“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.”
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.
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...
Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.
Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally.
So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
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.
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.
I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
If you are right about Russia losing the war of attrition (I am not certain, though I certainly hope so), this will result in some internal unrest. The Muslim part of the Caucasus may well secede, places like Dagestan have negligible ethnic Russian population anyway. The next leader will have a lot of work on his hands just to keep the federation intact and Russian politics at least a bit independent on China.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.
There is no amount of nuclear capability that can stop a party you are major threat to from attacking you. See Hamas attacking Israel. Of course Iran will still enrich uranium because they are an excellent negotition leverage.
It also might not. Nuclear powers have lost a lot of "smaller wars" since 1945. Given that most wars are of the smaller variety, and that the threshold of nuke use is very high, it makes sense to think of the economy of the entire arsenal. Especially if your national economy is on the weaker side.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
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.
> ? 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"?
> 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.
The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.
The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.
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.
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?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
>MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.
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.
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?
The slight problem here is that the war was started by Netenyahu, whom US voters are unable to remove. But yes, I doubt Harris would have gone for the decapitation strike that destabilized everything.
Netenyahu has been pushing the "Iran is building a nuke; they're literally a week away" line for decades.
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
See what I mean? America keeps starting wars in the middle east. Go back further in time and it was Obama, then Bush, then a little bit of Clinton, then the other Bush. It doesn't matter who or what party they're in, they mostly end up doing it anyway. No reason to think Harris would be anything different, especially considering her statements of promising military support to Israel.
It sounds like you are trying to both-sides away the fact that Trump (or "Trump 2", if you insist) is an outlier here. US support for Israel has been pretty invariant over the years but nobody went along with Bibi's wet dream until now.
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
"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.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
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.
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.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine really. That’s because many Jewish people in the US have had it hammered into their heads, usually through political messaging delivered adjacent to religious practice, that this type of activity is essential to the survival of Israel and of themselves.
It’s the same playbook successfully used with evangelical Christian groups and now even some Catholics. Latinos literally vote for people whose stated aim is to round them up. The technique is fear endorsed by a trusted leader or in a sacred place.
If the political person says the thing they are supposed to say, they’re safe. Otherwise, they want to destroy your way of life.
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...
> *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.
That is a conclusion that is arrived over course over long time and many experiences/thought. It is not a news or blog article I read once and made me conclude it.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
"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."
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.
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
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.
Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
> 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.
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.
There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
> 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?
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.
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.
Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.
Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
Only if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.
There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.
For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...
Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.
I'd say that the vast majority of people who live in a city both work, and socialise almost exclusively there.
Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
Depends on which powers for each specific choice.
Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
No, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.
Everyone's contribution is insignificant, and yet it all adds up.
This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.
No, it’s like saying how many goals you personally score is insignificant for how many goals are scored in total in football matches worldwide.
It’s like Down’s paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting). Being a paradox doesn’t make it untrue.
Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment.
Bicycles and public transportation.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
I hope you understand that you are in a very privileged position to be able to afford that lifestyle. Not everyone can do that.
Are you claiming owning a cargo bike is a bigger privilege than owning a car? Problem with cargo bikes are, if you are living in a flat where you cannot "park" them, you mean this?
The lifestyle I refer to is living in a bike friendly city, being able to afford a multi-thousand euro cargo bike and having secure storage for it. OP also appears to live in a house with a yard on top of that. That lifestyle is reserved for very high earners.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
"Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world."
I never debated that.
"And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city."
But this is not correct. You can get a 4 room apartment in Leipzig for 750 € a month (but of course you won't be the only one applying).
Also you may want to email dang about your rate limitation. Your recent comments seem fine enough to me to fix that.
"Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve."
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally. So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
Hm. Maybe visit a city like Leipzig or Berlin? Lot's of cargo bikes - some do belong to high earners, but most do not. Finding a suitable place to rent with secure storage is hard, but most old houses for example do have a big enough entrance house floor, where the bike can stand and this is what people do. Otherwise bike sheds in front of the house are becoming standard as well.
What??
On what planet is getting your groceries on a bike "more privileged" than driving?
This is literally oil industry propaganda.
You don’t even need bicycles if you design a city correctly.
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
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.
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.
I Netanyahu retires, Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse. But he's got no reason to retire, given how he's polling now.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
> Eisenkot or Bennett take up the mantle, which is arguably worse.
As far as I'm aware there is no reason to believe so
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art...
I meant the worse part
I think the question was "in what sense are Eisenkot and Bennett worse"?
I remember Bennett's shuttle diplomacy between Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and he struck me like a person who values peace more than Netanyahu does.
If you are right about Russia losing the war of attrition (I am not certain, though I certainly hope so), this will result in some internal unrest. The Muslim part of the Caucasus may well secede, places like Dagestan have negligible ethnic Russian population anyway. The next leader will have a lot of work on his hands just to keep the federation intact and Russian politics at least a bit independent on China.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
The drones and missiles helped them to not lose the war, but they were significantly damaged by the initial strikes. A nuclear capability might have been sufficient deterrent to prevent those.
There is no amount of nuclear capability that can stop a party you are major threat to from attacking you. See Hamas attacking Israel. Of course Iran will still enrich uranium because they are an excellent negotition leverage.
It also might not. Nuclear powers have lost a lot of "smaller wars" since 1945. Given that most wars are of the smaller variety, and that the threshold of nuke use is very high, it makes sense to think of the economy of the entire arsenal. Especially if your national economy is on the weaker side.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
> "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely"
Such an option was offered to him and was refused.
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.
Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
> ? 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.
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"?
> 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.
The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.
The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.
In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
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.
Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.
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?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
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.
It wasn’t predictable that he would start a war.
He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.
From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
I agree with this. What was certain and predictable was that Harris was a war candidate (the Democrats presided over the first year of genocide and were intending to continue).
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
>MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?
It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.
During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
Since January 6th it was clear that he would be willing to secure his power in any way. The most obvious way in america is to start a war.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
If you paid attention to his actions while in office, rather than a selection of his words while on the campaign trail, it was pretty clear he wasn't in the least bit interested in being a "peace president;" he just wanted the Nobel Peace Price because Obama got one.
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.
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?
Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.
The slight problem here is that the war was started by Netenyahu, whom US voters are unable to remove. But yes, I doubt Harris would have gone for the decapitation strike that destabilized everything.
Netenyahu has been pushing the "Iran is building a nuke; they're literally a week away" line for decades.
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
Is Netanyahu now an official representative of the american government?
War was started by Trump, Hegseth and Netenyahu. Hegseth specifically wants wars for emotional reasons - it makes him feel good.
America has a lot of Iran hawks, especially in goverment/military circles. They got their way.
See what I mean? America keeps starting wars in the middle east. Go back further in time and it was Obama, then Bush, then a little bit of Clinton, then the other Bush. It doesn't matter who or what party they're in, they mostly end up doing it anyway. No reason to think Harris would be anything different, especially considering her statements of promising military support to Israel.
It sounds like you are trying to both-sides away the fact that Trump (or "Trump 2", if you insist) is an outlier here. US support for Israel has been pretty invariant over the years but nobody went along with Bibi's wet dream until now.
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
"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.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.
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.
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.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.
It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine really. That’s because many Jewish people in the US have had it hammered into their heads, usually through political messaging delivered adjacent to religious practice, that this type of activity is essential to the survival of Israel and of themselves.
It’s the same playbook successfully used with evangelical Christian groups and now even some Catholics. Latinos literally vote for people whose stated aim is to round them up. The technique is fear endorsed by a trusted leader or in a sacred place.
If the political person says the thing they are supposed to say, they’re safe. Otherwise, they want to destroy your way of life.
>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...
If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?
What conclusion? I am talking about not having any conclusions at all.
> *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.
That is a conclusion that is arrived over course over long time and many experiences/thought. It is not a news or blog article I read once and made me conclude it.
I think he means the conclusion you were talking about when you said "I have come to the conclusion..."
> how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up
I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.
So it can't be fascism or be close it it until we have fully operational death camps?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It will impact how people vote this November though
but isn't expensive gas a local issue so local news will cover it regardless. That doesn't mean Americans will care about Hormouz in even an year imo. People only care when it affects their wallets.
Interestingly, I read more foreign news than local news.
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.
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.
Beter wording: your brain is made for detecting dangers and attention grabbers are taking advantage of that
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.
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.
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.
Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
since they are privately organized, you need to know the organizers or somebody who knows them. Be expert in the topic in question.
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.
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.
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.
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
But if it's a subject that interests you, you should participate.
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.
You can just ignore it. Nothing changes as a result of being "informed."
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.
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.
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
For US-centric news, I really like the text only https://text.npr.org/1001
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
The same as it was on tv when I grew up.
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.
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.
There was a sign I saw locally a couple years ago that said it best.
"Turn off the news, love your neighbors"
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:
https://leash.ax
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472475
Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
> 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...
mp4tomp3.lol
"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)
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.
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.
I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.
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?
"Not well adapted to", perhaps.
Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.