Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The brain was not designed for this much bad news

sciencedaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 376 posts

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

#291

Post by bilbo0s »

bdelmas wrote: post #284
roenxi wrote: post #11

The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made…

It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.

Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control.

For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?

At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.

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

#292

Post by Lammy »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #278
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"normal" is a perfectly fine word and there's no reason to criticize someone for using it.

What's normal?

It's a math term whose meaning depends on the qualities of the other people around you, not a reference to any one particular set of characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

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

#293

Post by katmannthree »

Isamu wrote: post #287
EA-3167 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were…

>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.

> You could put your hand around this tree

To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.

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

#294

Post by amanaplanacanal »

cryo32 wrote: post #97
appplication wrote: post #22

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…

We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education. I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.

Sounds like all the noise in Texas right now about sharia law. Muslims are a tiny proportion of the people there, what are the politician all worked up about?

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

#295

Post by anigbrowl »

bluebarbet wrote: post #150
roenxi wrote: post #11

The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made…

Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.

That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission...

There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.

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

#296

Post by amanaplanacanal »

kelipso wrote: post #235
XorNot wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that maybe most of the posters on this website weren't born yesterday and have also spent a lifetime absorbing facts from many sources and experiences? In fact most people have, in some way.

Most of the posters in this website are teenagers or in their early twenties. Let’s not be delusional here, this is still the internet.

There may have been a time when most people on the Internet were in their teens and early twenties, but I don't think that has been true for a long time.

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

#297

Post by amanaplanacanal »

kelipso wrote: post #236
inigyou wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Harris and Trump were identical in that respect, so it shouldn't have swayed your decision.

Harris was a known to be bad with respect to the war issue, became very obviously bad when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney. Trump was less known bad, so that difference should certainly have swayed your decision.

Trump had already tried to overthrow the previous election. He could only have been thought less bad if you weren't paying attention.

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

#298

Post by Isamu »

katmannthree wrote: post #293
Isamu wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.

> You could put your hand around this tree To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.

>it'll take more than one swing

That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

bilbo0s wrote: post #291
bdelmas wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.

Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control. For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of y…

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by Supermancho »

kelipso wrote: post #235
XorNot wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that maybe most of the posters on this website weren't born yesterday and have also spent a lifetime absorbing facts from many sources and experiences? In fact most people have, in some way.

Most of the posters in this website are teenagers or in their early twenties. Let’s not be delusional here, this is still the internet.

I don't believe you've made a case here.
Post reply on HN