Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 262 posts

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#51

Post by matt4077 »

aub3bhat wrote: post #26
it_learnses wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please expand upon your definition of "true change".

Microprocessors, Internet, Green Revolution, T-Cell therapy, China & India over the last 2 decades ..... You know the stuff that actually required knowledge and power. Not some feel goodery truthiness.

Yeah, this is the typical dismissal of anything not STEM!!STEM!!

In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.

Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.

In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#52

Post by rosser »

aub3bhat wrote: post #26
it_learnses wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please expand upon your definition of "true change".

Microprocessors, Internet, Green Revolution, T-Cell therapy, China & India over the last 2 decades ..... You know the stuff that actually required knowledge and power. Not some feel goodery truthiness.

This is so dismissive. You may not find those things valuable, but that doesn't make them valueless.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#53

Post by pnathan »

laretluval wrote: post #10

The narrative that information distribution was more accurate in the past because of "traditional journalism" has always struck me as self-serving. > Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda — has become the biggest casualty in this algorithmic war for our attention. Is the best solution really to fight propaganda by leaving our information distribution to a selected elite that we have to trust to follow som…

No. You don't know enough to be expert at everything, and if you were to become expert at sourcing information etc, you'd become a journalist, the very elite you decry.

(it's ok to have experts, honest!)

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#54

Post by sqeaky »

maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear. For a while I played along but then I quickly realized that all this stuff is manufactured to manipulate people. Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum?

Will it ever happen? If not will the economic repercussions leave us with a decent world or some kind of dystopia?

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#55

Post by anigbrowl »

maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear. For a while I played along but then I quickly realized that all this stuff is manufactured to manipulate people. Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.

Dopamine. We market excitement and adventure to children like sugar (along with sugar, which is what's actually being sold a lot of the time), then most of them get into the workforce and discover that most jobs are bullshit and while the political system is nominally a democracy, most corporations and public institutions are authoritarian dictatorships. Some people accept this and can be bought off with holidays or being consumers, more intelligent ones who can't can be redirected into being angry at Those People.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#56

Post by aub3bhat »

matt4077 wrote: post #42
aub3bhat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh DFW is the last person you ought to listen to for advice. [1] It's just demotivational-speak paraded around as if it were some profound wisdom, just to assuage ego of your average reader with Liberal arts degree. So that she/he can fool herself by believing that they are better than others because they "truly care"... “truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that y…

I wouldn't be so quick to say that Wallace' intentions are only commercial, i. e. "to sell empty wisdom[..]". That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right? Yo…

>> You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors.

Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#58

Post by anigbrowl »

sqeaky wrote: post #54
maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear. For a while I played along but then I quickly realized that all this stuff is manufactured to manipulate people. Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum? Will it ever happen? If not will the economic repercussions leave us with a decent world or some kind of dystopia?

Not long. We're at the stage where virtual assistants are being deployed through the population. As soon as people find reliable ways to ensure their loyalty, a strategic turn will make them unstoppable.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#59

Post by ouid »

_wp3r wrote: post #35

I would be happy with just opinion free and divisive speech free headlines. If the big outlets could simply start with that, it might be attainable. Words matter. In the meantime. https://legiblenews.com/

This doesn't seem to be all that much better. the "war" section is A at the top, and B the only headlines there explicitly generate fear and outrage.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#60

Post by tomsthumb »

aub3bhat wrote: post #16
hprotagonist wrote: post #9

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kin…

Meh DFW is the last person you ought to listen to for advice. [1] It's just demotivational-speak paraded around as if it were some profound wisdom, just to assuage ego of your average reader with Liberal arts degree. So that she/he can fool herself by believing that they are better than others because they "truly care"... “truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that y…

> In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.

He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.

Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.

Post reply on HN