211–220 of 252 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
Osho had some deep thoughts about this, best summarized in these 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE
The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch f…
A lot of it isn't actually news at all: it's news entertainment. It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'. I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance. To me, the…
> Definitely a demand issue. This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product. > To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert it…
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Definitely a demand issue. This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product. > To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert it…
I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by. To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are ant…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give peo…
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.
News, without making money, are boring. Consumers are trained to obtain news in entertainment.
But, news today is not the bulletin headlines and long-read newspaper investigations we knew news to be in the 1980s and 1990s. News has now morphed into an amalgamation of the worst elements of social media and reality television.
By reading a publication such as The Economist once a month, you can attain a more comprehensive understanding of global affairs than you would by watching daily news broadcasts.
The problem comes from our upbringing, where we were told that the news was important. But, news today is not the bulletin headlines and long-read newspaper investigations we knew news to be in the 1980s and 1990s. News has now morphed into an amalgamation of the worst elements of social media and reality television. By reading a publication such as The Economist once a month, you can attain a more comprehensive unde…
Other than the fact that its not anymore from a mostly-uniform set of corporate owners with mostly-uniform biases imposed on it, yes, actually, it is (and that had actually started to break down in the 1990s, anyway.)
(There are qualitative differences by specific outlet and medium, sure, but that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, too, with studies then showing, IIRC, quantity of radio and TV news consumption – unlike newspapers and newsmagazine consumption – inversely correlated with knowledge of current events.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't ha…
"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long." That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
(While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
Yes, and they are entitled to a vote that gets aggregated with others on the issues and candidates subject to public elections.
That’s different from them having an opinion that is worth listening to individually.