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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

10 years ago, I was a religious Techcrunch reader. I read every article. Eventually, I noticed something peculiar: I'd have an idea for a startup, and six months or so later (about the time it would've taken me to do it) someone would come out with that idea! It happened enough times that it pushed me to stop reading the same tech news as everyone else, because I didn't want to succumb to group think.

I've since extended that policy to most of my news...especially social platforms like Facebook and Twitter long before fake news became a thing. The irony is that I've been oft criticized by friends and family for being ill-informed by not reading CNN.

I do wonder how much speculation, opinion and general exposure to ways of thinking shape our thoughts in subtle ways. I'm generally afraid of a future where this phenomenon becomes better understood and weaponized.

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I was once hounded by reporters and criticized for not being up-to-date on the news. At the time, I lived down a small, back-alley road. There were only a couple houses along it. Apparently, several weeks prior, there was a major hit-and-run collision a mile down the main road where a man in a truck struck a motorcycle. The rider and passenger of the motorcycle were father and son. Neither survived. It was a sad story.

I didn't know about this event until news reporters came flocking down our small gravel street. For several days they were asking for interviews of anyone who lived down the road. Every single one of them was perplexed by my not knowing anything about the story, which was apparently "all over the news". Furthermore, they couldn't understand why I wouldn't give a statement after finding out the truck driver was one of my neighbors. A man I had never met before, or even seen. I informed them I had never met him, wasn't aware of the situation so I couldn't speak to it, and would go on assuming any other neighbor of mine is innocent and minding their own business. They could go about thinking every one of their neighbors is responsible for every recent murder and see how it goes for them.

I know that kind of constant reporting has been commonplace for a long time, but I wish there was a better way to show others that you don't need to read every news article or event to understand what is happening around you. I don't need fear to drive my instinct of what can kill me. I'm a rider as well and chose to join the community ride for the father and son. That seemed like a much better way to show support with other people that lived around me.

Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment.

I watched an hour of CNN's every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.

A few years ago, I discovered this and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

That's the news cycle for you, it's just another time sink to monetize your nonworking hours. There are maybe only a handful of truly significant stories a year, the rest is niche interest stories and stuff that's not very relevant or practical at all in your personal life. Therefore, to keep the lights on, CNN has to keep you on the edge of your seat. They know very well no one will remember yesterdays gaffe.

Personally, I skim the nyt newsletter over cereal and basically only thoroughly read local news articles from the paper of record here and some decent local magazines. Reading local stories gets you out of the little cultural bubble you've formed around your lifestyle. I've learned my city is an onion, a thousand cities at once. National news, on the other hand, is designed to polarize and monetize.

All of us have a baked in Negativity bias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

And in the current environment of negative info overload, things are going to feel much worse than they really are.

We don't live in a static world. Things are always changing and the environment of negative info overload will change too. Even though most people can't imagine how that is going to happen, it will happen. Why? Because the number of people sick of this unnatural state of opinion overload is increasing everyday.

< I didn't want to succumb to group think. >

It's unavoidable, but compartmentalization of Information and focus can help. You don't always have to mix fragments of known things (Do you think you know everything or almost anything you know?) with possibly new ways of providing products functionality or a completely new product consciously, but many times you are putting an "additional" cognitive effort when you try to predict if someone else would do it the same way you do it, or will go through the same thought process, and get the same results. Of course, that "additional" can overload you.

< I do wonder how much speculation, opinion and general exposure to ways of thinking shape our thoughts in subtle ways. I'm generally afraid of a future where this phenomenon becomes better understood and weaponized. >

Those phenomenons are being exploited from centuries ago but they have different causes and taxonomies according to the discipline you look at them.

It's put me in the habit of being intensely suspicious of anything that makes me feel too good about myself or too outraged towards someone else.

> I'm generally afraid of a future where this phenomenon becomes better understood and weaponized.

This phenomena was weaponized over a century ago. The Spanish-American war was largely instigated by propaganda so that William Randolph Hearst could sell more papers ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war"). Mass communications and mass advertising was critical to developing the mass markets of the early 20th century. Propaganda played a huge part in both World Wars, and was critical to Hitler's rise to head of the Nazi Germany. Orwell's 1984 wasn't speculation about a hypothetical future 35 years off; it was a thinly-veiled allegory of his actual experience writing cultural broadcasts for the BBC during WW2.

The history of modernity is literally the history of getting large bodies of people to think alike, to buy into particular models of reality, and to subsume their individual, family, or tribal interests under broader national interests. That's how we distinguish the "modern" world from "pre-modern" civilizations that we have largely enslaved or exterminated.

On a broader level propaganda and weaponized information dates back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, but the invention of movable type, radio, and TV dramatically accelerated it. Arguably the Internet is reversing that trend by giving a large plurality of voices an audience, but those of us who grew up in the modern era have brains so conditioned to a monopoly of worldviews that we have trouble making sense of it all.

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