HN

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  spking
  Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman
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  makeitdouble
  > 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 really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
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  zeroonetwothree
  I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
• stcg
  Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that
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  roenxi
  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 after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
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  tetrisgm
  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind.Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging.Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.
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  rf15
  I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
• elif
  Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists.I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.
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  cryptoegorophy
  Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
• cullumsmith
  You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."
• rolph
  gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.a cheap way of assessing relevance score.
• mult1scr33n
  One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
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  failrate
  One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white. Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me. Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
• anon
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• roveo
  HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally.When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning:> The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry.The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.
• Ccecil
  There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best."Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
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  MisterKent
  Things are worse than ever. And these types of opinions are just Ostrich strategies. This worked fine 20 years ago, and would be a wildly inappropriate and irresponsible way to live today.Yes, a lot of the news is sensationalized and blown out of proportion.But also YES, things are absolutely trending in the wrong direction and you should both be aware of that and be loudly screaming about it. Going to protests, boycotting companies run by these CEOs leading us into oligarchy, and letting people know your stance.The idea that "I can't do anything about it, so I'll just bury my head in the sand" is the rhetoric that the people benefitting from rigging the system want you to have. It makes it easier for them to screw you over.No, your brain was neven designed for this much bad news. It also wasn't designed for the Internet, tv, smartphones, processed food, soda, painting, sleeping in a bed, to infinity. It's a garbage argument that falls apart at first glance.Edit to add: I highly recommend meditation and days off from technology. But the answer is not what many people in this thread are proposing. Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy is winning.
• esjeon
  > Looking away is not the fix …> The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. …> Containing news consumption to defined windows of time …> Choosing depth over volumeGolden.TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
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  vivid242
  As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:https://leash.ax
• alecco
  Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
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  anon
  undefined
• anon
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• amelius
  Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
• shevy-java
  > Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the worldThis insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
• sanbaideng
  mp4tomp3.lol
• reinitctxoffset
  "There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
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  brador
  That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution.Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates.My focus is insane when adrenaline hits.I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.
• kindkang2024
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• Rekindle8090
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• marsven_422
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  fragmede
  I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.