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The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a diff

The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? How many people do we think were realistically in a position to make a change to the economic conditions and still uninformed? How many were in a place to make a change to the military conditions and similarly uninformed? Hind sight is 20/20, and its easy knowing a massive war was coming to say people should have been getting the hell out of Dodge. But moving your entire family to a new country let alone a new continent is a massive undertaking. How many people even if they had the warnings would have pulled the trigger on that move rather than wait and see? What sort of huge, global war scale negative things are being telegraphed today and what major life altering decisions on the magnitude of leaving your entire community and extended family behind and seeking asylum in a foreign country do you foresee yourself undertaking to address them in response to your unprecedented levels of modern awareness? Or does your unprecedented access to that information simply make you feel helpless and hopeless? Are you actually better equipped to attend to the impending doom or do you just know that it's there. One wonders if we had the ability to know the exact month and year we were going to die, would we think our lives were made better by knowing that, or would we find that having that knowledge does little to change the quality of the life we live in any positive way, and largely adds stress or other negative experiences. There's a balance to be struck with any amount of being informed, but like everything else in life, I suspect moderation is the key.

roenxi 2y ago
> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically. I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  > Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were. > The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.

roenxi 2y ago

> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically. I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.

tpmoney 2y ago
> Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were. > The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.