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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#721

Post by croissants »

user3939382 wrote: post #672
majgr wrote: post #570

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences: - Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll. - It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They…

> Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. All printed papers in the US that I’m aware of serve corporate political interests so I lost you there. Then you have magazines that are aligned with various think tanks and lobbyists. The truth isn’t somewhere in the middle of all this, it’s with totally independent journal…

> totally independent

How do you arrive at this conclusion? Individuals don't have to tell you where their money comes from. They might even be easier to influence/buy than the people inside the big news institutions.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#722

Post by wvh »

majgr wrote: post #570

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences: - Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll. - It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They…

I'm going to commit a netiquette faux-pas and, as a fellow European, simply wholeheartedly acknowledge all you just said, from politics to media to psychology and neurology.

I don't know if the internet is just mirroring the general state of society, or if it contributes negatively to it, but talking specifically about the net, this dystopia really isn't what I had envisioned in the '90s. Even rats in cages being subjected to psychological torture are better behaved than this.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#723

Post by uxp100 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #711
bluebarbet wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take seems to me to be a classic case of the US tendency to irrational suspicion as first described in the Hofstadter essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I'm not American but I do subscribe to The Atlantic, which seems to be owned by some kind of philanthropic trust with a do-gooding billionaire at the helm. As a European, that's plenty good enough for me. Financial incentives are important but they'r…

Atlantic is owned by Steve Job's ex wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. She is openly anti-trump. Not saying its not a good paper, just saying you are not going to get neutral news from them.

And the Editor in Chief is Jeffery Goldberg, of Iraq WMD conspiracy theory fame. I’m not saying they don’t publish good pieces, but seriously, talk about not a reliable source.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#724

Post by tuukkah »

cm2187 wrote: post #717
tuukkah wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be printed in the US. The Guardian is backed by a non-profit and there's a US (digital) edition plus a printed weekly international edition.

The Guardian is the worst example you could come up with, it is openly politically militant and its opinion pages headlines are hysterical.

It's the British style, but it doesn't make it bad journalism. You don't have to read or like it (or the opinion pieces), but their members clearly do. I was responding to the topic of "serving corporate political interests".

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#725

Post by [deleted] »

wonderwonder wrote: post #710
tuukkah wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be printed in the US. The Guardian is backed by a non-profit and there's a US (digital) edition plus a printed weekly international edition.

The guardian openly states on their website that they are anti-trump. So going to posit they may be less that neutral. From the banner on their home page: "From Elon Musk to the Murdochs, billionaire owners control much of the information that reaches the public. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of bad actors are spreading disinformation that threatens democracy" also "After Trump remarked that “in this term, everybody…

[deleted]

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#726

Post by pjc50 »

philomath_mn wrote: post #293
Glyptodon wrote: post #290

I don't have outrage fatigue. Outrages are outrages and they are what they are. Are there many exaggerations and fake outrages? Sure. But things like the USA's current constitutional crisis are real. What I struggle with isn't fatigue at outrage, it's knowing what to do about it. I think violence is going to become more common, but I don't particularly think it will be effective. So less so than outrage, it's the fee…

> I think violence is going to become more common What kind and why?

The US has what from the outside looks like a very odd combination of:

- violent anti-government rhetoric (not a new phenomenon at all)

- huge availability of guns

- explicit links between the two by second-amendment advocates of violence against the government

- very little of what would normally be called political violence (Jan 6 is an exception, but a significant one)

- a huge amount of "radicalized" gun violence against schoolchildren (Columbine to Uvalde, etc)

This doesn't feel very stable. It relies on people's actions never matching their words. As soon as someone turns a gun on an elected representative there's a risk of the situation escalating. Or someone could independently reinvent the carbomb, a common factor in situations from the IRA to Iraq.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#727

Post by NeutralCrane »

tuukkah wrote: post #681
user3939382 wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. All printed papers in the US that I’m aware of serve corporate political interests so I lost you there. Then you have magazines that are aligned with various think tanks and lobbyists. The truth isn’t somewhere in the middle of all this, it’s with totally independent journal…

It doesn't have to be printed in the US. The Guardian is backed by a non-profit and there's a US (digital) edition plus a printed weekly international edition.

The Guardian is not the example I would have chosen. They are among the most politically biased publications you could have chosen. Simply being backed a by a non-profit doesn’t mean they can’t be pushing an agenda.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#728

Post by immibis »

HEmanZ wrote: post #377
magicalist wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? My family could be murdered in front of me and it wouldn't qualify as a trivia question for you or most other people in one year. This feels like a version of stoicism that missed the point of stoicism.

You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally. 99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you. And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would…

> You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally.

> 99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.

What I'm hearing is that if the government kills someone, only their immediate family members are allowed to protest. We shouldn't protest when the government is killing people who aren't related to us, even if our relatives could be next.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#729

Post by NeutralCrane »

nonchalantsui wrote: post #292
niceice wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions. I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped…

This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides…

This behavior has been going on long before the API protests.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#730

Post by lazide »

pooper wrote: post #706
prox wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s also an alarm bell right there. If the answer to the question “Does this article/headline want me to feel anything?” is Yes, than it’s emotional bait. If its “boring” than it’s probably more neutral. Emotional reactivity is the psychological name I believe. High reactivity means more anxiety, stress and sometimes sign of a disorder.

Here is one example of what I think is boring. Is this what you had in mind? ---- Bank of England Cuts Interest Rates as British Economy Weakens The central bank cut rates for the third time in about six months as it said growth had been weaker than expected.

If it bleeds it leads has been a core tenet of journalism essentially since it has existed. And certainly a staple of rumor mills since long before that.
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