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The brain was not designed for this much bad news

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311–320 of 376 posts

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

#311
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…

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…

I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.

Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.

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

#312
post #167
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment. Bicycles and public transportation.

This is literally oil industry propaganda.

No it isn’t.

I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…

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

#313
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,…

...except for guns. That topic is off-limits at all levels of government. The problem is never guns, it is mental health, or drugs, or poverty, and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.

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

#314
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution. Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.

Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be. In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.

Large family sizes dilute family wealth and leave children at a disadvantage to their better capitalized peers.

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

#315
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.

Value bundling is a pretty universal problem. Maybe Switzerland is less impacted with their direct democracy escape valves, but it's a huge issue in almost every country.

The US has an extreme case of it, with their 2 parties system, but most countries can't keep 4 different issues actively guiding politics.

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

#316
It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news.

But the author missed some key nuances.

- Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person.

- The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization.

- People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.

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

#317

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…

What is the corruption you are alleging here? I live in Salt Lake City and I haven't heard any arguments against that data center that don't boil down to some kind of conspiracy theory or just a fundamental lack of understanding of scale and engineering. Are you claiming that the commissioners were bribed?

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

#318
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…

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

#319

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.

Nah. People actively voted for a guy who said no war. Then he got the USA into a dumb war. Just like all the rest.

Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it all starts falling apart again.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.

Nah. People actively voted for a guy who said no war. Then he got the USA into a dumb war. Just like all the rest. Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it al…

Well, voting doesn't produce the results you want when you vote for a liar. That doesn't mean that voting never produces the desired result, just that it doesn't in that condition.
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