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Comment by alwa | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to meet a person who regrets having successfully weaned themselves off the news-cycle dopamine treadmill. If anything, I find that they tend to be better informed and more thoughtful than they were when they wasted cycles on the carnival.

Might just be me though.

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Well that's a bit of conceptual selection bias, isn't it? Good for their mental health, but you cannot regret something if you don't know what you're missing.

There must have been 1930s Europeans who checked out of all those news about Hitler, after all. Must have been much better for their peace of mind, until one day suddenly it wasn't.

The rise of Hitler was noticed and minimized by even the most plugged-in governments and leaders. The UK was led by a chap who thought he could mollify him by just giving him parts of Central Europe. You can call Chamberlain many names but "uninformed" isn't one.

I like the description earlier in the thread of "the carnival". You can leave at any time and your life and dopamine will be the better for it.

The thing is the Nazi's didn't come out of nowhere.

If you check the news once a week or once a minute you'll still notice them.

lol. Because I’m sure all the news was posting anything critical about the nazi party at all. Look at now the vast majority of the mainstream news handled Covid. Absolutely zero intellectual curiosity or actual honest insight and 100% pure grade-a government propaganda. Not even a shred of actual investigation or thought. They were nothing more than a mouthpiece for whatever nonsense the government spewed out.

While I encourage everyone to opt out of the sensationalized news cycle and prioritize their own mental health, people who aren't paying attention aren't better informed, because the news is actively being censored by their billionaire owners, so it takes a lot of effort to be fully informed, and no, remembering a few things they heard off of Joe Rogan doesn't make them well informed.

Ea-nāṣir sold me poor-quality copper. I need high-quality copper. Therefore, I will buy loads of copper from Ea-nāṣir, and sift through it until I find high-quality copper.

The copper market sold me copper, some of which was low quality, some of which was high quality. But instead of continuing to shop at the whole market and developing any sense of what is quality, I've decided to go exclusively to Joe's Best Copper. He tells me his stuff is the best. I don't go to anyone else now so I have no way of comparing it to anything else. Anyway, there's no possible way he could be lying to me, I'm way too smart for than.

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