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How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

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Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#141

Post by chipotle_coyote »

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #76

I and I am sure a good percentage of the internet population always struggle with articles like this. I don't have an ad blocker, don't have any 'ad-free' subscriptions to anything, yet I never click an ad while at the same time am not particularly bothered by them. They're just noise, and since they register as basically whitespace in my head, noise easily ignored. I don't feel 'at war' when I go online, and even if…

If we accept the article's premise (which I think I do), whether we click on the ads or even see the ads is irrelevant, though, isn't it? The need to get those ads in front of us changes the way publications write, edit, frame, and promote their stories.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#142

Post by theseatoms »

moduspol wrote: post #101
karllager wrote: post #80

As a kid, I grew up in a country with almost no advertising. Repeat after me: No ads in the streets, in the TV, in the radio, nowhere. One day we found a magazine (from another country), which contained ads. Two people smoking cigarettes in a strangely alien world, some kind of jungle - or a safari, maybe. This image was so strange in many ways: Why is it there in a magazine, that was about something completely diffe…

Advertising is a fact of life, though. Without it, there's no way to inform potential customers of a new brand or product. I mean, imagine if it all disappeared tomorrow. Wouldn't people just stick to the megacorps and established brands they already know? Wouldn't this make it even that much tougher for a Netflix to compete with a Comcast, or an Uber/Lyft to compete with an entrenched taxi industry? How would Dollar…

It's a matter of push versus pull though. If I know I want a product, I can search for reviews and recommendations, (half of which I assume are astroturfed, but I'm counting those as "ads" which would disappear in this hypothetical.)

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#143

Post by gmarx »

gnaritas wrote: post #49
gmarx wrote: post #37

I noticed his violent crime graph stopped around 2013. Convenient. Yes violent crime is down by the standards of the previous 50 years but I'm pretty sure it has been inching back up over the previous two, at least in cities. Nothing to panic about yet but also nothing to be dismissive about. Also, though I too long for the old days of journalistic standards, let us a remember one of the side effects what creating th…

It is totally something to be dismissive about because violent crime is firmly in a downtrend, that a year here or there has a slight uptick does not change the trend and is entirely irrelevant. To say violent crime is up at all is to be dishonest and nothing more than an attempt to incite fear.

What, even if violent crime is up you know the downward trend will continue so pointing it out is fear mongering? Given the down votes we can consider the point made; people enjoy being outraged by things they disagree with

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#144

Post by bufbupa »

SCHiM wrote: post #133
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…

It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…

On the contrary dude, I don't think you've gone deep enough. To dismiss the parent comment on some vague existential bemusement seems near insidious in intent.

At the risk of derailing this conversation into semi-unrelated philosophical conversations: Why is it you would prefer 2 to 3?

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#145

Post by Consultant32452 »

thebokehwokeh2 wrote: post #117
awkwarddaturtle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda Wow. Then they need a lesson in the history of journalism. They might want to read up on hearst and pulitzer and the founding of modern american journalism. > "The good old days", except that never existed. Journalism has always been the tool for the powerful to paint a positive picture of themselves to the general public via "unbiased agents" called journalists wh…

> foxnews and the nytimes are just propagandists like any other This is a textbook example of the lazy, uneducated thinking that causes fear and outrage. Lazy lazy lazy false equivalence. To say that "they're all the same" is absolutely not the case and nor will it ever be. The sooner people become more discerning of the information that they consume, the better off we all will be. There is an extremely large gulf in…

Those two things are not mutually exclusive. All other things being equal, I'd rather cite the NYT than Fox News. That doesn't mean the scale of bias isn't the same between NYT and Fox News.

With regard to quality of reporting I think the gulfs really lie in the outlet/format. TV/cable news is worse than traditional/print news. Daily news is worse than weekly/monthly, etc. When you're reporting 24 hours a day you've gotta sensationalize a lot of shit to keep people watching. If you only print once a day, not so much. Once a week, even less so.

I've gotten to the point now that I usually try to avoid the TV and daily print news altogether. If it's not important enough to make it in a weekly newspaper, it's probably not worth knowing about.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#146

Post by gmarx »

anigbrowl wrote: post #44
gmarx wrote: post #37

I noticed his violent crime graph stopped around 2013. Convenient. Yes violent crime is down by the standards of the previous 50 years but I'm pretty sure it has been inching back up over the previous two, at least in cities. Nothing to panic about yet but also nothing to be dismissive about. Also, though I too long for the old days of journalistic standards, let us a remember one of the side effects what creating th…

That's a bogus objection that ignores the yawning gap that opened up between perception and reality around the turn of the century, which is the author's point. As for the argument about there being so such thing as bias-free reporting, you're extrapolating from that to a position of epistemological abdication where you use that narrow fact as a justification for believing whatever you want to believe. While bias is…

Your first sentence is just a long way of saying "you are wrong and I need offer no counter evidence because I am right"

WRT your second sentence you are clearly so deep in your own cognitive bias you can't see anymore. I'd enjoy seeing such a study. I've seen plenty of reports about stuff that happened in the past century that were obviously now misreported by the mainstream press at the time.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#147

Post by astrobe_ »

rosser wrote: post #43
astrobe_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a trustless way to implement journalistic standards such as sourcing? That's kind of what HN and a few selected subreddits are for me.

That's not trustless, though. It's just ... call it "distributed" trust. The communities in question have, in whatever way, earned (or at least been granted) your trust.

Depends. Some members are known to be experts (as in: you can see right on Github what they actually do) in some areas so they are quite good primary sources. Sometimes people argue and provide links to support their point of view. But often you have neither and then the voting system plays the role of the distributed trust you mentioned.

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#148

Post by nostrademons »

SCHiM wrote: post #133
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…

It's strange how many people in this thread are discussing concepts such as 'choice', 'do', 'freedom'. Perhaps I've been too deep down the philosophical/metaphysical rabbit hole, but AFAIK there's only three options: 1) Deep down (past the turtles-all-the-way-deep) there's only chaos 2) Free will and alternative options exist 3) It's only predetermined order past the turtles. And 2 is somehow impossibly situated on t…

I recall studying free will in Intro Philosophy class, and Hobart [1] had a good argument that free will vs. determinism was a false dichotomy stemming from a misunderstanding of what it means to "choose" something.

His argument, paraphrased for the layman (he wrote in fairly impenetrable terms) was basically:

Say that we do have a deterministic world, where human action is the result of each human being continually processing stimuli, rationally (or emotionally) evaluating it, and then deciding on a course of action. The meaning of "choice" is this process, and the meaning of "self" is all the hidden machinery that lets us go from a stimulus to a course of action. People who believe free will and determinism are incompatible are implicitly positing that there's some entity outside of this process of weighing alternatives and choosing one, but there is no evidence for such an entity and no need to invent one. Rather, our common-sense notions of choice are completely compatible with someone having received a bunch of sensory inputs and then used the internal circuitry of their brain to decide on a course of action, and our common-sense notions of self are compatible with different people having different dispensations to make certain choices under various circumstances. And we can make moral judgments based on our evaluation of whether the choices another makes will be helpful or harmful to our interests.

Interestingly (and this is me adding to the theory after 15 years of life experience), this perspective seems to mirror psychological development. I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to settle into my own skin. When I was young, it was like I'd frequently "pop out" of my self and my actions and be like "who is this person?" As I've gotten older, it's more like "Yeah, I'm me, and I make the best choices I can with the information available to me, and ultimately I'm responsible for the consequences even if they don't work out." It's like there's less of a divide between that automatic stimulus -> processing -> response cycle and my objective perception of my life.

[1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mnat/~ball0888/oxfordopen/hoba...

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#149

Post by gmarx »

eridius wrote: post #39
gmarx wrote: post #37

I noticed his violent crime graph stopped around 2013. Convenient. Yes violent crime is down by the standards of the previous 50 years but I'm pretty sure it has been inching back up over the previous two, at least in cities. Nothing to panic about yet but also nothing to be dismissive about. Also, though I too long for the old days of journalistic standards, let us a remember one of the side effects what creating th…

The source for that graph is Pew, and if you look at the linked source, it looks like violent crime did in fact keep going down (at least until 2015, Pew's graph doesn't go past that) - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perce...

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-rel...

Re: How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

#150

Post by gmarx »

gmarx wrote: post #149
eridius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source for that graph is Pew, and if you look at the linked source, it looks like violent crime did in fact keep going down (at least until 2015, Pew's graph doesn't go past that) - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perce...

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-rel...

violent crime up 3.9% in 2015 though still down from 2011
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