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Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

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

#101

Post by humanrebar »

penpapersw wrote: post #78
komali2 wrote: post #37

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 missin…

Wait why is reddit a lost cause?

r/LateStageCapitalism is on the front page all the time. Its rules include "Support for capitalism--and the political parties which uphold it--is strictly prohibited". Counterbalanced views are not front paged on a regular basis.

Reddit made sure idiotic pro-Trump subreddits were left off the front page. It didn't do the same for idiotic anti-Trump subreddits.

r/TwoXChromosomes, also regularly appearing on the front page, is about as liberal and pro-choice as you can get.

I don't like Trump at all. All the things going down right now were easy to see coming. But he got well over 40% of the popular vote in the election and still has millions and millions of supporters. Absence of pro-Trump viewpoints on the reddit front page is conspicuous, in my opinion. Likewise any number of other relatively popular viewpoints.

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

#102

Post by Dobbs »

banned1 wrote: post #64
Dobbs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how NPR and Fox News can be compared in good faith. Yes NPR has a liberal bias, but for the most part it attempts to reasonably source its articles and publish a journalistically accurate news report. Fox News is not a news channel. They have one or two news programs mixed in with "entertainment". Sean Hannity is not news, but entertainment pretending to be news[^1]. [^1]: https://www.dailykos.com/storie…

Is DailyKos the pinnacle of Liberal unbiased sources?

Not a clue. Never read them before. I simply linked them because they were the first result to come up with sources to Fox Media's own words.

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

#103

Post by nradov »

40Alpha wrote: post #92
knodi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell are you talking about, just because NPR report the news that not pro Trump doesn't make them liberal or left.

NPR has been known as being a left leaning news outlet long before Trump entered the picture.

Known by who based on what criteria?

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

#104

Post by humanrebar »

knodi wrote: post #87
banned1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. CNN has gone the way of MSNBC (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). HN is the same way when it relates to political news (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). Fox News is, well, Fox News. NPR is, well, for the most part, the Fox News of the left. So on and so forth. In a world of two echo chambers (The Right-wingers and The Left-wingers), it's up to you to make up your mind.…

What the hell are you talking about, just because NPR report the news that not pro Trump doesn't make them liberal or left.

If NPR is so objective, why were (are) NPR listeners so shocked that people would actually vote for Trump?

I say this as someone who was also confused about this for the longest time. NPR certainly didn't help me figure things out at all.

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

#105

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Irrationality is increasingly well supported by empirical evidence from economics and political science.

As for people's motivations to seek out fear-inducing information, you are quite right that some of that is motivated by rsk management but a great deal more of it cannot be explained on utilitarian grounds. freud theorized the existence of a death drive in humans as a correlate of consciousness, suggesting that infants dealt with their anxiety about the intermittent unavailability of their mothers by modeling their anxiety through play so as to assert control over its manifestations.

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

#106

Post by 40Alpha »

nradov wrote: post #103
40Alpha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPR has been known as being a left leaning news outlet long before Trump entered the picture.

Known by who based on what criteria?

Just Google it... Awhile back there was a decent amount of debate about the organization as they are partly funded by tax dollars. Many agree they are left leaning.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-biased-is-your-media/

http://archives.cjr.org/news_meeting/does_npr_have_a_liberal...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/business/media/14carr.html...

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

#107

Post by humanrebar »

QAPereo wrote: post #23
erikb wrote: post #5

I wanted to complain about the title not really making the right distinction, that fear is not a product but a sales method. However, the author actually understands that distinction and really talks about fear being the product. That also implies that people desire fear and that fear is produced with industrial efficiency. Interesting thought.

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.

I think that's reductionist.

People also want reasons for things. They don't want complex reasons for high rent, terrorism, racial injustice, mass murder, low employment, stagnant wages, the lack of community support, etc. They want clarity. And "it's complicated" doesn't satisfy emotionally.

So we take a half truth (to be generous) and make it the whole truth. Someone is to blame. Therefore they must be powerful enough to be to blame. Therefore they must be dangerous. And dangerous now, not later. Otherwise we won't do anything about it.

So we can blame boredom or chemical responses for the desire for fear, but there are higher brain functions mixed up in this as well.

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

#108

Post by anigbrowl »

ethn wrote: post #40
enraged_camel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's true as far as it goes, but the emphasis on terrorism in the media is wildly disproportionate to the measurable risks. Compare the ubiquity and intensity of anxiety about climate change, whose existential impact is arguably far more widespread and vastly better quantified.

Consider in the light of this discussion that rural voters appear (by inference) to be more concerned about terrorism than urban ones, despite the actual impact of terrorism falling far more heavily on the latter group (unsurprisingly, given the lack of meaningful targets in rural areas).

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/are-rural-voters-most-conc...

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

#109

Post by vacri »

Swizec wrote: post #33
nowarninglabel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

When I was growing up, there was a definite fear of Mutually Assured Destruction, which disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union.

On a more local scale, in the 80s in Australia there was a huge fear of European Wasps - you could even buy little plastic protectors for your drink cans to prevent them crawling inside.

On a personal scale, when I was young I was scared of being different, now I don't really care whether I'm different or not.

Fear is not forever. We shed fears left, right, and center. Yes, if someone is putting energy into maintaining a fear, it will sustain, but it's just not true that once we fear something, we always will.

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

#110

Post by King-Aaron »

rndmize wrote: post #80
banned1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. CNN has gone the way of MSNBC (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). HN is the same way when it relates to political news (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). Fox News is, well, Fox News. NPR is, well, for the most part, the Fox News of the left. So on and so forth. In a world of two echo chambers (The Right-wingers and The Left-wingers), it's up to you to make up your mind.…

I don't understand this perspective. When CNN gets a story wrong, the right creates a huge storm and people get fired. When the right gets a story wrong (Breitbart still pushing the hard anti-climate change line, Hannity with the Seth Rich conspiracy, the entire birther movement, Pizzagate, and on and on and on )... nothing happens. Nothing. It took Milo saying "maybe pedophelia isn't that bad" before there was enoug…

> When CNN gets a story wrong, the right creates a huge storm and people get fired. When the right gets a story wrong (Breitbart still pushing the hard anti-climate change line, Hannity with the Seth Rich conspiracy, the entire birther movement, Pizzagate, and on and on and on)... nothing happens. Nothing.

We see this in Australian media too, and I'm guessing everywhere else in the world is seeing it becoming more prevalent too. There's a real elitism around "what you are allowed to say"...

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