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Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

laphamsquarterly.org

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Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#31

Post by aleyan »

This is not this essay's first time[1] making it to this front of hacker news. And I am glad for it, because Petrified Forrest essay is great, and Lapham's whole issue[2] on fear is fantastic.

Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone from tea"[3] and Joseph Heller's bit on "Corporate Welfare" in "Something Happened"[4]. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087

[2] http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear

[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=...

[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=...

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#32

Post by ethn »

I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty.

The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty.

tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#33

Post by Swizec »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #27
QAPereo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people crave fear, they crave stimulation. Joy is much harder to manufacture than dread, and dread makes people act in a predictable, often-profitable manner. In other words, people don't want to be bored more than anything else, and the rest is just about the most stimulating things on offer.

>Joy is much harder to manufacture than dread Is it though? And is it just harder in our current configuration or absolutely harder no matter how resources are allocated? I'd argue that Joy is easier/cheaper to produce, we just haven't optimized for it (yet).

Joy is fleeting, fear is forever.

Manufacturing joy is easy, yes. Tie a counter to a semi-random process that's semi-controlled by a human and they experience joy when the counter goes up. The so called slot machine. THis is how HackerNews karma, Facebook notifications, your email inbox, and other addictive activities are designed.

You experience momentary joy.

But fear, fear is forever. How many fears have you been dragging on since childhood that never seem to go away no matter how irrational they are? Could've been from a single event like watching a scary movie about a clown, or a case of near-drowning, or ... well there's a lot of common phobias. The list can go on forever.

You always need to make a new slot machine. You rarely need to make a new fear.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#36

Post by enraged_camel »

ethn wrote: post #32

I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The reason to want to know fear, why…

No, I don't think the desire to mitigate uncertainty explains it. The reason is simple: fear is about overplaying and exaggerating the risks and uncertainty.

Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, Islamic terrorism.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#37

Post by komali2 »

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy.

That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missing out on what's going on in the world. Every time I dip my feet in global news, it's screamed at me, dripping in panic: "Trump DID A THING!!!" "Cops Shoot a Guy AGAIN WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!!"

Are there any good general global news sources that don't try to manipulate my emotions as I read them? Paid or free.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#38

Post by amalcon »

mxfh wrote: post #18

A not so convincing conservative (counter) narrative that lumps up the arguably questionable nature of trigger warnings with a russian imposed nuclear doomsday scenario? That assumption that a russian bomb was merely a copy of the the American effort, spying helped it speed up, but mostly prevented costly mistakes for the soviets is just another example of american exceptionalism. Would rather watch Adam Curtis' Powe…

The narrative didn't seem all that conservative to me -- it attacks conservatives at least as much as liberals, and concludes that the election of DJT is the present culmination of the trend.

I do take issue with pulling trigger warnings in here (though, in fairness, that was a minor part in the article), just because it's re-enforcing a very negative trend.

Trigger is a term of art in psychology, related to post-traumatic stress disorder. It specifically refers to a stimulus triggering a fight-or-flight response in a situation where it would not be called for in someone without PTSD. We should be giving this clinical issue the respect it deserves, and not conflating it with the things we are more abstractly afraid of.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#40

Post by ethn »

enraged_camel wrote: post #36
ethn wrote: post #32

I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The reason to want to know fear, why…

No, I don't think the desire to mitigate uncertainty explains it. The reason is simple: fear is about overplaying and exaggerating the risks and uncertainty. Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, I…

Terrorism is a real threat to interests abroad and test on the ability of the US to mitigate small risks. If they can't mitigate small risks how would they be able to mitigate a large risk? Every single human created disturbance (i.e. war) begins with a small group of people cascading into a larger force, with governments it happens with leaders, but it's greatly more unpredictable when it is propagated by an unknown people–especially when that group is in a region which produces 81.5% of the worlds oil supply. You would be quite irrational to not be interested in the domestic and foreign affairs of your own government. Even more irrational to say it's not a problem.
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