about important things because it means alarms no longer work. Journalists have been crying wolf 24/7/365 on every available bit of bandwidth for decades now and it's time to start treating them appropriately.

robbedpeter 4y ago
Run out of the village, into the forest, to fend against actual wolves, preferably.
seibelj 4y ago
The NYT is constantly using the words "scary", "terrifying", "afraid", "catastrophe". The sun is still shining and my kids are still playing outside. You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences.
- rocqua 4y ago
  I do believe that generally the world is not okay. We are currently suffering the consequences of many slowly unfolding tragedies that were well warned about by experts. So I imagine there are quite a few tragedies building up now, warned about, but not yet acted uppon.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    Honestly - don’t care. The internet makes me able to see endless tragedies big and small 24/7. I help my family, friends, and community and pay it forwards. I sleep like a baby.
    - rocqua 4y ago
      I am not talking about tragedies like the war in Ukraine. I'm talking about tragedies like leaded gasoline, PFAS, global warming, air pollution in cities. Things that affect everyone, but slowly enough that we barely notice.
  - xvector 4y ago
    Meh. These "tragedies" are often irrelevant and often the only time you will ever encounter them will be in some news article written by a hand-wringing doomer. Willfully ignoring the news is amazing for mental health. The benefit of cutting the constant stream of doomerism out of one's life cannot be overstated - it's a benefit that far exceeds whatever minimal value to society you could provide by tuning into the news.
    - rocqua 4y ago
      Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law. That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet. These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly. How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
      - helloworld11 4y ago
        Also speaking from a European perspective. Virtually all of those problems you mention do exist to some extent, but have existed in many worse forms before. Life in Europe is today objectively, by almost all objective measures, better than at any time in its very long history and it continues to improve in most ways (even with events like the Ukraine invasion). In case you do have children, barring a truly black swan type catastrophe, the overwhelming likelihood is that their contexts when they're adults, in Europe or otherwise, will be still better than those of us today. It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Don't forget "historic". It seems every day there are approximately 713 new historic events happening, that are totally and completely unlike any other event, evar!
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences. Yeah, the problem is that your children's children will be living with the consequences of 3 °C global warming or worse, while both of us will probably be dead for long at that time. Humans psychologically aren't wired to deal with long-term threats, our brains can't process them and their impact nowhere near as well as short-term threats. Just look at the Ukraine crisis: People raised the bells already in 2014, and no one listened to them. Only when tanks rolled up on Kyiv, the West finally got its collective arse up and started actually delivering serious ammo towards the Ukrainians.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  That is why survey after survey shows that those who consume such media the most are the most harmed by these messages. It’s quite sad when you think about it, because those who have a desire to learn more are then taken advantage of until they cower in fear.
madiator 4y ago
This is not a problem with journalists alone. This is human nature. Establish the same set of incentives and structures and this outcome will be very likely.

tjr225 4y ago

Yeah, NPR has been driving me nuts with this crap. There seem to be 0 news sources available that can’t help but slip some alarmist flavor text in. I can’t listen to it anymore.

labster 4y ago
That’s just normal news flavor text, like “breaking news” or “storm watch”. There’s no semantic meaning, the words just boost engagement metrics. Which would you click first? “Clock sales dip, wristwatches gain” or “Breaking News: storm watches PUMMEL bedside clock sales, is it cause for alarm?”
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  By now, the first.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Which would you click? There's this weird phenomena in society where we always attribute different actions than those we'd take to the rest of society, and I think it drives a lot of this stupidity. There was certainly a time that yellow journalism drove interest, but that's because it was more the exception than the rule, which enabled it to exploit naivete more effectively. Now that everything is a historic alarming unprecedented catastrophic dangerous event (or in the equal but opposite direction an amazing groundbreaking miracle cure for cancer), I mostly just yawn and look for the next link. And I've no reason to believe that my tolerance for hyperbole (to describe what's happening kindly) is substantially less than the rest of society. As some sort of quantitative evidence for my argument, I'd also point to the trust in media polling [1]. There is only 1 "media" outlet that more than 50% of Americans rate as at least "somewhat trustworthy" - The Weather Channel. That absolutely all trust has collapsed leads me to believe most people know all of this stuff is, at best, yellow journalism. [1] - https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/04/05/trust-media-2022-where-americans-get-news-poll https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
  - 4y ago

red_trumpet 4y ago

> We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary definition of "cause of alarm". > Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that Could you elaborate on that? What happened to teenage pregnancy after the 1960s (I sounds like the numbers are going up/not going down anymore?), and what did disrupt that trend?