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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#841

Post by marcusverus »

righthand wrote: post #791
basisword wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But things like the USA's current constitutional crisis are real. While I have no doubt this is true, is it _actually_ having any impact on your day to day life? If you didn't have social media, didn't read the news, and somehow didn't even know there was an election (I know this one isn't possible) would your day to day life have changed at all? Look at the past week as an example. Threats of tariffs, headline ne…

This is wrong, Trump and his policies does affect everyone’s day to day life. It may not be immediately visible effect but that is why he lost the 2nd time he tried to run. This fallacy didn’t cause people to vote for Trump in this current election, it caused them to not vote. Not voting is a direct negative effect on your life because you’ve chosen to give up on understanding the consequences. We are basically on tr…

> He never spends any time around or near immigrants

He's literally married to an immigrant.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#842

Post by intermerda »

Bhilai wrote: post #785
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. I struggle with this. It's incredibly challenging to find reliable, unbiased news sources these days, especially with the perceived slant of many major outlets. It's discouraging when even subscriptions to reputable publications like the NYT and WSJ leave you feeling like yo…

What do you mean by an “unbiased news source? What dimension does it not have a bias against?

If you are talking about political ideologies, reality has a well-known liberal bias. So you have to choose one or the other.

There was a comment recently about how Gemini won’t tell you some Chili recipe from Obama because that might see political. So Google seems to be heading towards politically neutral direction. Contrast that with many years ago when a Google image search would bring up Trump’s image when you searched for “idiot”.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#843

Post by magicalhippo »

timeon wrote: post #836
magnetometer wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be only two sides?

That was probably mentioned from US-centric point of view where they have two-party system.

I'm from Norway where we have currently ten parties in our parliament[1].

We still mostly talk about them as distributed along a left to right axis. Though as I mentioned it's not a perfect approximation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storting

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#844

Post by StableAlkyne »

Bhilai wrote: post #785
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. I struggle with this. It's incredibly challenging to find reliable, unbiased news sources these days, especially with the perceived slant of many major outlets. It's discouraging when even subscriptions to reputable publications like the NYT and WSJ leave you feeling like yo…

> So what are people reading?

I've been liking AllSides. They aggregate news from all parts of the spectrum, so you get stuff ranging from Jacobin / Daily Beast all the way to Fox News / Breitbart (I'm not commenting on the truthfulness of or recommending any of these sources, just using them as an example of how wide ranging the sources being pulled from are)

For each headline, they pick a left, center, and right source and show that headline. They also show various headlines either side misses along with which side of the media is covering it. And other stuff, but mostly I just care about the news.

It helps with avoiding echochambers. One side's doomerism usually ends up being what another side's cheering. Given the current political climate that's been especially helpful to my stress levels.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#845

Post by rightbyte »

intended wrote: post #456
urda wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals. It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.

Did people forget the_donald? What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support? If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.

'thedonald' was not violent are even hateful by Reddit standards. Banning it was a big mistake and gave fringe supporters headroom.

Reddit has in general got way worse since 2016. The amount of bloodthirst and hate is very unsettling.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#846

Post by Clubber »

snapcaster wrote: post #179

I think "being informed" is very overrated in general. Often it means being informed about palace intrigue and intelligence service/corporate narratives. I would say that in general media consumption or "staying informed" should be seen as a vice not a virtue

Most people think being informed is reading the NYT or the WP. That's being half informed. That's like listening to the prosecutor and ignoring the defense. You have to read both sides of the stories and guess where in between the actual facts lie (no pun intended).

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#847

Post by wat10000 »

medellin wrote: post #486
intended wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did people forget the_donald? What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support? If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.

Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously. They believe people hate Americans and everyone…

I was in Europe for a while starting right after 9/11 and there was a lot of shame and no lack of pointed questions. The locals didn’t hate us, but there was a decent amount of “what the hell is wrong with you guys?” It was not uncommon for American travelers to put Canadian flag pins on their backpacks to try to deflect attention or curry favor.

It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#848

Post by adolph »

From TFA: There’s actually a recent study by William Brady, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He and his colleagues found that outrage actually helps misinformation spread more widely, especially online on social media.

No specific study was linked from the transcript. Brady's works indexed by Google Scholar there is "Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online" by KL McLoughlin, WJ Brady, A Goolsbee, B Kaiser, K Klonick, MJ Crockett, published in Science 386 (6725), 991-996. [1] Two of moral outrage's properties are interestingly counter to one another. Expressions of outrage are often orthogonal to truth/falsity and expressing outrage imbues trustworthiness.

[O]utrage expressions can serve communicative goals that do not depend on information accuracy, such as signaling loyalty to a political group or broadcasting a moral stance. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions such as fact-checking or accuracy prompts that assume users want to share accurate information.

[I]ndividuals who express outrage are seen as more trustworthy. This suggests that news sources might gain a credibility advantage by posting outrageous content.

0. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ysiWkJMAAAAJ...

1. https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.adl2829

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#850

Post by user3939382 »

croissants wrote: post #721
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…

> 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.

Mostly by observing the sacrifices they make for their coverage, especially over several years. There’s always an element of trust, that’s life. I’d direct anyone to Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi for example.
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