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Comment by Dangeranger | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate this. Watching the news cycle feels like being in an abusive relationship. You watch and wait for the next eruption, anticipating if it will be violent or joyful. It leaves you feeling depleted and helpless.

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The problem is that it isn't really the "news". It is infotainment. I'm not talking about the fact that truth is subjective and every story has a lens.

The truth of the matter is that the story (and "updates") are all crafted specifically to be addictive, to be click bait. It isn't about sharing information or exposing the truth. All that matters is ad revenue. I do get it that we need to pay journalists. It has become clear we need a new system. I guess NPR kinda has a solution via patronage. If only we could now get more different viewpoints this way. God knows we have enough multi-billionares to fund it.

News is not news. It is entertainment. Pick your flavor and let them tell you how to feel.

It is designed to be addictive. Either by accident or deliberate is up for debate. I have my opinion on it but it is just that. They use your own feelings to manipulate you into watching/clicking for more. Facts matter little, feelings do in this segment of our world. Mr. Bernays should be proud of the monster he set loose upon us. Even the vaunted NPR does this. I noticed it years ago after a drive across the country and realizing they try to make it look like they were investigating things and not just reading something of one of the 4 or 5 news wires.

> Even the vaunted NPR does this.

I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is.

The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a piece on immigration detention centers a few weeks back (no qualms there). The person they chose to interview was a transgender Guatamalen.

It's basically the most on-brand thing the reporter could have done. Talking about immigration? Better throw in some LGBT issues as well.

It's too much I guess to expect a news organization to just report on the news.

When I get feeling really irritated about it, I calm myself down by rationalizing that I like the music they play in the evenings.

Without having listened to that piece, it occurs to me that one reason for specifically including the perspective of a transgender individual in the radio segment may have been that under the current administration there have been _major_ changes to our country's policies around asylum. "Fear of persecution for sexual orientation or transgender status" is one of the one of the more common reasons that people seek asylum in the US, after all. Just a thought...

I found the article [1]. Looks like they crossed Coronavirus off the bingo card too.

Like I said, it's perfectly on-brand for them.

My wife and I have a running joke (which I think I've seen pop up elsewhere too) about how Terry Gross picks her interview guests based on how many items the guest ticks on the "diversity checklist"

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a...

You are clearly right on the topic of intentionally addictive click bait.

> that long-sought serenity

But i don't think changing your input is related to gaining that long-sought serenity - in a sense of being immune to those inputs if required.

I my opinion it boils down to being human and being to some degree a puppet of your brain chemistry, meaning we can search for said serenity but are propably doomed to never find it.

On a non-subjective basis, there are many bad things going on in the world, with implications for both ourselves and our families.

A genuine question: is it access to news or content of the news that messes with our sense of wellbeing? Does “the media” upset me, or knowledge, for example that climate models appear to be more conservative than reality, upset me?

In not reading the news, are we simply happy in the way ostriches are happy when they place their heads in the sand?

For me personally, it's the volume. If you concentrate on your local area, particularly if you live somewhere smaller than a city, there are crimes and tragedies, but even if some of them are horrible they're relatively few and far between, and can be processed mentally. If you take the entire world of 7+ billion people you could spend your entire waking hours reading about brutality, tragedy and horror from around the world and not run out. Many of us - particuiarly new addicts - have psychologies that are tuned to stories which provoke emotion, so we're drawn to those them. Until relatively recently, you wouldn't be able to get many of those stories outside of occsaional TV programmes and "World's Grisliest Murders" books. But now there's a firehose of horror that you can tap into and it's both fascinating and debilitating. I've found the only way is to do what Charles Simic's dad did, and not read it. I hope that there's some kind of a resurgence in online local journalism that's not driven by advertising, because that feels like the only thing I should read on a day-to-day basis, unless there's something of national importance going on (which, unfortunately, in these days does actually seem to be every day).

I live thousands of miles away from New York city. A few months ago I was reading about someone getting into an argument in central park. Why am I being show that? It was to provoke an emotional response out of me. They are using our emotions to manipulate us.

Or maybe the advent of easy to use and accessible recording devices is shining a light on the prejudice and abuse that people with certain characteristics have been suffering from for decades.

Those with political power in the US could conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem with plausible deniability with a he said she said excuse, but now they have to face the problem.

I think that’s an important development in the progress of my country.

You should be having an emotional response to the huge undercurrent of racism and classism pervading society.

Why? They were being quite racist towards each other. Should I get involved somehow? Other than 'be angry' what are my choices? I literally can not change what those two do to each other. I sure did not feel sympathy towards either of the two people. I see neither party doing much to help at all. I see one party who has promised to fix that exact issue and made it much worse with poor economic choices and making people think they are getting a good deal. The people of those cities have consistently voted for that. So it is what they wanted. Now they seem shocked that they have made it worse. They literally voted for it.

are you talking about the time when a white woman tried to weaponize the police on a black man?

> climate models appear to be more conservative than reality

I've read this sentence multiple times and still not sure what it means. Would you please expound?

“Conservative” here is being used to mean “marked by moderation or caution”, rather than the set of political positions called conservatism.

The poster is saying that global climate change is probably even worse than people think. Often, the reporting around climate change focuses on the best case, the average case, or what could be achieved with an immediate strong response. But the actual paths we are on seems to track some of the worse, more pessimistic cases.

It's not clear to me how anyone can make a judgement about whether models are more conservative than reality. We have no ability to independently measure climate change within our tiny data point of existence. Even a decade of observing it being hotter than it was in your younger years is not any sort of indicator of climate change.

Unless you're reading the entirety of academic research yourself and able to critically judge the validity of that research (by being a climate scientist yourself) it seems like you're always depending on someone else's biased interpretation.

To clarify: not disputing climate change. Only the ability for someone to make judgement calls on whether the reporting is accurate.

I wouldn't blame the reporting... the scientists are also very conservative, because they're afraid of being labeled doom-sayers by deniers.

If they are worried about being labeled doom-sayers by deniers then they aren't very good scientists.

Or they’re worried about losing their source of income with which they feed and house themselves and their families. Because the leaders of the US have explicitly threatened them.

Of course, and I apologize that it was not more clearly stated. (1) climate models project changes in climate, (2) a body of evidence is emerging that climate volatility is greater in reality than predicted by those models, eg we are on track to hit 1.5 degrees of warming in 5 years time instead of 50, (3) therefore the models were too cautious or conservative in their projection of the rate of change.

Thank you. After reading a few explanations, I think the phrase was fine. I was just parsing it in a political context, as opposed to the original meaning of the word "conservative".

Where can you find up-to-date temperature readings (as up-to-date as possible)? Are there public datasets available?

There are a range of projections among climate models, and as we learn more it seems that on average the consensus models have been too optimistic.

I.e., things are even worse than we thought.

I agree with your description. The devil on my other shoulder tries to argue with me about being knowledgeable about the world so that I can do something about it. Support my causes by protesting, donating etc Instead I get into snark warfare on twitter :-(

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