Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Some of the arguments here remind me of the puritanical strains of religions. For eg: I am against Wahhabi Islam.

They're just like other Muslims but they take percepts that are valid in Islam and run with them to the ridiculous extreme.

Same goes for cutting down on Social media or regulating your consumption of news. There is nothing to be gained by turning into a puritan. It makes you feel good about yourself for a while but you're just cutting yourself off from vast dimensions of human experience.

Its possible to read HN once a day just to keep up instead of refreshing it every few hours.

Its possible to stop visiting twitter every hour and perhaps use it a few times a week.

Its possible to restrict your reading to good long form articles in NYT or WaPo or The Economist.

If we started completely cutting out anything and everything that had a remotely negative influence the logical conclusion is that we end up turning into Puritan Wahhabis who don't drink alcohol , ruthlessly suppress sexuality and generally lead colourless lives.

EDIT:

Downvoters , I'd appreciate if you gave your reasons.

I agree to a certain extent on your point about puritans. However I know people that recognized they have a tendency to overdo news or social media as soon as they get a bit of it.

That might be partly due to the very nature of social media and news these days being made to be addictive eg. clickbait titles. Making people end up in a loop, without noticing and before they know it they've wasted hours on it or worse created a habit that is hard to control.

For which the only solution seems to be to go cold turkey in that case. As it seems much harder to reduce usage than to stop it entirely. So I guess it's a matter of what stage you identify yourself in, in this news and social media detox.

That is true of sex,alcohol or food or anything else.

You could go on a "fast" , ie avoid it for a while to break a destructive dependency but avoiding entirely ?

No thanks.

For some people, those things take over their lives in a horribly destructive way. Not everyone has the disposition to have "just a bit" of these things and no more. If you've got an addiction to something that's sucking the life out of you, avoiding it entirely makes a lot of sense to me.

I think that you are getting downvoted for implying that an extreme position is the only alternative. I don't think that is necessary at all.

Its not that you have to ignore all news sources because of the possibility of bias (or easy, emotion filled "emotional truth" nuggets that fill so much of the discourse), but that you should be aware of these issues and react accordingly. Take time to reanalyze whether the narrative being pushed really makes sense. Compare it to other sources and validate the findings.

Don't just throw out everyone and only trust "NYT" or "WaPo" or "Fox News".

Not a downvoter-the opposite in face.

From a rational, logical, and chemistry point of view, one cannot have a balanced view or understanding without positives and negatives.

The only thing that makes it work is critical thinking; or at least rational thinking, though rational thinking is easy enough to manipulate by any sophist. Recognizing the forms leads to recognizing the art of sophistry as it occurs. However, emotion is even easier to manipulate and inflame, ridding one of the possibilities of rational thought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com