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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

#301

Post by bluebarbet »

anigbrowl wrote: post #295
bluebarbet wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-commissio…

All no doubt true and none of it contradicts my point.

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

#302

Post by Supermancho »

inigyou wrote: post #246
qsera wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not. I meant that even in the news, there is nothing to substantiate such a point of view.

Then you clearly think it is not.

ie null finding versus negative finding

Neither are a positive finding.

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

#303

Post by zbentley »

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…

> 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

I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in events in the future”.

Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.

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

#304

Post by Applejinx »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #52
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…

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…

I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.

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

#305

Post by miki123211 »

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…

So well put!

Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).

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

#306

Post by nitwit005 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #265
inigyou wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.

War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.

No one expected the guy who previously almost decided to bomb Iran to bomb Iran? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-r...

I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

h26d3r wrote: post #288
kjkjadksj wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.

No, you're just highly misinformed. I could have told you a decade ago that all of this will play out in a second Trump term. The invasion of Iran was always going to be the culmination of the "War on Terror" and it was clear that Trump aligned himself with that political faction since long ago.

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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…

A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.

It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.

Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.

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

#309

Post by inigyou »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #265
inigyou wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.

War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.

Stupid shit should've been on everyone's bingo card. The exact format the stupid shit would take was hard to predict but there was definitely going to be a lot of it.

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

#310

Post by inigyou »

Supermancho wrote: post #302
inigyou wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you clearly think it is not.

ie null finding versus negative finding Neither are a positive finding.

So you don't know whether America is fascist or not? Because you clearly presented it as if you believe America is not fascist.
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