The brain was not designed for this much bad news

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260614012006.htm

by colinprince • 1 month ago

457 346 1 month ago

rolph• 1 month ago

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.

spking• 1 month ago

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

landdate3• 1 month ago

Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).

However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.

stouset• 1 month ago

Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.

cucumber3732842• 1 month ago

If you do that the system works around you.

Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.

metabagel• 1 month ago

This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...

world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen

the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive

fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism

appplication• 1 month ago

I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.

Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.

qsera5• 1 month ago

We should be aware of current events

I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.

For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?

So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.

There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...

chadcmulligan2• 1 month ago

"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.

shreddude• 1 month ago

Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.

applfanboysbgon2• 1 month ago

This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?

Paracompact• 1 month ago

My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 month ago

People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?

foxglacier5• 1 month ago

You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?

devsda• 1 month ago

People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things

People don't do that.

Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.

Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.

You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.

People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.

joshrw• 1 month ago

It wasn’t predictable that he would start a war.

He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.

cryo324• 1 month ago

It’s not really.

The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.

You vote for who you were told to vote for.

ReptileMan• 1 month ago

On the other hand - you may not choose a whether a president will start a war in the middle east, but Trump's cost was abnormally low compared to his predecessors in one very important area - soldier's coffins coming home. His adventurism may have had substantial financial costs, but is better than Bush or Obama on deaths while in combat.

Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.

uberex3• 1 month ago

Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.

Gibbon13• 1 month ago

Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.

weregiraffe• 1 month ago

No, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.

Npovview• 1 month ago

You plan to do nothing about them.

Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.

pjc503• 1 month ago

inflation, crime and unemployment?

Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.

They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?

On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?

sho• 1 month ago

the “Peekaboo World”

What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.

I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.

momocowcow• 1 month ago

You can read what his son has written on the subject

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...

csallen• 1 month ago

… ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis

To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.

paganel• 1 month ago

? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme

A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.

danaris2• 1 month ago

But how do you start a proletarian revolution?

It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.

stratocumulus02• 1 month ago

Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:

- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.

- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.

- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.

Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.

consp2• 1 month ago

Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.

datsci_est_20152• 1 month ago

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 probably hasn’t even reached its zenith yet.

kstenerud3• 1 month ago

It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide.

Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.

And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).

Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).

So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.

inglor_cz4• 1 month ago

Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s.

But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.

At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.

On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.

Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.

inigyou28• 1 month ago

Trump could literally just stop sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Netanyahu and the war would end - probably not well for Netanyahu. He could use that fact as leverage. He isn't.

8note4• 1 month ago

they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA

isnt that leaving out the current only nuclear power in the region?

rvba• 1 month ago

Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran

Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.

mlrtime• 1 month ago

I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.

bigstrat20032• 1 month ago

If you get downvoted it'll be for starting a partisan fight for no reason. That shit is annoying and drags down the discussion.

cineticdaffodil2• 1 month ago

I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.

elif2• 1 month ago

There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.

JKCalhoun4• 1 month ago

I don't disagree.

Mental health is important as well.

I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)

unparagoned5• 1 month ago

For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference.

Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.

AlienRobot• 1 month ago

I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems.

Media only gives you super-hearing.

jancsika• 1 month ago

One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...

Yoric• 29 days ago

I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others.

So, not entirely nothing.

zeroonetwothree• 1 month ago

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

standeven• 1 month ago

The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented it.

So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it.

That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.

altmanaltman4• 1 month ago

I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.

timcobb2• 1 month ago

You can vote against this trash and still not consume 99% of the "news" content people pretend is information. You don't need to know "the latest" about this second "administration". Consuming "news" is not a civic duty, it just is bad for you and a waste of your time. Don't be fooled.

joebates• 1 month ago

I really don't think anyone voting against Trump was doing so with the Straight of Hormuz on mind.

pfannkuchen• 1 month ago

I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.

eszed• 1 month ago

What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's nowhere to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.

chistev• 1 month ago

Interestingly, I read more foreign news than local news.

anal_reactor• 1 month ago

I used to read local news until they made an article "Top Ten dangerous places in our city" where they just listed a bunch of places that someone considered scary based on vibes.

timcobb2• 1 month ago

I live in Baltimore county and most of our local news is homicides and stuff like that.

I know some people who moved to Delaware beaches and they told me that there the local news is just folks talking about government administration stuff, which was pretty mind-blowing to me. I would like to check this out.

rubslopes• 1 month ago

Same here, but I live in a developing country. I usually switch to international news (or tech news, or no news at all) because local news is mostly about murders and other terrible things. I have family in Portugal, and when I visited, I remember the local news being mostly about pastries and folklore events. I watched TV every day while I was there.

PaulKeeble• 1 month ago

I wish my local news wasn't mostly filled with people going missing and fires but at least balanced it with "this new restaurant just opened". If anything my local news is more fear driven than the national news.

inigyou28• 1 month ago

You're here on Hacker News too though.

If there's a way to find happiness without social media, unfortunately, it won't be posted on social media.

firstplacelast• 1 month ago

I was talking to my aunt, who has never been much for technology, during covid. Never really had a tv in her home, etc. She's late 70's maybe early 80's now. Anyway, I was asking her how she was doing with all the chaos and she was just like "umm well I just live my life. I go out and volunteer and go camping, not much has changed...". She was just very unbothered by all of it (and she was a nurse for decades, so not in a "masks are criminal, social distancing doesn't work" way).

I more and more identify with that ethos. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be miserable from the bombastic 24/7 news cycle being shoved in my face when I can't do much about any of it.

dartharva3• 30 days ago

It's a shame that local newspapers are dying, they are exactly the thing our generation needs right now.

tetrisgm2• 1 month ago

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.

uberex3• 1 month ago

Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?

tetrisgm2• 1 month ago

since they are privately organized, you need to know the organizers or somebody who knows them. Be expert in the topic in question.

isodude3• 1 month ago

On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.

As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.

isodude3• 29 days ago

I have noticed that the same amount of people down voted as up voted the comment. I wonder how they reasoned.

roenxi• 1 month ago

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.

bluebarbet3• 1 month ago

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.

anigbrowl• 1 month ago

That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission...

There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.

Andrex• 1 month ago

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!

EA-3167• 1 month ago

An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.

I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.

greenavocado• 1 month ago

And don't forget that those fictional sources are typically commissioned by oligarchs with their own vested interest in herding the voting masses

Isamu2• 1 month ago

An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it.

A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.

cheesecakegood• 1 month ago

I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.

Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.

bdelmas2• 1 month ago

It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.

bilbo0s• 1 month ago

Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control.

For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?

At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.

zbentley• 1 month ago

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

I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in <thing> events in the future”.

Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.

tadfisher• 1 month ago

...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.

miki123211• 1 month ago

So well put!

Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).

consensus12• 1 month ago

And before the question of trade offs there is the question "does the Fish Protection Act actually protect fish at all?" In a very large number of cases it does not.

ajsnigrutin• 1 month ago

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 a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.

esyir• 1 month ago

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.

dartharva3• 30 days ago

This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.

Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.

failrate• 1 month ago

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

bigmadshoe2• 1 month ago

For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 month ago

I think I like charts too much for text only, but this really does capture a common problem I have. A lot of articles seem to come with images that are almost designed to get the reader worked up. I think, at least in most cases, as a side effect, of selecting for reach and clickthrough rate? But that doesn't really help me and I'm not sure how to eliminate the "look how much of a jerk this guy is!" photos without also losing the charts.

isodude3• 1 month ago

https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100

The same as it was on tv when I grew up.

dartharva3• 30 days ago

It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.

fragmede• 1 month ago

I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.

ggm• 1 month ago

A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed.

I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?

Terr_• 1 month ago

"Not well adapted to", perhaps.

wseqyrku• 1 month ago

Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.

reinitctxoffset• 1 month ago

"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)

cryptoegorophy• 1 month ago

Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.

Pooge• 1 month ago

But if it's a subject that interests you, you should participate.

eimrine• 1 month ago

This message is going to be read with a lot more of strangers than one. It is intentional.

brador• 1 month ago

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.

sph2• 1 month ago

This is the type of comment that I expect to read on ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where impressible young males are taught how to live life in very mechanical terms by sociopaths.

There are better ways to stimulate your adrenaline and stress response than picking fights with strangers.

vivid242• 1 month ago

As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:

https://leash.ax

hemmert• 1 month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475

esjeon• 1 month ago

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 volume

Golden.

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.

rf15• 1 month ago

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.

sph2• 1 month ago

I have no way to prove this, and likely you don’t either, but it’s likely it is affecting you but you are simply not aware of it.

functionmouse• 1 month ago

probably making him "naturally anxious" lol

alecco• 1 month ago

Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.

makeitdouble3• 1 month ago

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?

gherkinnn• 1 month ago

We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.

Indeed. These hunter-gatherer stories explain anything and predict nothing. Discard at will.

altmanaltman4• 1 month ago

No, human knowledge has definitely grown over time and the modern human in the modern society has access to a lot more information. But in terms of evolution, our brains are still pretty much what they used to be back then. That timeline isn't long enough to actually evolve our brain and how it processes things.

A lot of biases are present in our mind precisely due to how biology evolved the systems over millions of years. Humans have been around for only 300k-ish years.

However, you do need to study and research about how the brain works if you want to make these point and a lot of writers just misrepresent/misunderstand things because they don't do their research enough.

I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.

makeitdouble3• 1 month ago

It's not a perfect analogy, but I understand the evolution argument as our "hardware" taking time to drastically change, and agree with it. From there, our "software" can IMHO evolve a lot faster, and we're probably able to rewrite how we use the hardware to a very low level. What esports player do in their heads on daily basis never stops impressing me.

I think someone like Daniel Kahneman can be a good read if you are interested.

Thanks ! It's a bit sad D.Kahneman was already of pretty old age when the replication crisis hit the field. I saw a few of his talks from a few years later but don't remember him addressing any of the underlying research being put into doubt.

xtiansimon• 1 month ago

“We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons.”

Sparks my imagination. Like sibling relations when you’re old. You must go back further and further to a time of innocence and ignorance to find agreement and common ground.

bodash• 1 month ago

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 limitations.

makeitdouble3• 1 month ago

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.

padjo• 1 month ago

Indeed, they have all the intellectual rigour of Kipling's Just So Stories, and should be treated with as much seriousness.

dang2• 1 month ago

Negativity bias is a well-attested phenomenon, no? and one can derive the rest of the argument from that.

mult1scr33n• 1 month ago

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.

shevy-java• 1 month ago

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 world

This 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...

amelius• 1 month ago

Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.

Ccecil• 1 month ago

There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best.

"Turn off the news, love your neighbors"

stcg• 1 month ago

Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that

NotGMan• 29 days ago

This is probably it. It's addictive due to hardwiring in the brain, just like sugar.

MisterKent2• 1 month ago

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.

bluebarbet3• 1 month ago

these CEOs leading us into
the people benefitting
them

What an awful lot of "them". This populist rhetoric is way too easy, not to mention dangerous. The problems are real and as human beings we are all implicated in them. Not just the faceless "them" but also you, me, us.

smugglerFlynn• 1 month ago

Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article.

It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality.

The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.

MisterKent2• 1 month ago

Sorry. This is addressed at the 99.9%. the them is the 0.1% of people that are responsible for the 99% of the bad news the article mentioned.

Didn't think that was needed to be pointed out.

roveo• 1 month ago

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.

cullumsmith• 1 month ago

You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."

inigyou28• 1 month ago

The current high gas prices are the direct results of people not being informed two years ago.

user68858788• 1 month ago

“People” being informed is quite different from an individual being informed. Presumably you were informed back then, yet here we are still.

kjkjadksj3• 1 month ago

War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.

4lx87• 1 month ago

Are they? I think it could be the opposite, ironically. Trump is in many ways the result of news media directed at voters, which was mostly misinformation and propaganda.

elif2• 1 month ago

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.

sanbaideng• 1 month ago

mp4tomp3.lol

mmarian• 1 month ago

I wonder if this applies to seeing successful people as well.

RickJWagner• 1 month ago

All this at a time when world poverty is in continual decline, medical science reaches continual new heights, crime is in multi-year decline, etc.

It is often said that the average person today has better food, shelter, health services, etc. today than a king had just a short while ago.

Bad news sells, though. Don’t buy it.

nobodywillobsrv• 1 month ago

This makes me feel like an alien.

I feel perfectly happy sorting by worst taking the top K and then understanding what can be mitigated etc

Not doing this is immoral IMO.

But I hear and understand certain kinds of people who say they can't deal with hearing about anything remotely unpleasant.

But then these same kinds of people seem to enjoy the kinds of horror or thriller movies I detest.

I feel alone and like an alien.

dang2• 1 month ago

A past thread about one of the papers linked to in the OP:

Negativity drives online news consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197587 - March 2023 (355 comments)

willmadden• 1 month ago

Avoiding the news and consuming it on your own terms infrequently is a fantastic way to solve this problem. Step 1: cut your cable and use your television as a computer monitor only. Source: myself.

chopete3• 1 month ago

It is natural that early brain evolved to handle "negativity bias" from local dangers, not 24/7 exposure to worldwide bad news.

But the author missed some key nuances.

- Whether a news is good or bad depends on the person.

- The same news is seen as good by one person but as bad news by another or not news by some. Good and bad is too general categorization.

- People seek out news naturally to expand the awareness. The author appear to make the point people are forced to know.

mieubrisse• 1 month ago

Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.

Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.

pnt12• 1 month ago

This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.

stndef• 1 month ago

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.

Jgoauh• 1 month ago

I am at a point where i block people talking about specific issues i already know about. I already know it's bad, either tell me how i can help or leave me out of it.

tim-tday• 1 month ago

The brain was not designed at all.

yamillove2• 1 month ago

News is a business. The mainstream media has made tons of money fabricating conflict or drama (see increase in use of “white supremacy” or “racism” in news). This has created mental angst in Democrats.

Thankfully the recent soccer World Cup is showing the world that America is the greatest country on earth. At least the foreigners will learn the truth (the democrats? That’s another story of perpetual self depression).

NunoSempere• 30 days ago

If you want all your bad news once a week, you might be interested in: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/, which my team writes.

damnesian• 28 days ago

It's simple. The powers that be rely on the constant stream of bad news to convince the terrified population to give away what control they have. It's a spectrum- dictatorships use it, sure, but even democracies work with media to control the message, so people even continue feel the basic need to be governed. The whole thing is a psyop or sorts.

The brain was not designed for this much bad news

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