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

We need to reclaim our attention

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 458 posts

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#411

Post by Falkon1313 »

redisman wrote: post #335
freewilly1040 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight tangent re: fitness. Over Christmas my dad and some similarly aged people (70’s) were reminiscing about their childhood, and pointed to the lack of Doritos as memorable. Junk food was neither the product of decades of addictiveness-enhancing R&D not cheap. A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.

Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals

Except if like a great many in the U.S., your only source of nearby groceries within reasonable walking distance is a gas station. In that case a bag of Doritos is $40+ cheaper than hiring a cab to take you to the grocery store and back for a bag of beans and rice. Also saves you a couple of hours of travel and cooking.

When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.

One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#412

Post by Warlockcraft »

I already claimed my attention back. I did this by removing stupid media companies from my life. I did this by learning about "The Propaganda Multiplier". The Guardian is part of "The Propaganda Multiplier". The Guardian is a media company controlled by cut-throat oligarchs. It does not have independent journalists who investigate corrupt politicians deeply. It only has sellouts promoting corporate interests while keeping predators in power.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#414

Post by int_19h »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #210
bnralt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of your examples are of times we failed to counter problematic tendencies as a society, gave up, and then even worse (in this case, more addictive time consuming activities) things come along. It's basically the realization of a slippery slope, where failure to stop one problematic trend is used to justify an even worse trend. Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when America…

"it's hard to imagine the world without them" There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.

For the curious, it's "The Hour of the Bull" by Ivan Yefremov.

(It should be noted that this particular feature is not the central premise of the book, but merely one of the facets of said dystopian society.)

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#415

Post by dTal »

thegrimmest wrote: post #395
dTal wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical nihilism is no basis for public policy. Your argument successfully justifies legal murder, for instance. Who are we to say that it's wrong?

If someone consents to be murdered, who are we indeed to stop them? My argument doesn't justify non-consensual murder at all however.

It certainly does justify it. And literally everything else. It's an argument against laws of any kind. After all, "good, desirable or natural" are not real. We have no framework to rank desirability of outcome, according to you. The only reasonable way forward is tolerance of the full diversity of belief, right? Including the belief that murder is okay.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#416

Post by dTal »

thegrimmest wrote: post #393
dTal wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "violence" your boundary? Most people agree that lots of things can be "bad" besides violence. There's a pretty broad consensus on that. You're going to need some pretty strong arguments to justify legalizing theft and fraud.

I'm not trying to justify legalizing theft and fraud - these are most generally justified by property rights, which are somewhat tangential here. Neither of them set a precedent for the government intervening in honest interactions between people. Lots of things are widely considered "bad", that doesn't mean it wouldn't be tyrannical to make them illegal.

You didn't answer. Why do you draw the line there? What's so special about violence that it deserves special attention from the state, while other bad things don't? I see you've also added property rights now, which are a totally separate category from violence. Why these things in particular?

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#417

Post by pdfernhout »

jmknoll wrote: post #372
redisman wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals

Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience. Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable. Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the U…

Another complicating factor of all this is "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" in a society far from what humans are adapted for.

Related:

"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!" By Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....

"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

"The Lifestyle Cure" https://tlc.ku.edu/

From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#418

Post by bytehowl »

champagnois wrote: post #164

Consider what this does to opinion and independent thinking. Most attention grabbing platforms are designed to use a variety of reward mechanisns to reinforce the politics of the platform. Some easily botted platforms (like reddit) will constantly bombard people with anti-civilizational content promoting "anti-work" or very toxic identity politics that further isolates the users, and, in turn, strengthens their addic…

Anyone who doesn't just have a kneejerk reaction based on the name realizes antiwork is actually more against the exploitation of workers and/or the planet than against work. Calling it "anti-civilizational" demonstrates that you either have no understanding of it, or worse that you're trying to discredit the movement through intentional lies and manipulation.

As for the possibility that the movement is being bolstered by some foreign nation for nefarious purposes, maybe. I have only checked it semi-regularly in the first half of 2021 and it wasn't that popular then, whereas I often see it on the frontpage nowadays. However, even if that was the case, it doesn't mean that the sentiments at the heart of it aren't genuine. Rebellion against capitalism's unsustainability has been a long time coming.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#419

Post by andersonvom »

thegrimmest wrote: post #397
andersonvom wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the two horrible options were free from context, sure. But that's hardly (if ever) the case. It is very convenient to start from a place where A has power over B, then say "B is free to choose whatever crappy options A offers, because... freedom".

We have to start from some place don't we? Even if we perfectly redistributed wealth tomorrow, we'd see billionaires in a generation or two.

This only goes to show that the current system is inherently broken, but this is a completely different conversation.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#420

Post by ikr678 »

barrkel wrote: post #163
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One form this takes is that people with some regularity claim that 'all this advertising doesn't work on them' while having an iPhone, ridiculously over-priced in ear headphones, designer clothes with large logos on them and shoes with very visible branding. Advertising works, on everybody. The only way to get to a level playing field is to filter it out of your life as much as possible. The only thing I haven't foun…

And a large fraction of fashion items are made out of advertising; that is, the value proposition of displaying a branded item comes from the web of associations generated and maintained amongst your social group by the fashion brand's advertising efforts, which will in turn be associated with you by exhibiting the item. This means that it is actually possible to not be affected by advertising and still use fashion i…

Your can make your brand associations more meaningful though. I've started to embrace hyper-local street fashion. Wearing tshirts from local businesses in my area that I enjoy (bars/cafes/local brewery merchandise).
Post reply on HN