In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important
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And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
> is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be?
Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works.
> Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy.
The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest.
> And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored.
The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health.
Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them.
> be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.
This isn't a symptom of global news dissemination though, it's a result of people being shitty and needing to grasp at any thread to justify their shitty position. Whether most of our news comes from local sources or not will not stop that. They'll just go seek out those local sources.
It is only made possible by, which is the point. And that was a single example of the harm, TV news play much of the same stories.
Avoid taking a too narrow view of the argument. Don’t get stuck on a single part you can think of, steel man and engage with the macro point being made.
Well... no, it's not only possible this way, as I just tried to point out. With or without global news programs, with or without addictive news feeds, those people will still act that way and go to great lengths to find reasons to justify it.
I did not engage with other bits because I do not generally disagree with you: watching too much news is a problem, highly addictive news feeds are a problem. I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face, particularly racism - and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
No one is arguing that. Even the original commenter said:
> This is partly the reason
Partly. But they are a reason.
> and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
There is no single factor which is the cause and can be solved. There are a bunch of partial factors which cause the issue. Fixing any of them would help.
In the newspaper days there was greater professionalism due to money and prestige but I think part of the appeal is you never heard conflicting interpretations so it felt more true and less confusing.
Actually reading the foreign news ... how many papers are you going to check? And quite a few of those will only contain government approved news. Good luck getting info on Covid from Chinese news papers.
Journalism has been murdered.
My point is that at the same time access is unmatched. If you care about it you can find it.
What were you trying to convey by starting with "Er...", and all the other rhetorical and dismissive tone and techniques?
Your entire post reads like you're quite offended, and you're dealing with that by being quite confrontational and dismissive towards someone who probably wasn't trying to offend or start a fight.
One of my usual news sources is SVT, the national Swedish broadcaster. Their svt.se website is good and, aside from Swedish news, they're also quick to cover major foreign events, if something is breaking news they'll have it up right away. But one of my main complaints is SVT covers local American crime too much. It pops up as one of the top "just in" headlines. I went to look just before replying here, and it's actually happening again right now - there's a "just in" headline "Four dead in a shooting in Mississippi". It's fast, I don't even see it on cnn.com as I'm typing this. But, with all respect to the victims, mass shooting are pretty much a daily event in the US and generally have no global importance.
You could have stopped there. I don't think we (in the U.S.) get too much international news — to the contrary in fact. But to be sure we are not getting enough local and relevant news.
For example, just opened Google news and saw "Joy Behar calls out “The View” cohost's revealing outfit: 'Where are you going in that dress?'"
(Of course it's easy to cherry pick dumb celebrity "news".)
Who does the flooding? It surely ain't the people.
> Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood.
Not all global news. Just some global news. And framed in a particular manner for effect.
> This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world.
You have it backwards. These governments and the elites who control these government want to act and use media to generate popular support.
> Because people feel that their government should do something about it.
No. People generally want their governments to not get involved. For example, no war the US was involved in was a result of "the people putting pressure on the government".
My brain holds on to the weirdest shit. Back in May my wife texted me: "Hot Lips died" and I immediately replied, "Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman?"
And thinking about that: why in the world should I remember either of their names? But seriously: Sally Kellerman? I saw the MASH movie when I was...ten? I'm pretty sure never since then.
And just typing that, my brain gremlin is cataloging everything it recalls from the movie: Elliot Gould, sure. Donald... oh crap. So this right here is the crux of the issue: objectively I know I shouldn't care, like, AT ALL. But right now I have a subprocess running to retrieve that guy's last name. I know his son was the star of 24, and Stand By Me, and he's escaping me at the moment, and my brain Will Not Stop until it recalls... Sutherland! Kiefer Sutherland, and Donald his dad.
<sigh> I could be remembering something important. I do remember actually important things -- but I could remember more important things if my brain didn't care deeply that Gary Burghoff was the only person to play the same role in the movie and the TV show.
Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.
In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.
They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement.
We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count.
"It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.
The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same.
There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.
This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature.
For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use.
[0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
Indoctrination.
Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
The fact there is intense disagreement about what is “obviously true” between countries shows that this is still happening.
The beliefs of the masses are simply shaped to suit political interests.
Concrete example: “boys should be circumcised”. If the answer was objectively obvious to educated people why does the US have such a different position on it than Europe?
We have to face truth constructions are lures in folk science societies like ours, they are not valid. Science is not understood (correlational thinking) or accepted b a majority of the population anywhere on this planet.
Those two worlds are not equivalent.
You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.
So, while it's not binary, it's as I said before: The difference really matters.
Who is we? I nor anyone I know never lived in such a world. Maybe there was a time when I was naive and brainwashed enough to believe we lived in such a world. But such a world never really existed.
> Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative.
It's always been that way. The oldest newspaper in the US ( NY Post ) was created by Alexander Hamilton to push his political agenda. Nothing has changed since. Newspapers exist to push the narrative of the elites who control them.
> Those two worlds are not equivalent.
Agreed. One of those world is a fantasy and the other is reality.
You had, for example, the editor of the New York Times who, knowing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately steering the editorial policy to the right, trying to have the net result be unbiased. He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight."
Was it perfect? No. But it tried.
I have lived through it ending. As I have said, the difference matters. You see that in the distrust for the media. You see it in our civic discourse, where the two sides can't agree on basic facts because they can't trust anyone to tell them something that is not just one side's narrative.
But to all those who have replied, claiming that unbiased reporting is a fantasy, that everybody is pushing a narrative: When you say that, are you sure that you haven't bought someone's narrative? Or is that a narrative that you are deliberately trying to create?
Is this a joke?
> You had, for example, the editor of the New York Times who, knowing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately steering the editorial policy to the right, trying to have the net result be unbiased.
Who is talking about editorial policy. We were talking about news. Right?
> He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight."
Wow that must mean it is true. That reeks of overcompensation. Doesn't it? But you are right, the NYT is not biased at all. Never has been... Fox News said they were "fair and balanced". If they said it, it must be true right? Believe the branding. Hey, the Truth Social platform has the word "truth" in it. So that must mean it was created to push truth to the public. Right?
> You see that in the distrust for the media.
There have been many periods of deep distrust of media.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -- Thomas Jefferson
Through the yellow journalism years. To the ww1 and ww2 years. And beyond.
> When you say that, are you sure that you haven't bought someone's narrative?
I'm sure.
> Or is that a narrative that you are deliberately trying to create?
It's not a "narrative". It's the truth. It's basic history and reality. What do you think newspapers and media were created for? What do you think they exist to do? Do you think Rupert Murdoch created fox news to push "truth"? Do you think a banker created the NYTimes to inform the public of "truth"? Do you think politicians created the nypost and washington post to expose "truth"?
You are trying to push a narrative. I'm just telling you what the news industry is. It's an obvious fact anyone could see if they just took off their politically driven blinders.
https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s
Compare those 3+3 to Aristotle's 5: intuitive understanding (nous), scientific knowledge (episteme), wisdom (sophia), art/skill (techne), and practical wisdom (phronesis).
Or to Laozi's (n)one--- as popularized by Alan Watts, not r/Stoicism
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_v...
Things you personally see = 10
Things you heard from a friend = 9
Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1
Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10
Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
Until we modularize a specific form of external signaling, be it speech or object, nothing we express is the truth.
Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed.
Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective.
People have to confront what we built here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge.
An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.