52 ms·

The brain was not designed for this much bad news

457 points by colinprince 4mo ago

rolph 4mo ago
gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius" closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank. example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher. a cheap way of assessing relevance score.
spking 4mo ago
Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.” https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman
- landdate 4mo ago
  Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils). However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
  - stouset 4mo ago
    Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
    - landdate 4mo ago
      > Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Right is right; Belief doesn't effect truth. Such as in physics, there are differing theories, but the underlying truth doesn't change. > Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife. Just because you are blind doesn't mean others can't see.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
    If you do that the system works around you. Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
    - landdate 4mo ago
      Helping one's community encompasses much more than just the political realm.
- metabagel 4mo ago
  This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples... world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
  - appplication 4mo ago
    I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official. Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
    - fn-mote 4mo ago
      In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy. It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
    - ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
      Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
      - bonesss 4mo ago
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
  This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
  - Paracompact 4mo ago
    My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
    - threatofrain 4mo ago
      Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
      Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
- uberex 4mo ago
  Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
  - Gibbon1 4mo ago
    Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
    - gchamonlive 4mo ago
      The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
      - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
        Depends on which powers for each specific choice. Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
        Gibbon1 4mo ago
        The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
      - numpad0 4mo ago
        I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
      - seba_dos1 4mo ago
        Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
- voxl 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - userbinator 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - unethical_ban 4mo ago
      [flagged]
- Npovview 4mo ago
  > You plan to do nothing about them. Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
- pjc50 4mo ago
  > inflation, crime and unemployment? Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on. They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined? On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
- sho 4mo ago
  > the “Peekaboo World” What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
  - momocowcow 4mo ago
    You can read what his son has written on the subject https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
  - csallen 4mo ago
    > … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
- paganel 4mo ago
  > ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
  - danaris 4mo ago
    But how do you start a proletarian revolution? It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      History shows that a revolution can only be started by a group of potential elites who hope to displace the current elites.
- stratocumulus0 4mo ago
  Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be: - A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way. - A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans. - A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with. Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
  - consp 4mo ago
    Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
    - throwaway209329 4mo ago
      As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
- kstenerud 4mo ago
  It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide. Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better. And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA). Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay). So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
  - inglor_cz 4mo ago
    Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s. But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres. At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it. On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war. Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
- rvba 4mo ago
  > Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
  - mlrtime 4mo ago
    I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better. Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    If you get downvoted it'll be for starting a partisan fight for no reason. That shit is annoying and drags down the discussion.
- cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
  I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
  - cindyllm 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - elif 4mo ago
    There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
    - cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
      Ah, that mighty CIA- that couldnt even stop Trump from tanking the sales of the MIC. Its not real- never was. Its some drunken station-chiefs, rainmaking Langley from hotel bars abroad.
  - JKCalhoun 4mo ago
    I don't disagree. Mental health is important as well. I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
  - unparagoned 4mo ago
    For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference. Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
- AlienRobot 4mo ago
  I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems. Media only gives you super-hearing.
- jancsika 4mo ago
  One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Revival_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
- Yoric 4mo ago
  I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others. So, not entirely nothing.
zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
- standeven 4mo ago
  The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented it. So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it. That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.
  - altmanaltman 4mo ago
    I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.
    - joshbetz 4mo ago
      It will impact how people vote this November though
      - altmanaltman 4mo ago
        but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      November 2024 nobody could have reasonably predicted that the strait of Hormuz would be closed in February 2026 because Trump would declare war on Iran. But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen. Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but I can predict it will be stupid.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
- s5300 4mo ago
  [dead]
tetrisgm 4mo ago
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind. Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging. Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.
- uberex 4mo ago
  Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
  - tetrisgm 4mo ago
    since they are privately organized, you need to know the organizers or somebody who knows them. Be expert in the topic in question.
- isodude 4mo ago
  On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions. As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
  - isodude 4mo ago
    I have noticed that the same amount of people down voted as up voted the comment. I wonder how they reasoned.
roenxi 4mo ago
The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results. [0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
- bluebarbet 4mo ago
  Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
  - anigbrowl 4mo ago
    That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commissioners-approve-data-center/ https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission... There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
    - bluebarbet 4mo ago
      All no doubt true and none of it contradicts my point.
    - consensus1 4mo ago
failrate 4mo ago
One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white. Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me. Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
- bigmadshoe 4mo ago
  For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001 https://text.npr.org/1001
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
  - isodude 4mo ago
    https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
  - dartharva 4mo ago
    It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.
    - bigmadshoe 4mo ago
      They aren’t able to control whether the important facts people want to be updated on are positive or negative. But I find it less addictive to read the news with minimal colors and no images.
fragmede 4mo ago
I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.
- ggm 4mo ago
  A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed. I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
  - Terr_ 4mo ago
    "Not well adapted to", perhaps.
- wseqyrku 4mo ago
  Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.
reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people." - Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
cryptoegorophy 4mo ago
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
- Pooge 4mo ago
  But if it's a subject that interests you, you should participate.
- eimrine 4mo ago
  This message is going to be read with a lot more of strangers than one. It is intentional.
brador 4mo ago
That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution. Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates. My focus is insane when adrenaline hits. I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.
- sph 4mo ago
  This is the type of comment that I expect to read on ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where impressible young males are taught how to live life in very mechanical terms by sociopaths. There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.
vivid242 4mo ago
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser: https://leash.ax https://leash.ax
- hemmert 4mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475
esjeon 4mo ago
> Looking away is not the fix … > The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. … > Containing news consumption to defined windows of time … > Choosing depth over volume Golden. TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
kindkang2024 4mo ago
[dead]
Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[dead]
marsven_422 4mo ago
[dead]
rf15 4mo ago
I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
- sph 4mo ago
  I have no way to prove this, and likely you don’t either, but it’s likely it is affecting you but you are simply not aware of it.
  - functionmouse 4mo ago
    probably making him "naturally anxious" lol
alecco 4mo ago
Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
makeitdouble 4mo ago
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened. We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument. On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ? On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ? We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO. There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
- gherkinnn 4mo ago
  > We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.
- altmanaltman 4mo ago
  No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things. A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years. However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough. I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.
mult1scr33n 4mo ago
One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df499153c20e?ucc=GDi2EvHYRB8 https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
shevy-java 4mo ago
> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
amelius 4mo ago
Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
Ccecil 4mo ago
There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best. "Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
stcg 4mo ago
Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that
- NotGMan 4mo ago
  This is probably it. It's addictive due to hardwiring in the brain, just like sugar.
MisterKent 4mo ago
Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today. Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion. But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance. The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over. No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance. Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.
- bluebarbet 4mo ago
  >these CEOs leading us into >the people benefitting >them What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.
  - smugglerFlynn 4mo ago
    Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article. It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality. The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
roveo 4mo ago
HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally. When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning: > The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry. The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
cullumsmith 4mo ago
You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."
- inigyou 4mo ago
  The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.
  - user68858788 4mo ago
    “People” being informed is quite different from an individual being informed. Presumably you were informed back then, yet here we are still.
  - kjkjadksj 4mo ago
    War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.
    - h26d3r 4mo ago
      No, you're just highly misinformed. I could have told you a decade ago that all of this will play out in a second Trump term. The invasion of Iran was always going to be the culmination of the "War on Terror" and it was clear that Trump aligned himself with that political faction since long ago.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
    - nitwit005 4mo ago
      No one expected the guy who previously almost decided to bomb Iran to bomb Iran? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-retaliatory-iran-airstrike-cancelled-10-minutes-before https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-r... I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.
elif 4mo ago
Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists. I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.
sanbaideng 4mo ago
mp4tomp3.lol
mmarian 4mo ago
I wonder if this applies to seeing successful people as well.
RickJWagner 4mo ago
All this at a time when world poverty is in continual decline, medical science reaches continual new heights, crime is in multi-year decline, etc. It is often said that the average person today has better food, shelter, health services, etc. today than a king had just a short while ago. Bad news sells, though. Don’t buy it.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
nobodywillobsrv 4mo ago
This makes me feel like an alien. I feel perfectly happy sorting by worst taking the top K and then understanding what can be mitigated etc Not doing this is immoral IMO. But I hear and understand certain kinds of people who say they can't deal with hearing about anything remotely unpleasant. But then these same kinds of people seem to enjoy the kinds of horror or thriller movies I detest. I feel alone and like an alien.
dang 4mo ago
A past thread about one of the papers linked to in the OP: Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)
willmadden 4mo ago
Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.
chopete3 4mo ago
It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news. But the author missed some key nuances. - Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person. - The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization. - People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.
mieubrisse 4mo ago
Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful. Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
- pnt12 4mo ago
  This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.
stndef 4mo ago
I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news. I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.
Jgoauh 4mo ago
I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.
tim-tday 4mo ago
The brain was not designed at all.
yamillove 4mo ago
News is a business. The mainstream media has made tons of money fabricating conflict or drama (see increase in use of “white supremacy” or “racism” in news). This has created mental angst in Democrats. Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).
NunoSempere 4mo ago
If you want all your bad news once a week, you might be interested in: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/ https://blog.sentinel-team.org/, which my team writes.
damnesian 4mo ago
It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.

457 points by colinprince 4mo ago

rolph 4mo ago

gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius" closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank. example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher. a cheap way of assessing relevance score.

spking 4mo ago

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.” https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman

landdate 4mo ago
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils). However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
- stouset 4mo ago
  Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
  - landdate 4mo ago
    > Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Right is right; Belief doesn't effect truth. Such as in physics, there are differing theories, but the underlying truth doesn't change. > Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife. Just because you are blind doesn't mean others can't see.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  If you do that the system works around you. Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
  - landdate 4mo ago
    Helping one's community encompasses much more than just the political realm.
metabagel 4mo ago
This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples... world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
- appplication 4mo ago
  I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official. Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
  - fn-mote 4mo ago
    In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy. It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
  - ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
    Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
    - bonesss 4mo ago
applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
- Paracompact 4mo ago
  My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
  - threatofrain 4mo ago
    Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
    Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
uberex 4mo ago
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
- Gibbon1 4mo ago
  Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
  - gchamonlive 4mo ago
    The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
    - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
      Depends on which powers for each specific choice. Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
      - Gibbon1 4mo ago
        The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
    - numpad0 4mo ago
      I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
    - seba_dos1 4mo ago
      Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
voxl 4mo ago
[flagged]
- userbinator 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - unethical_ban 4mo ago
    [flagged]
Npovview 4mo ago
> You plan to do nothing about them. Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
pjc50 4mo ago
> inflation, crime and unemployment? Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on. They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined? On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
sho 4mo ago
> the “Peekaboo World” What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
- momocowcow 4mo ago
  You can read what his son has written on the subject https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
- csallen 4mo ago
  > … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
paganel 4mo ago
> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
- danaris 4mo ago
  But how do you start a proletarian revolution? It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    History shows that a revolution can only be started by a group of potential elites who hope to displace the current elites.
stratocumulus0 4mo ago
Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be: - A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way. - A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans. - A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with. Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
- consp 4mo ago
  Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
  - throwaway209329 4mo ago
    As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
kstenerud 4mo ago
It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide. Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better. And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA). Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay). So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
- inglor_cz 4mo ago
  Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s. But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres. At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it. On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war. Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
rvba 4mo ago
> Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
- mlrtime 4mo ago
  I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better. Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  If you get downvoted it'll be for starting a partisan fight for no reason. That shit is annoying and drags down the discussion.
cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
- cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
- elif 4mo ago
  There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
  - cineticdaffodil 4mo ago
    Ah, that mighty CIA- that couldnt even stop Trump from tanking the sales of the MIC. Its not real- never was. Its some drunken station-chiefs, rainmaking Langley from hotel bars abroad.
- JKCalhoun 4mo ago
  I don't disagree. Mental health is important as well. I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
- unparagoned 4mo ago
  For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference. Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
AlienRobot 4mo ago
I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems. Media only gives you super-hearing.
jancsika 4mo ago
One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Revival_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
Yoric 4mo ago
I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others. So, not entirely nothing.

zeroonetwothree 4mo ago

I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it

standeven 4mo ago
The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented it. So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it. That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.
- altmanaltman 4mo ago
  I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.
  - joshbetz 4mo ago
    It will impact how people vote this November though
    - altmanaltman 4mo ago
      but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    November 2024 nobody could have reasonably predicted that the strait of Hormuz would be closed in February 2026 because Trump would declare war on Iran. But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen. Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but I can predict it will be stupid.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

s5300 4mo ago
[dead]

tetrisgm 4mo ago

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind. Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging. Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.

uberex 4mo ago
Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
- tetrisgm 4mo ago
  since they are privately organized, you need to know the organizers or somebody who knows them. Be expert in the topic in question.
isodude 4mo ago
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions. As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
- isodude 4mo ago
  I have noticed that the same amount of people down voted as up voted the comment. I wonder how they reasoned.

roenxi 4mo ago

The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results. [0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.

bluebarbet 4mo ago
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
- anigbrowl 4mo ago
  That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commissioners-approve-data-center/ https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission... There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
  - bluebarbet 4mo ago
    All no doubt true and none of it contradicts my point.
  - consensus1 4mo ago

failrate 4mo ago

One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white. Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me. Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media

bigmadshoe 4mo ago
For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001 https://text.npr.org/1001
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.
- isodude 4mo ago
  https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
- dartharva 4mo ago
  It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.
  - bigmadshoe 4mo ago
    They aren’t able to control whether the important facts people want to be updated on are positive or negative. But I find it less addictive to read the news with minimal colors and no images.

fragmede 4mo ago

I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.

ggm 4mo ago
A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed. I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
- Terr_ 4mo ago
  "Not well adapted to", perhaps.
wseqyrku 4mo ago
Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.

reinitctxoffset 4mo ago

"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people." - Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)

cryptoegorophy 4mo ago

Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.

Pooge 4mo ago
But if it's a subject that interests you, you should participate.
eimrine 4mo ago
This message is going to be read with a lot more of strangers than one. It is intentional.

brador 4mo ago

That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution. Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates. My focus is insane when adrenaline hits. I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.

sph 4mo ago
This is the type of comment that I expect to read on ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where impressible young males are taught how to live life in very mechanical terms by sociopaths. There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.

vivid242 4mo ago

As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser: https://leash.ax https://leash.ax

hemmert 4mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475

esjeon 4mo ago

> Looking away is not the fix … > The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. … > Containing news consumption to defined windows of time … > Choosing depth over volume Golden. TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.

kindkang2024 4mo ago

[dead]

Rekindle8090 4mo ago

[dead]

marsven_422 4mo ago

[dead]

rf15 4mo ago

I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.

sph 4mo ago
I have no way to prove this, and likely you don’t either, but it’s likely it is affecting you but you are simply not aware of it.
- functionmouse 4mo ago
  probably making him "naturally anxious" lol

alecco 4mo ago

Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.

makeitdouble 4mo ago

> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened. We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument. On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ? On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ? We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO. There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?

gherkinnn 4mo ago
> We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.
altmanaltman 4mo ago
No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things. A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years. However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough. I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.

mult1scr33n 4mo ago

One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df499153c20e?ucc=GDi2EvHYRB8 https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.

shevy-java 4mo ago

> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...

amelius 4mo ago

Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.

Ccecil 4mo ago

There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best. "Turn off the news, love your neighbors"

stcg 4mo ago

Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that

NotGMan 4mo ago
This is probably it. It's addictive due to hardwiring in the brain, just like sugar.

MisterKent 4mo ago

Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today. Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion. But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance. The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over. No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance. Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.

bluebarbet 4mo ago
>these CEOs leading us into >the people benefitting >them What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.
- smugglerFlynn 4mo ago
  Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article. It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality. The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

roveo 4mo ago

HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally. When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning: > The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry. The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

cullumsmith 4mo ago

You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."

inigyou 4mo ago
The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.
- user68858788 4mo ago
  “People” being informed is quite different from an individual being informed. Presumably you were informed back then, yet here we are still.
- kjkjadksj 4mo ago
  War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.
  - h26d3r 4mo ago
    No, you're just highly misinformed. I could have told you a decade ago that all of this will play out in a second Trump term. The invasion of Iran was always going to be the culmination of the "War on Terror" and it was clear that Trump aligned himself with that political faction since long ago.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - nitwit005 4mo ago
    No one expected the guy who previously almost decided to bomb Iran to bomb Iran? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-retaliatory-iran-airstrike-cancelled-10-minutes-before https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-r... I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.

elif 4mo ago

Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists. I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.

sanbaideng 4mo ago

mp4tomp3.lol

mmarian 4mo ago

I wonder if this applies to seeing successful people as well.

RickJWagner 4mo ago

All this at a time when world poverty is in continual decline, medical science reaches continual new heights, crime is in multi-year decline, etc. It is often said that the average person today has better food, shelter, health services, etc. today than a king had just a short while ago. Bad news sells, though. Don’t buy it.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

nobodywillobsrv 4mo ago

This makes me feel like an alien. I feel perfectly happy sorting by worst taking the top K and then understanding what can be mitigated etc Not doing this is immoral IMO. But I hear and understand certain kinds of people who say they can't deal with hearing about anything remotely unpleasant. But then these same kinds of people seem to enjoy the kinds of horror or thriller movies I detest. I feel alone and like an alien.

dang 4mo ago

A past thread about one of the papers linked to in the OP: Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)

willmadden 4mo ago

Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.

chopete3 4mo ago

It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news. But the author missed some key nuances. - Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person. - The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization. - People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.

mieubrisse 4mo ago

Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful. Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.

pnt12 4mo ago
This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.

stndef 4mo ago

I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news. I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.

Jgoauh 4mo ago

I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.

tim-tday 4mo ago

The brain was not designed at all.

yamillove 4mo ago

News is a business. The mainstream media has made tons of money fabricating conflict or drama (see increase in use of “white supremacy” or “racism” in news). This has created mental angst in Democrats. Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).

NunoSempere 4mo ago

If you want all your bad news once a week, you might be interested in: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/ https://blog.sentinel-team.org/, which my team writes.

damnesian 4mo ago

It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.