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The brain was not designed for this much bad news

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Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official. Sometimes online and election media d…

Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to…

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…

Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.

Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.

The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.

The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.

Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#83
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effec…

> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things People don't do that. Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem. Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your…

In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#84
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?

What conclusion? I am talking about not having any conclusions at all.

> *I have come to the conclusion* that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.

Depends on which powers for each specific choice. Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.

The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#87

I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it

Interestingly, I read more foreign news than local news.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#88
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.

On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?

On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?

We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.

There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#89

I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it

I used to read local news until they made an article "Top Ten dangerous places in our city" where they just listed a bunch of places that someone considered scary based on vibes.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#90
post #3

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering…

This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effec…

It’s not really.

The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.

You vote for who you were told to vote for.

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