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The case against crisis-mongering

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Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#101

Post by chrisco255 »

jerf wrote: post #72
tvirosi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.

I think they are sick of it, but not because the grandparent post is wrong. They're sick of it because the emergency is "supposed" to be something you can overcome, feel triumphant about, and move on to the next thing. But the emergencies in the media don't work that way. It doesn't matter how much you recycle, the media will keep screaming about catastrophe. It doesn't matter how many solar cells adorn your roof, th…

Yeah the trick is to turn off and tune out the media altogether. You really don't need to be hearing about everything that happens in the world and a non-stop partisan narrative interpretation of it. It's really not good for you, or anyone else. Turn it off. Go outside, go hike, go fish, play video games, whatever, just turn off the news. Remove the news feed from your phone. Add extensions that block news feeds on social media. Delete social media apps with feeds. Cancel your cable subscription. Go outside, enjoy your short life.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#102

Post by oofabz »

This is a well-written and insightful article, but I don't think it's good for HN. Divisive political and culture war issues are thoroughly covered elsewhere. I would prefer HN to focus on its unique niche and show me new ideas I have not encountered before.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#103

Post by Seattle3503 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #67

I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a Portland protest. How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience? OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else just relax since you're all the same anyway..."

That man isn't generally representative. If you reactive the world is full of people like him, you will over react.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#104

Post by throwaway_4253 »

namdnay wrote: post #64
tvirosi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.

If they were sick of it, they wouldn’t lap it up. People like drama. If they didn’t we wouldn’t have reality TV

Hmm, I think there's a difference between heavily fictionalized external personal drama and the diffuse, anxiety-provoking miasma of social media and mainstream news headlines feeds.

Even if there isn't a huge difference, I feel like the relationship is more like that of an alcoholic or other addict. Do addicts really "like" their drug? Surely most of them know at some level that it's really unhealthy, and there's diminishing pleasurable returns even in the short term, but they still crave it as a release from their short term anxieties and problems.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#105

Post by mythrwy »

_ykl9 wrote: post #55

Both sides have a tendency to cry wolf. Bush was awful, but he wasn't Hitler. Romney was treated particularly unfairly during his presidential run. Regardless of one's feelings on Trump, it's clear that he wasn't treated entirely fairly by the media from the start. Sure, for a while they would tiptoe around calling him out for outright lies, but I also saw how his words and actions would at times be twisted and prese…

I'm with you up until "and then attacked the United States with intent to violently usurp control of the government".

That isn't what happened and is exactly the type of inaccurate and unfair characterization you mention previously.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#106

Post by blagie »

dahart wrote: post #74
blagie wrote: post #7

What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change (whether man-made, or from a volcano/asteroid/etc.), nukes, or what-not. Being resilient means: * Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains shouldn't be b…

So, you’re suggesting we should prepare for unlikely events, seems reasonable as a general thought. And at the same time armchair questioning the best science we have on climate change without any specific evidence, contributing to the very doubt that has already fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date. How are we to be resilient and prioritize preparedness when we can’t agree on the priorities? Certainl…

The best science, in climate change, in COVID, and in many other areas, just isn't very good science. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare. We make decisions on limited evidence all the time -- in business, investments, and in war, there is a certain fog.

I think where scientists went wrong -- and what contributed to doubt and fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date -- was exactly from the type of manipulation you described. In the nineties, scientists correctly believed we should do something about the climate, but to affect change, they politicized science.

In the case of climate change, if you read right-wing media, they'll point to failed prediction after prediction expressed with great confidence 10 or 20 years ago, and use that to discount the whole concept of climate change. If that same data had been presented with confidence intervals -- and /real/ confidence intervals, not just based on statistical measurement error but on the possibility of models being wrong -- I think we'd actually be a lot further along.

If the choices were "six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds", the risk would be 0.6%, and the case for acting wouldn't exist. As it is, I'd give perhaps 75% odds for the need to act on climate change. Precision is important.

But no, a lot of possibilities aren't hard to model or a reason not to act. We assign probabilities, and give a distribution. We have major wars perhaps every 50-100 years in most parts of the world. Recent past has been stable, but we've had windows of stability. Pandemics are on the rise, due to growing population and more commute. We can come up with likely scenarios, and they all have a lot in common.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#107

Post by blagie »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #44
blagie wrote: post #7

What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change (whether man-made, or from a volcano/asteroid/etc.), nukes, or what-not. Being resilient means: * Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains shouldn't be b…

That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You only get that kind of resilience when you have a political system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more than than its leaders. With a few debatable exceptions, that's not true of any country on Earth. And it's certainly not true of the planet as a whole. Which is the level at…

Then how do we get one? Our model democracy is a quarter millennium old, and showing signs of wear. How do we put in place a better system?

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#108

Post by s7atic »

luffapi wrote: post #70
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are we talking about someone that believes in free speech, a free press, private property, the Rule of Law, opposes cancel-culture, believes in social policies, free elections, Separation of church & State, supports a progressive taxation, abhors violence as a way to change govt, and generally supports the constitution? Or, are we talking about someone that believes in controlled/regulated speech, a controlled press,…

Both your personas are oddly constructed and not really representative of a political quadrant with state-individual empowerment on the vertical access and state backed private property on the horizontal. Free speech, reduction of private property, dissolution of centralized state and wealth redistribution are all very classic bottom left (anarchist) principles for instance. I would think anyone below the center line…

> I would think anyone below the center line vertically (so anarchists to free market libertarians) would support what you call “cancel culture” since is a powerful form of direct action.

No liberal is the other alike, but some would argue that privacy is a prerequisite of freedom. Calling out someone with intent of harm is a violation of their privacy and civil rights. This can have a chilling effect and promote homogeneous thought and expression, which is inconsistent with basic liberal values. Maybe a distinction between anarchism and liberalism is that the former want no regulation at all, while the latter embrace legislation that protect civil and human rights.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#109

Post by _ykl9 »

mythrwy wrote: post #105
_ykl9 wrote: post #55

Both sides have a tendency to cry wolf. Bush was awful, but he wasn't Hitler. Romney was treated particularly unfairly during his presidential run. Regardless of one's feelings on Trump, it's clear that he wasn't treated entirely fairly by the media from the start. Sure, for a while they would tiptoe around calling him out for outright lies, but I also saw how his words and actions would at times be twisted and prese…

I'm with you up until "and then attacked the United States with intent to violently usurp control of the government". That isn't what happened and is exactly the type of inaccurate and unfair characterization you mention previously.

It absolutely is not. Unless you're claiming that the 1/6 footage was all deepfaked and/or an Antifa false flag operation, the issue seems pretty unambiguous.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#110

Post by thinkharderdev »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #67

I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a Portland protest. How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience? OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else just relax since you're all the same anyway..."

I doubt he would claim you are over-exaggerating your particular experience, nor do I think he is insisting that no terrible things happen at all (which would be an obviously insane thing to say). But is it actually *worse* now than in the past?

I think we have a way of remembering the past as much rosier than it actually was which leads us to think the present is much worse than it actually is. We tend to think of last summer as a particularly volatile time in the United States but as a point of comparison during periods in the 1970s we averaged 5 bombings a day in the US (https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/). At various periods between the 1960s and the 1990s we had riots in American cities orders of magnitude more destructive than anything that happened during the summer of 2020. Not to mention the long and sordid history of pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward (see https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacr...).

That is, the point is not that everything is great now so nobody should complain about anything but it is also a bit ahistorical to think that we are in some sort of unprecedentedly dangerous moment of history.

There is a boarder point as well which I think that we not only see this moment in aggregate as some moment of catastrophic danger but each *individual* issue is something of transcendent importance and we will all be doomed if we don't fix it right this moment. It leads to a sort of paralysis where you can't actually solve anything because you can't make tradeoffs when EVERYTHING is an emergency.

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