Why We're Living in the Age of Fear • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#161

Post by mwfunk » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

wnevets wrote: post #149

Is this age of fear really any different than the previous?

Perhaps. If you think of irrational or uninformed fears as memes (in the classic sense, not the "pictures with captions" sense) that propagate through a society, the Internet provides mechanisms for those memes to spread much more quickly, and with far less resistance, than before.

At the same time, these same communications mechanisms allow falsehoods to be debunked much more effectively, assuming that readers would rather believe hard boring truths than comfortable exciting falsehoods. Then again, I've seen enough people (even on HN!) say things like, "I would rather be passionate about a lie than bored by a truth" (paraphrasing) that I wonder if even this is true.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#162

Post by Bartweiss » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

L_Rahman wrote: post #114

Bartweiss wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without diving into specifics, I'm usually annoyed by people pitching "we're safer now than ever!" That argument almost always hinges on day-to-day, statistical safety; the most common citations are crime rates and life expectancies. It's a good rejoinder to certain things (like the cable news fixation on kidnappings and murders), but it's a deeply incomplete story. A lot of the most potent fears are black swan issue…

People pitching "we're safer now than ever" do so to allay cable news and talk radio induced fears of crime rates and immigration. There's an entirely different discussion to be had about existential threats to humanity, but 1. the majority of the populace is pre-occupied with fighting the cable news fear battle 2. the existential threats from antibiotic resistance, bioweapons and climate change require people to und…

True enough.

A lot of the most popular fears are either unsupported or provably untrue; most of my friends grew up being warned that (effectively nonexistent) childsnatchers and murderers lurked behind every corner. The cable news fixation on lurid crimes by people who don't look like us is absurd and alarming.

I guess I'm reacting more to the neoliberal insistence that things are getting better, and so we should all stay on this trajectory and not raise too many objections. It's a bait-and-switch where you rebut a popular fear ("crime is rising!") and pretend you've proven the broader point that there's nothing serious to fear. This sort of thing: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-guest-edits-wi....

We're deeply wired to not appreciate low probability risk, but I think that there's also a popular technocratic-left narrative that actively minimizes those risks. (I also think that a lot of our ostensibly political gains amount to credit-taking for a handful of good outcomes in environmentalism and technology, but that's another matter.)

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#163

Post by TimJYoung » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #65

As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision. I feel like it must have been so overwhelming yet intangible - in some ways a nuclear holocaust is much less painful than losing a loved one in a car accident or seeing your country splinter into violent factions. A nuclear holocaust is a quick, binary…

I'm not sure where some of these other responses are coming from, but the cold war was very much front and center for my generation, growing up in the 70's and early 80's. If you want to get a good feel for the grinding fear that the possibility of nuclear war instilled in people, just watch the movie "Testament" or read the book "Alas, Babylon" and you'll get a good idea of what that fear was based upon. As another poster indicated, there was nothing "binary" about nuclear war unless you were lucky and were within the blast radius and it killed you instantly.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#164

Post by grillvogel » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

astrocat wrote: post #2

Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve? We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices"…

>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?

sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#165

Post by Florin_Andrei » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #65

As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision. I feel like it must have been so overwhelming yet intangible - in some ways a nuclear holocaust is much less painful than losing a loved one in a car accident or seeing your country splinter into violent factions. A nuclear holocaust is a quick, binary…

> As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision.

If they had Facebook back in the days of the cold war, the country would have gone insane with fear in less than 1 year. Social media is an amplifier for base, brutish emotions.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#166

Post by lsc » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

cel1ne wrote: post #9

We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet. Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving. We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is t…

I have another theory.

What if what we are seeing is that what used to be mainstream media is now niche media, though it is still distributed through the same channels? What if the fringe is the same, it is just that the mainstream no longer watches tv, or that cord cutters are politically similar in a way that upset the previous equilibrium?

Alternate theory with the same implication: what if television advertising has become so marginal that it no longer supports the serious business framework it once had?

Either way, my theory can be phrased as: What if television has become fringe media?

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#167

Post by oldmanjay » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

grillvogel wrote: post #144

oarsinsync wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand the opposing viewpoint, you can't discuss it with those that agree with it. You're reduced to "no, you're wrong", which is the same viewpoint they have. Sticking to places that are skewed towards a similar bias as yourself doesn't help you understand those that have differing views to you. It can be especially important to be able to do this when those people are in your family, in order to ke…

>If you don't understand the opposing viewpoint, you can't discuss it with those that agree with it. You're reduced to "no, you're wrong", which is the same viewpoint they have. who cares? what is the purpose of exposing yourself to things that will annoy you that you have no control over, just so you can argue with people?

Your attitude is what leads to echo chambers that cause the arguments to be so awful and polarizing. Your comment would make me laugh if I weren't so sad knowing it's how most people feel.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#168

Post by grillvogel » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:15 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #167

grillvogel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you don't understand the opposing viewpoint, you can't discuss it with those that agree with it. You're reduced to "no, you're wrong", which is the same viewpoint they have. who cares? what is the purpose of exposing yourself to things that will annoy you that you have no control over, just so you can argue with people?

Your attitude is what leads to echo chambers that cause the arguments to be so awful and polarizing. Your comment would make me laugh if I weren't so sad knowing it's how most people feel.

I think you're missing the point which is that "the arguments" don't matter to begin with.

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#169

Post by moises_silva » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #35

I think some of the fear is justified. Climate change is a very real threat and it's justifiably scary. Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy. Our security state now engages in mass surveillance of us in a time when our government is engaging in extraordinary rendition of suspected "terrorists" in secret w…

> Economic inequality is worse than at almost any time in human history, including the gilded age prior to the great depression.

I'm curious about this. Care to point to some references on this?

Re: Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

#170

Post by makomk » Mon, Oct 17, 2016, 8:31 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #160

One of the big drivers of fear in the US is the basic feeling that life is harder than it used to be. The implicit guarantee from society that if you finished school and worked hard you would have a good life is broken. Trump has tapped into this feeling, with unexpected success. In reality, we have met the enemy, and them is us. The US's major problems are internal, not external. The US's economic problems are mostl…

In reality, the US media and political system have two sides, both of which are determined to set fixing the broken economic system and racial equality/"social justice" against each other. In reality, the media have responded to demagogues blaming the underlying economic problem on other races by insisting that the problem doesn't exist, that it's just something made up by the white working class to justify their racism. In reality, the US's problems may be internal but that doesn't make it any less fucked.