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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

#341

Post by MrDisposable »

throwaway209329 wrote: post #149
consp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.

As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging…

> the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group

Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.

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

#342

Post by stndef »

I do watch how much I'm consuming the news as it does impact my day, but part of the problem is that when I eventually go to look at news online, I'm immediately confronted with 8+ blurbs of what's made up of a majority of bad news.

I would like to look at one bad thing at a time, please, but I know that's likely not compatible with money making models.

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

#343

Post by yurishimo »

esyir wrote: post #334
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the biggest thing that people refuse to accept is that the optimal number of accidental deaths is non zero And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.

And that the cause can be addressed by regulation. There's no regulation that will protect from bad actors so designing the system to cater to them in extremely specific ways just creates more red tape for normal people.

Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.

In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.

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

#345

Post by makeitdouble »

bodash wrote: post #248
makeitdouble wrote: post #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 rea…

Given the audience here, I think an adjacent analogy would be “if we were to understand tech today, do we always go back to the beginning of tech?” Then the answer is more clear as yes and no. Obviously much of our tech today adapts to modern innovations and standards, but it would not be hard to quickly find examples where even the most cutting edge tech are still being affected by the earliest decisions or natural…

I've been thinking about it for a while and like the tech analogy a lot.

The interesting part to me is that we have many relics of earlier choices, but the reason they were set that way and the reasons we kept these choices around are completely different.

For instance choosing to start time at 1970 was to work around space limitations IFAIK, but we're still using that norm out of inertia and compatibility concerns.

I think that kind of logic applies to many human things as well, for instance at one point physical differences between men and women had a huge practical impact on the kind of "work" they could optimally do, yet the same kind of labor segregation today would come from a totally different place.

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

#346

Post by Andrex »

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.

> After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes

Not strictly true for presidential elections.

My vote cast in CT literally matters more than someone else's vote cast in CA. Yay electoral college!

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

#347

Post by cholantesh »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #323
cholantesh wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to treating fact-free rehashings of Israeli state propaganda as 'non-flattering statements' and decorating such treatments with thought-terminating epithets.

I included specific examples from the latest Iran discussion. Flagging responses dead like that is even more thought-terminating than my poor computer geek writing style. Please respond to those examples in context/a substantive/HN worthy way and have a discussion, not a fact free handwaving of 'they're XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda'. How do the examples I provided break Hacker News guidelines and deserve not o…

It's not a fact-free handwaving; every last one of those comments is just steelmanning Israel's position without any evidential basis. And if you are so deeply concerned about characterizing them as 'XYZ evil foreign power's propaganda', I wonder why you see no reason to push back on claims like this:

>Iran isn’t negotiating in good faith, and will likely need another round of attacks. America should also flood Iran with small arms for the revolutionaries

What kind of productive discussion do you think this encourages? And given that the intelligence community broadly considers the latter a losing proposition, are we to assume that you think they are all Iranian proxies?

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

#348

Post by LocalH »

mc3301 wrote: post #327
tadfisher wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.

Nice sarcasm

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

#349

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

stratocumulus0 wrote: post #337
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this is somehow reducing all expression of opinion as performative, i.e. serving to heighten the social standing of the expressor. I have a handful of other motivations: - to persuade - to develop my worldview (speaking, typing, thinking all use different neural pathways) - to collect feedback and be challenged The activism against “performative” activism is equally grating when it misfires, and the movement p…

While others might be like that, the type I'm talking about explicitly does not want to be challenged or alter their worldview. I find a comparison with religion an another poster made to be pretty fair, as the people I know who practice such behavior tend to be either insincere (they don't actually care about politics, but just want to control others) or sincere, but unprepared (they didn't care before, so their abi…

Yes but I’d just want to point out that the rub lies in who is deciding which activism is performative and which is authentic. I.e. all of my friends are authentic, all my enemies are performative.

It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”

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