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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the key concern of our generation should be learning to avoid emotional overreaction to the media's business model of fear-porn and outrage-porn for clicks and shares.

Depending on where we are in the news cycle, you might have anything from a mass shooting, to treatment of economic migrants, to Covid, to climate change, to cops shooting black people, to war, to illegal immigration, to terrorism, to white supremacy, to drugs, etc labeled as THE CRITICAL ISSUE WE MUST TACKLE FOR HUMANITY NOW.

We went from mass societal panic about Covid to mass societal panic about Ukraine basically without skipping a beat and few people notice how their energy was redirected so seamlessly. How many people gave a shit about past Russian incursions into Ukraine or Georgia for land? The rest of the world basically never gave a shit about that only because the media never told them that they had to care about that. It's absurd how much influence the media has over people who are only overly concerned about whether they maintain acceptable public opinions or not.

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People give a shit now because it’s a major escalation with a nuclear power. That was not true with their invasion in Georgia or the previous incursions in Ukraine. This is a genuinely newsworthy and alarming event, I’m not sure what you expect the media to do when things like this happen.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf comes to mind. When everything is an emergency, nothing is.

Someone who always cries "sheep" and keeps asserting genuine issues are "just the flu" or "Russia won't invade" is similarly problematic.

Whataboutism. The answer to one problem isn't to say "but what about this other problem." The problem we're discussing here is the endless fear porn on the news and social media.

The post upthread asserted COVID and Ukraine were examples of "fear porn". You chimed in with "crying wolf" about emergencies. It's hardly whataboutism to point out that these are actual emergencies, and that media coverage of them should be expected.

That's the point of the "crying wolf" story: the boy cried wolf so many times, that when a wolf (emergency) actually appeared, the townsfolk response was not appropriate. That's the risk you run when every story is hyped up for maximum engagement.

Then you go about banning commercial news. Short of that don't expect anything to change. The risk the for profit news station runs by not hyping everything to the max is loss of profit.

In the meantime there are many things in this world that have the potential to become very dangerous, but because people notice and do something about that, said terrible event doesn't happen.

There are just active disinformation campaigns all over the place to do that. They want to overload our cognitive capacities to reason and find middle ground.

I think that's absolutely true when it comes to the media's treatment of past outbreaks, but that doesn't apply to the situation in Ukraine, it's the opposite. The mainstream did not take the threat of Russian aggression very seriously, even in Ukraine. Also the people pointing to the nuclear threat are urging calm, the opposite of your typical "boy who cried wolf" scenario.

Sorry but you're trying to correlate unrelated concepts here. It still holds true that humanity has never been more informed about events in almost real-time. Sure the media wants to make profit, but that doesnt change the fact that a nuclear power is blowing up civilians right next to mainland Europe right now.

Not pushing the break when you are driving directly into a wall at high velocity is not crying wolf, it is common sense.

It is only comparable to crying wolf if there is no wall or if you are going so slow that you could just calmy reduce the speed instead of alarming people — if you are actually in control of the vehicle. If you are not in a car, but on a huge ship the wall can be further out and the speed can be lower and suddenly crying wolf becomes a high paid job. Climate change is like a big oil tanker: if we want to stop in 30 years we need to hit the break now.

The nuclear crisis is different, because there is no clear defined path, but the risk of nuclear war is not zero.

What's the escalation? The European and American responses to Russia? It's the media stoking those responses

Otherwise, this is the same conflict escalation as russia's invasion of Georgia and annexation of crimea. It's not like Russia wasn't a nuclear power a few years ago

> We went from mass societal panic about Covid to mass societal panic about Ukraine basically without skipping a beat and few people notice how their energy was redirected so seamlessly.

Could it have to do with the fact that covid is the biggest pandemic in hundred years and that the UN Security Council had to call an emergency special session for the first time in 40 years because of Ukraine.

If these are not good reasons for "fear-porn", what do you think would be?

Sadly it proves the point in a perverse way: we're so used to everything being important that we/some got desensitized and no longer perceive the true scale of things. (The boy who cried wolf, etc)

That doesn’t make any sense at all.

I agree; it's utterly irrational; yet I literally hear a non small number of people around me living and thinking like that

Covid for 90% of the population was never something to have fear over. Something to be cautious about yes but the range of sheer panic among people under 40 in good health that i met was beyond silly.

I don’t trust the media anymore on anything. Every article they print that i have deep knowledge about or insider information on is so wrong as to be malicious.

Read the news to get an idea of what is going on but any opinion they present and most facts are pure bullshit.

There was a summer when we didn't know what the hell the virus was going to do. Where hospitals were overflowing so much that if a young person got in a car accident they'd sit in an ambulance. Or if they got the sniffles and hugged their mom they'd kill her.

I'm starting to distrust any person who claims to distrust the media over covid.

> I'm starting to distrust any person who claims to distrust the media over covid.

We know more than we ever have about the virus but we’re still pushing bullshit mandates. It’s over, time to move on.

Some people are pushing mandates, many aren't. And there was a time when mandates made sense. There may likely be a time in the future when a mandate would make sense again.

> there was a summer…

Yes. A summer. Not two years.

I would say that we had a spring even. Because by the summer with the whole world taking to the streets over George Floyd, it seemed pretty much like we weren’t going to have a major problem.

I don’t ever remember the fear of covid among informed people being the mortality risk of under 40’s.

I do remember the covid fear being the collapse of the healthcare system due to under-resourced hospitals being stretched to thin from the rate of hospitalization of covid cases. I also know that people did die from being crowded out by covid patients.

> Covid for 90% of the population was never something to have fear over. Something to be cautious about yes but the range of sheer panic among people under 40 in good health that i met was beyond silly.

To me the fear seemed mostly directed to local health infrastructure being in a position of crumbling down under the case load, which still holds true in many places. Can't speak for every country, but over here we're still one wave large enough away from overloading our ICUs. Each wave brought us extremely close to the cutoff.

There's no contradiction between thinking fear porn is bad and thinking nuclear war is a real and horrible risk.

Sure. But there are at least 20 things I'm more worried about than nuclear war. You've got to have a very lax definition of 'key concern' to include your 21st-ranked worry.

There are a lot of things I'm more worried about than an asteroid hitting earth, but I rather we develop technology that could avoid it from occurring because if it does happen it could drive us extinct.

You seem unable to comprehend and classify that there are existential threats and that you have to focus on them some but not too much.

We have a major war on our doorstep, a humanitarian catastrophe and very likely millions of refugees. That is certainly a real cause for worry.

Reflecting on what will be the greater challenge for my kids: avoiding emotional overreaction to the media's business model

  ...or climate change.

Pretty sure it's the later

20 years ago I’d have agreed.

Now? Now my gut feeling is that climate change is mostly going to be OK — bad stuff will still happen, but I don’t expect catastrophic variation from what would’ve happened otherwise, because PV is rapidly growing in quantity (literally exponentially) and batteries are rapidly getting cheaper.

Plenty of other unsustainable things about our economy besides greenhouse gases of course.

But I’m more worried than I used to be about journalists and propagandists both separately A/B testing their ways to the most potent methods to effect specific emotional affects, at which point we all go to war because of something which despite being objectively stupid is also something which enough people feel is a fundamental truth of nature they’re willing to kill and to die for.

A more extreme version of https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc

Why would you go with "gut feeling" instead of IPCC AR6?

The elevator pitch summary of IPCC AR6 is “It is only possible to avoid warming of 1.5 °C if massive and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are made”.

I am saying “I think those cuts are extremely likely to happen, and soon”.

Soon is still a lot later than immediate. And they won't be that large because even cheap PV needs time to be manufactured in large enough quantities to matter.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PV_cume_semi_log_c...

An order of magnitude every 5 to 10 years is faster than I think you’re giving credit for.

I’m expecting the peak capacity of just PV to exceed world electricity demand this decade, and actual output (rain, night, being put on cars parked in shade) to exceed current global electricity demand early next decade as more stuff gets electrified.

I expect a slowdown in growth after that point, but I don’t have any intuition about when exactly.

And of course we need so much reduction that the long term goal is “everything everywhere in every sector except half the livestock methane” or “everything in really all sectors worldwide except for North Korea”; yet halving output doubles the time available to make the next step, so even there I am optimistic.

I'm fairly sure it is not. Climate change is actually a good example, it has been blown out of all proportions by both politicians as well as media which has led a large number of children and young adults to start worrying whether they will have a future at all before they will die from starvation/drowning/heat shock/fill-in-the-blanks. Slightly older young adults state they do not want to get children "since they will not have a future on a dying planet", all being egged on by "Extinction Rebellion"-like prophets of doom in the media.

They are your children so it is your responsibility to make sure they learn to separate panic porn and propaganda from believable prognoses on things like war, natural phenomena, changing climate and its ramifications and more. Get some books on the subject - Michael Shellenberger's "Apocalypse Never", Bjørn Lomborg's "False Alarm", Steven Koonin's "Unsettled" and read up on the facts and fictional narratives around the subject of the changing climate. If you are not in panic-mode they are far less likely to be pulled into the fable of a climate-induced eschaton. Teach them critical thinking skills - that is true critical thinking, not "critical theory" thinking which is actually the opposite of what I'm getting at. Help them on their way of navigating through the rapids of their formative years and they'll be stronger and more self-reliant on the other side.

So your point is basically to teach your kids to be climate change deniers? And your supporting evidence is a reading list of pop-science books none of which were written by actual climate scientists?

Sounds like you need to apply a bit more of that "Critical thinking" you're going on about, as if your reading list is anything to go by, you're not really being all that "critical" but rather seeking out sources of information that confirms your existing biases.

You are professing a religion when you're talking in terms of "climate change deniers". It is the same primal urge which makes people call others "anti-vaxxers" even though they've had the full spectrum of vaccinations except that single one. Us versus them, good versus evil, the chosen versus the damned. I prefer to think and live in more than just 2 dimensions, the third one making it possible to take some distance and study the subject. My daughters don't believe the world will go under in a climate catastrophe, nor should they. They also learn to respect their environment. They do not crave after plastic trinkets or the latest phone.

I'm fairly sure our "energy footprint" is lower than yours so if anything I should call for you to "repent, sinner!". But I won't and I'll grant you your religion just as long as you grant me the freedom of it.

The problem is not that climate change will hurt everybody. Many areas will be just fine.

But many others won't, and the people that lived there will need somewhere else to live, and productivity resources in that area are gone. That's going to be a lot of refugees needing a place in the world that's already struggling to provide for all of us.

All this will make the world a lot more unstable politically and economically. And just look at the news today to see how well we're getting along before any of this really kicked in...

Your list of source books is telling: you have a PR person with a history of being sloppy with the truth in service of conservative political goals, a political science major who has made a great deal of money from conservative funders but whose articles do not meet scientific levels of rigor and are routinely ripped apart by actual scientists, and a theoretical physicist who was a C-level officer at a fossil fuel company (BP). Beyond the lack of domain experience, what all three of those have in common is work which is widely recognized as being based on cherry-picking, misrepresenting climate scientists' claims and goals, and, especially, studiously ignoring how climate scientists' predictions from decades ago have held up well while the various deniers have rotated through a series of poorly-supported explanations with no coherent linking philosophy other than that climate change cannot be real because otherwise their funders might be expected to pay damages.

Did you read those books?

Thought so.

You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen.

By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ?

Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Well, I don't still have my copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist (moving cross country does that) but I bought the hard-cover when it came out because the ideologically-tainted glasses I was wearing were those of a young libertarian who loved the idea of the experts being wrong but hadn't yet learned to be just as skeptical of the knowledgeable-sounding people who were saying that.

One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter).

In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.

Can't wait for a few more decades of "50 years of failed climate predictions".

That said, there is plenty of tech being developed to improve global warming, so that rich mega corporation won't have to abandon their fancy offices and villas on the seaside.

The real ecological catastrophe will be plastic, the recycling scam (approved by governments and paid with oil money) really sold plastic to people and now we have microplastic everywhere - including our body.

Hopefully governments won't stifle innovation too much so that the private sector will come up with a tech solution.

I've started to see a lot of burnout on my social media, of posts like "It's ok to take a break from the news" and "It's ok to not participate and focus on your mental health." These are coming from people who are typically very active in the social justice space. The news endlessly shifting from one emergency to another is burning them out, which is saying a lot.

Infotainment has become very toxic. It's not simply a cold front, its "tHe pOlAr VorTeX". It's not an interesting asteroid, is "cOulD tHiS AstERoiD iMpAct eArTH iN 2027?".

Between this and all the blatant manipulation on social networks, it's a necessity to take a break from all this madness before it sucks you into it.

There are also extremely successful and highly productive long term disinformation campaigns. I noticed a notable shift in decreased disinformation when the war started and Twitter cut off Russia for instance and similarly even before that when they cut off Trump.

i resonate with your comment

every 2 weeks its some new crisis in the news. I try to avoid it because it just consumes my energy and im not contributing to helping anyway. Maybe im jaded but it feels like i should experience the life i have before me, instead of constantly being pulled one direction or another based on 2week news cycle.

lately though, i notice that people close to me are soliciting this info to me regardless of whether i ask or not. My whole family, the 2nd topic after "hello" is "X thing happened in the news isnt that crazy!?" and other folks get upset if i dont have an opinion about X thing.

COVID was the cause of the deadliest event in US history.

I agree that we should learn not to overreact, but I also think that social media plays an integral role in the quality (or lack thereof) of our discourse.

Research shows that hate is the most virulent type of content that spreads on Twitter and there’s a whole cohort of Twitter employees and investors that have an interest in advancing that business. Same thing with Facebook.

There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made by our own industry to drum up this fear and anxiety, we can’t just blame it all on the anchors sitting behind the desks. The platforms are culpable as well.

I sincerely don't understand this line of reasoning. Are the negative consequences of overmediatization and people having too much empathy in the moment really what we should focus on? If so what are those consequences exactly? It feels like a counterproductive leveling down argument. Instead of dumbing down every event to its worldly relativistic place, we could seize the opportunities to rise, try to question and inform ourselves and let people who want to rearrange their priorities do so. There is no world roadmap with a ubiquitous world product owner incentivized to handle its rational prioritization.

Or serious problems do exist and for the most part we are shielded from them.

To be fair, both COVID and nuclear threats are very legitimate issues. We can’t deny that we are living in a dark period.

More Americans have died from COVID than all American soldiers lost in combat in all military engagements combined in our history, and we like our wars. We surpassed that figure last summer, so we’re way past it at this point.

We’re also consciously considering the possibility of nuclear war again, which came very close to happening the last time we engaged with Russia.

I don't think we can clearly state covid deaths were counted correctly.

There are many odd thing with the numbers, eg. no-one died of the flu during covid because they were all counted as covid, not to mention the emergency measures (I know of at least 2 european countries where this happened) that allowed even just presumption of covid to be counted as covid deaths, without a proper autopsy or the financial incentive that some hospitals / state actors had in having a certain number of covid deaths in order to get compensation.

The age at which people died also matters. If covid just sped up the death of old people we lost significantly less years of life as a society than when young soldiers die.

Overall if we focused on improving cardiovascular diseases or traffic related deaths instead of scrambling making emergency vaccines for covid, I believe we would have saved more years of life as a whole.

Nuclear threats are just threats - if anyone actually fire nukes both sides would die.

They're great for making your enemy panic and don't bother you during invasions, though.

> More Americans have died from COVID than all American soldiers lost in combat in all military engagements combined in our history, and we like our wars

What happens to that comparison if you look at years of life lost rather than deaths that coincided with a covid infection?

I don't know, but I have to assume it's not even close. Covid seemed (in the average case, of course there were exceptions) to push people who were near their life expectancy over the edge, whereas war takes young people with full healthy lives ahead of them and either kills or permanently damages them.

> mass societal panic about Covid

If anyone with clairvoyance predicted in 2018 that one million Americans would die from a contagious disease, while a third of the population would go on protesting anti-spread measures and wouldn't even let their kids vaccinated ...

... it would have been widely panned as unrealistic disaster porn aiming to undermine Americans' social trust.

Sometimes a disaster is actually a disaster.

In 2018 everyone who pays attention knew that hundreds of thousands of people in our country would die every year from a contagious disease, also known as the flu.

You seem to be of the mind that you can somehow stop the spread of Covid, you can't. We have not been able to stop any respiratory virus from spreading EVER. Your vaccines will only limit the effects of the virus on you if you get it. It will in no way stop you from spreading it.

No one who pays attention would have predicted hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from influenza, because in the last decade, it has never happened.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

The high-end of yearly flu deaths is in the low 50,000s, while the low-end is just over 10,000. COVID has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

You're not just misinformed about vaccines, you're outright lying about numbers that can be easily Googled.

It's politics driven by access journalism, constant press releases, and simple covert placement of deceptive news stories in tiny outlets to allow larger outlets to amplify those stories under the guise of metareporting.

We're currently on the tail end of en engineered media panic about an epidemic of shoplifting.

That's just how things are going to be now, people are so cynical about all media that they don't believe anything that comes from anywhere other than their own personal fandoms. But their own fandoms are just injecting the same propaganda directly into their veins.

The thing that's been most astounding to me is that the most militant about Ukraine in the US seem to completely overlap with the most Democratic/Republican hyperpartisan types, and each characterize extreme concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine as something that their respective parties own, and identify lack of appropriate concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine with the opposite party; the Republicans are traitorous Trumpian Soviet spies who deserve execution or exile, and the Democrats are peacenik anti-interventionist cowards who are holding back the military.

I suspect that's an incidental observation - because the main thing that hyperpartisans and Ukraine hysterics have in common is extreme consumption of television news.

Which is why they're so much less concerned about Yemen (which has been pointed out a ton), and why they have no historical background on the situation (because you had to read to know about the constant attempts of NATO expansion to Ukraine and the obvious problems with that, it wasn't something you could just pick up while changing channels.) The analogies between NATO expansion to Ukraine and the Cuban Missile Crisis are lost on people who don't know why NATO exists, and who don't actually know about the Cuban Missile Crisis other than it had something to do with Cuba, missiles, and the Soviet Union.

This world is still the same world where decisions are made by royalty, and normal people die to help oligarchs jockey for relative position, but the degree to which murderous nationalistic/partisan rage can be stirred up in a plurality of the populace is intense, and instant.

Man, even if you watch the news you’re quite likely to be affected by the media hype. It’s shameful the kind of control they have over us. What’s even more alarming is that absolute racists can hide themselves easily just by being on the right side of the media hive narrative. Look at how common Russians are being treated by sections of western society just for the crime of being Russian when they probably just escaped to the west from a life under Putin.

Capitalism is great, but unrestrained pure profit motive capitalism in some sectors - like journalism - does not look like it’s in public interest. Companies like Twitter just serve up content that can rile people up, with no concern for what it’s leading to. All they care about is engagement.

Yes this was Europe's response to Hitler's expansions. Downplaying the situation does NOT help when the aggressor is determined to do whatever it takes to advance their agenda.

The threat/warning Putin said after invading is very hard to dismiss. That was a turning point in my head. I tried to think over and over where was he drawing the line that he wouldn't cross and I got too uncomfortable with my imagination

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