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Endless Doom Scroller
81–90 of 118 posts
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#82I would advise the way to beat the anxiety about doom scrolling is to RTFA Headline: The world is spiraling out of control Body: X is happening that will impact Y in these specific ways. Z people are working against X and trying tactics A & B... The Headline is calibrated to maximize your anxiety. The Body is often calibrated to the right level of anxiety and context. I find instead of trying to mentally suppress Hea…
We should write a plugin which normalises headlines, essentially a de-click-bater. By training a NN on neutral headlines vs doom/anxiety-inducing/clickbait headlines we can essentially provide the inverse as well.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how you can fix problems if you aren't willing to in the first place look at them, as we've seen in this pandemic the virus doesn't care how optimistic you are. How can you fix problems by knowing about them? What I mean is: unless you're an expert on the problem, or willing and able to become one as soon as you've learned about it, what difference does it make whether you specifically know how bad some…
Obviously the news cycle thrives on panic and style over substance. This does not change the fact that "knowing" about the world is valuable. Effective action to address a threat is nearly impossible without an accurate model of it. People don't need to be experts about everything to become relatively well informed about many things, nor do they need to try to solve every problem at once. The appeal to institutions a…
Not all knowledge is equal in value, and time spent learning one thing has an opportunity cost - it's time you can't spend, say, learning something more useful.
Understanding what went wrong, how it could've been caught, how to prevent it from happening in the future, options and tradeoffs for how to resolve things now that the damage has been done, etc. - this can be extremely useful and empowering. Even if you have no ability to impact the specific problem being discussed, you can draw parallels from those problems to the problems you do face in your own domains where you can have an impact. There may be no perfect solutions, but there may be better solutions, a better understanding of the problem, and an example of moving forward as one is best able to. This isn't exactly a message of "doom" though.
On the flip side, one can see yet another retelling of beating yet another dead horse - be they unpredictable black swan events with no real useful takeaways for planning, no useful nonobvious changes to policy to propose, or yet another deadlocked political quagmire of shouting heads that even the experts can't untangle - or something where the lessons are obvious and spelled out hundreds of hours of content ago and being applied - isn't terribly useful, encouraging, or empowering. Quite the opposite - if anything, they're depressing and disempowering.
To put it another way - flooding our information channels with low quality low content unactionable unrelatable useless unresearched unvetted "the sky is falling" shallow summaries of our inevitable doom displaces useful content about the problems of our world and more in-depth discussions about what we're experimenting with to try and fix them, what seems to be working, what was tried and failed, etc. Framed in this light, much of the news cycle has negative value: while it may let you "know" "more" about the world, you would've spent your time much more wisely by trying to learn from what other people are trying to do to fix things, or by attempting to fix things yourself.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#84I don't really understand the 'doomer' debate, that is to say complaining about negative news when the world in fact is facing enormous negative events. It seems to me sort of like the 'three-wise-monkeys', just think happy thoughts and the world gets better or something. It seems infantile. I don't see how you can fix problems if you aren't willing to in the first place look at them, as we've seen in this pandemic t…
I don't think this page is meant to poke fun at the entire "doomer" debate but more so at the people who have become addicted to/complicit with scrolling through doom and gloom on the "front-page" of their news source day after day.
Given the current state of the world, its become much easier for media outlets to write stories on topics like; how far away a vaccine is, what shape the economic recovery will take or what countries are horribly dropping the ball. I think these stories grab people's attention because people are scared and think learning more will help them feel less scared. Unfortunately, many of these articles are open-ended/non-conclusive and this leaves the reader looking for more. If the reader finds more of these same types of articles, in my mind, they've begun doom-scrolling.
I agree most people are probably not scared enough overall but I also think most people are scared about the wrong things. They're scared about what their media of choice is telling them to be scared about, rather than the issues that'll have the biggest impact on their life/society at large.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how you can fix problems if you aren't willing to in the first place look at them, as we've seen in this pandemic the virus doesn't care how optimistic you are. How can you fix problems by knowing about them? What I mean is: unless you're an expert on the problem, or willing and able to become one as soon as you've learned about it, what difference does it make whether you specifically know how bad some…
I'm replying because you're obviously being downvoted for the content of your comment, not the quality. It appears to me that you're contributing to the conversation in good faith with tough questions. What your questions triggered in me was to reject the notion that the institutions set up around me will solve much. I'm sure most people have lost faith in these institutions at this point, on all sides. But I agree w…
I believe that "the institutions are broken" is similar to "the youth has no discipline, is rude, and our future is doomed": every generation believes it and it turns out we're okay anyhow. I'm not saying that having institutions is a fire-and-forget solution that you never need to worry about once they're established. But generally, we have institutions so you don't have to worry about it constantly. And it works tremendously well in most areas most of the time. Being individually hyper-aware isn't necessary.
It's also an interesting thing to watch from outside the US: there's a lot of arguments that it's the US institutions specifically that are broken beyond repair, willfully being destroyed etc. That may well be true, but it has nothing to do with the news being what they are, we see the same kind of news coverage pretty much everywhere, the actual circumstances don't matter. And we have the same sentiment in Europe, it's always this close to the edge. In my opinion, it's emotional manipulation, but it's really hard to get out of it once it has become a habit.
I'm not sure it's a modern thing either. Here is Thomas Jefferson on the same issue, albeit writing about knowledge of facts, not so much the psychological cost of constant fear: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#86This is a brilliant work of interactive digital art that perfectly captures the zeitgeist.
The artist, one Benjamin Grosser, describes it as follows:
> "Doomscrolling" refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly—and in some cases, almost involuntarily—scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. Certainly the realities of the pandemic necessitate a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety. But doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. Yes, it may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, The Endless Doomscroller acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. By stripping away the specifics wrapped up in each headline and minimizing the mechanics behind most interface patterns, The Endless Doomscroller offers up an opportunity for mindfulness about how we’re spending our time online and about who most benefits from our late night scroll sessions. And, if one scrolls as endlessly as the work makes possible, The Endless Doomscroller might even enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what these interfaces want from and do to us. In other words, perhaps the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling.
Source: https://bengrosser.com/projects/endless-doomscroller/
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#87I would advise the way to beat the anxiety about doom scrolling is to RTFA Headline: The world is spiraling out of control Body: X is happening that will impact Y in these specific ways. Z people are working against X and trying tactics A & B... The Headline is calibrated to maximize your anxiety. The Body is often calibrated to the right level of anxiety and context. I find instead of trying to mentally suppress Hea…
The problem with that is we are bombarded with at least 10 times as many headlines as articles can possibly be read. Even within an article, there will be links to other headlines. Look at a news front page and there are enough headlines immediately in view that would take an hour or five to read through. There’s no way to “get ahead” by RTFA, and shaming people for only having seen a misleading headline is attacking…
If news media is for profit, news media will naturally use the most engaging headline to beat out competition. There is no solution to this problem unless news is regulated or not for profit. You won't 'shame' an entire industry into changing something they've been doing for centuries.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#88I want to stay informed about the world but I'm unable to read the highly editorialized doom scrollers. I'm tired of the news cheering for the hurricane and I'm tired of pointless feel good stories to bring "happy news" that isn't really news at all. I've started to read more long-form essays on current events topics. I find they nicely summarize events in a chronological order with all of the benefit of hindsight to…
"The News" is mostly gossip and things that are interesting because they almost never happen. As a way of learning how the world works, it's pretty awful.
If you want to be informed, spend the news time reading books/essays about important/interesting topics, and you'll be way more enlightened in a year.
If you go all the way in this, you won't be able to participate in the shared culture of society, so I don't get fanatical with it. I'm human, and some gossip is fun.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#89Was expecting a procedurally-generated Doom sidescroller conversion. I was nonetheless quite amused.
I was also expecting a doom side scroller. Was hoping it would be similar to the old 2d duke nukem stuff.
Re: Endless Doom Scroller
#90I would advise the way to beat the anxiety about doom scrolling is to RTFA Headline: The world is spiraling out of control Body: X is happening that will impact Y in these specific ways. Z people are working against X and trying tactics A & B... The Headline is calibrated to maximize your anxiety. The Body is often calibrated to the right level of anxiety and context. I find instead of trying to mentally suppress Hea…
We should write a plugin which normalises headlines, essentially a de-click-bater. By training a NN on neutral headlines vs doom/anxiety-inducing/clickbait headlines we can essentially provide the inverse as well.
I actually wrote a half baked version of this to replace the headline with a machine learning generated summary of the article. Headlines wound up being sort of long and clunky but I did like them a lot more than the sort of headlines being discussed here (the reason I wrote it in the first place). Maybe I should finish that.