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Claiming everything is cause for alarm is defecting against the ability to communicate about important things because it means alarms no longer work. Journalist

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.
  - asdff 4y ago
    What can you personally do about it? Like it or not we are on a ship we can't steer. Might as well look inwardly and enjoy yourself, friends, and family most of all.
    - tetris11 4y ago
      You can help out with volunteer work or donations, you can vote instead of in your own interests but tactically to help others, you can undermine oppressive laws with secret acts of kindness. It's amazing what one person can do.
      - krageon 4y ago
        None of those things will solve the real problem: We're destroying our own biosphere. Our kids are going to live in an objectively shittier world, to say nothing of their children. That's not solvable with random acts of kindness, because cruelty isn't what's killing the planet. It's indifference. It's not solvable by voting, because the generation you can vote into political power will never suffer the consequences of their own decisions. The timelines are too long. Couple that with the fact that political power is very temporal and political thinking is of necessity fairly short-term and you have to come to the conclusion that no politician will solve this for anyone. If you have a meaningful way to solve this issue, I'd love to hear it. But pretending there are things we can do to solve it is not going to change anything.
        ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        Voting is not sufficient but it is necessary. Vote for more democracy/transparency/science/education, vote against less. The general form of the issue (and therefore solutions) is outlined by Olsen's Collective Action Theory. We're doing this to ourselves, like the prisoner's dilemma and game theory tells us we can rewrite the rules of the game to get better outcomes.
        watwut 4y ago
        Your suggestion amounts to "do nothing" which will achieve even less then voting. Practically speaking, people who do think there is issue and are willing to look for solutions or at least talk about the issue have a chance to improve state of things in the long term. People who gave up, wont ever improve anything. People who insist that nothing should be done, because none if it is perfect enough are actively working against solution.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Look at basically any metric over the last 100 years and there will be an astonishing amount of improvement - Extreme poverty - Literacy - Life expectancy - Access to medicine - #People living in democracies - Access to clean water - Access to food - General standard of living - Air quality - ... Meanwhile some people think (and others trying to make it look like) we're living in desperate times and are worse off than 50 years ago.
    - DoughnutHole 4y ago
      It's very clear that the quality of life for the average human is better than it has been at any other time in history, and that we've been on the upward trend for a long, long time. The mistake is looking at that historical trend and falling for a whig history belief that this trend is the unstoppable march of history and things will always get better, when it's very possible that we are the generation that is approaching the peak. These gains have to be fought for and protected. The principle issue is that this past century's gains have been built on borrowed time - namely on limited resources that sow the seeds of global environmental catastrophe with every extracted Joule that allows for the next temporary marginal gain in quality of life. Things are better now than they've ever been. But if someone sticks their head in the ground and ignores the problems that are already starting to manifest they might be in for a rude awakening.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      If people think that it wouldn't matter too much. But we have a very active older generation that constantly release new laws against terrorism and violence until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because some people have had enough. We have been fighting terrorism for 20 years, it did cost trillions of dollars and you cannot even take a coke on a plane. Completely off base an insane because essentially you are correct. We live in the safest times ever. Sure, there are local conflicts and enough human suffering, but policies for safety are still in extremely high demand. Some people really need to take a chill pill. A caveat is that wealth is relative and the younger generation will have a harder time finding dependable long time employment and may not be able to afford a home because speculations drove prices beyond reason. But they don't really need their nuts checked while boarding a plane.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    The experts are living in first world countries and their expectations are pegged to continual improvement in quality of life. When my dad was growing up in Bangladesh, one out of four kids died before age 5. He nonetheless remembers a happy childhood in his village. Today the childhood mortality rate is under 1 in 30 (about where the US was when he was growing up, but three times higher than the US is today). Experts say climate change will cost Bangladesh double digit fractions of its GDP by the end of the century (which will still be much higher than today). Are we going to go back to a quarter of kids dying before five? Do the folks in the US not having kids because they worry about climate change think the US is going to get anywhere near what was common around the world a generation ago?
  - helloworld11 4y ago
    Please do name these tragedies and their unfolding consequences, somehow majorly different from the other, previous unfolding tragedies that have been predicted for many, many decades by all sorts of people.
    - 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.
- 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.

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.
- asdff 4y ago
  What can you personally do about it? Like it or not we are on a ship we can't steer. Might as well look inwardly and enjoy yourself, friends, and family most of all.
  - tetris11 4y ago
    You can help out with volunteer work or donations, you can vote instead of in your own interests but tactically to help others, you can undermine oppressive laws with secret acts of kindness. It's amazing what one person can do.
    - krageon 4y ago
      None of those things will solve the real problem: We're destroying our own biosphere. Our kids are going to live in an objectively shittier world, to say nothing of their children. That's not solvable with random acts of kindness, because cruelty isn't what's killing the planet. It's indifference. It's not solvable by voting, because the generation you can vote into political power will never suffer the consequences of their own decisions. The timelines are too long. Couple that with the fact that political power is very temporal and political thinking is of necessity fairly short-term and you have to come to the conclusion that no politician will solve this for anyone. If you have a meaningful way to solve this issue, I'd love to hear it. But pretending there are things we can do to solve it is not going to change anything.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        Voting is not sufficient but it is necessary. Vote for more democracy/transparency/science/education, vote against less. The general form of the issue (and therefore solutions) is outlined by Olsen's Collective Action Theory. We're doing this to ourselves, like the prisoner's dilemma and game theory tells us we can rewrite the rules of the game to get better outcomes.
      - watwut 4y ago
        Your suggestion amounts to "do nothing" which will achieve even less then voting. Practically speaking, people who do think there is issue and are willing to look for solutions or at least talk about the issue have a chance to improve state of things in the long term. People who gave up, wont ever improve anything. People who insist that nothing should be done, because none if it is perfect enough are actively working against solution.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Look at basically any metric over the last 100 years and there will be an astonishing amount of improvement - Extreme poverty - Literacy - Life expectancy - Access to medicine - #People living in democracies - Access to clean water - Access to food - General standard of living - Air quality - ... Meanwhile some people think (and others trying to make it look like) we're living in desperate times and are worse off than 50 years ago.
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    It's very clear that the quality of life for the average human is better than it has been at any other time in history, and that we've been on the upward trend for a long, long time. The mistake is looking at that historical trend and falling for a whig history belief that this trend is the unstoppable march of history and things will always get better, when it's very possible that we are the generation that is approaching the peak. These gains have to be fought for and protected. The principle issue is that this past century's gains have been built on borrowed time - namely on limited resources that sow the seeds of global environmental catastrophe with every extracted Joule that allows for the next temporary marginal gain in quality of life. Things are better now than they've ever been. But if someone sticks their head in the ground and ignores the problems that are already starting to manifest they might be in for a rude awakening.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    If people think that it wouldn't matter too much. But we have a very active older generation that constantly release new laws against terrorism and violence until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because some people have had enough. We have been fighting terrorism for 20 years, it did cost trillions of dollars and you cannot even take a coke on a plane. Completely off base an insane because essentially you are correct. We live in the safest times ever. Sure, there are local conflicts and enough human suffering, but policies for safety are still in extremely high demand. Some people really need to take a chill pill. A caveat is that wealth is relative and the younger generation will have a harder time finding dependable long time employment and may not be able to afford a home because speculations drove prices beyond reason. But they don't really need their nuts checked while boarding a plane.
- rayiner 4y ago
  The experts are living in first world countries and their expectations are pegged to continual improvement in quality of life. When my dad was growing up in Bangladesh, one out of four kids died before age 5. He nonetheless remembers a happy childhood in his village. Today the childhood mortality rate is under 1 in 30 (about where the US was when he was growing up, but three times higher than the US is today). Experts say climate change will cost Bangladesh double digit fractions of its GDP by the end of the century (which will still be much higher than today). Are we going to go back to a quarter of kids dying before five? Do the folks in the US not having kids because they worry about climate change think the US is going to get anywhere near what was common around the world a generation ago?
- helloworld11 4y ago
  Please do name these tragedies and their unfolding consequences, somehow majorly different from the other, previous unfolding tragedies that have been predicted for many, many decades by all sorts of people.
  - 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.
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.