Impending National Distraction, aka Public Relations 101 | Hacker News Reader

Impending National Distraction, aka Public Relations 101

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59 pointscwilson18 comments

I'm reminded of a something Neil deGrasse Tyson once said of optical illusions : "They should be called BRAIN FAILURES!" We get a lot of them and they're not all optical.

People hate unhappy, depressing or otherwise hopeless situations and will seek out the easiest outlet to escape. I think it's a survival mechanism of sorts where you're more focused on being happy and alive vs. disillusioned and not procreating.

We're genetically ill-equipped for righteous indignation by and large so X-Idol-Housewives-Celebrity-Factor-Dance will do nicely in a time of genuine crisis.

Or alternatively, a much bigger crisis (which is scary).

I have a different and more pessimistic perspective. My pessimism is actually derived from my Facebook feed as well. I haven't seen a single posting about PRISM or any discussion of the massive surveillance state that we have created from people outside of the technology industry. My facebook friends consist largely of people whom I've grown up with or known since childhood. I have approximately 226 FB friends and of those approximately 20 are developers. The only posts even mentioning these shenanigans are from a few of those developers. YMMV I guess.

Ditto, almost all the substantive debate I see comes from the British, French, German, and Chinese press.

Agree, even at around people I know I still dont hear about it, and these are people who are on the internet every day. General public? I just hear SSDD.

I was sitting in the airport waiting for a flight today for two hours and heard NSA discussed on the news channel at least once an hour. this was on whatever local news channel for seattle they had in seatac, so, maybe you just have tuned out friends...

But what if the Facebook feed algorithms found that talking about the NSA bums people out, thus decreasing engagement and revenue? They might then decrease the visibility of such discussion.

What you observe might be a real phenomenon – the 'normals' are barely aware of the NSA stories so far. But something so carefully curated by a for-profit entity as the Facebook feed (or similarly, the national TV networks' nightly half-hour news) is not going to give a representative sampling of people's concerns.

Yeah, it seems to me there is some tradeoff that could likely be expressed in a mathematical equation between distracting the public and therefore in theory not jeopardizing the status quo of intelligence gathering, and the cost of a too-large distraction. Not that it would necessarily be a simple equation (what's the cost of jeopardizing the status quo of intelligence gathering? No clear way to say for certain that a specific capability would necessarily head off future calamity, with the possible exception of really clear cases, which I think must exist at times. And what's the true cost of, say, military action? There's the direct. There's the fallout (literal and figurative - benefit to weapons manufacturing, damage/benefit to trade, injured veterans, reduced/increased spending from a scared public...)). But I think I would love to see that equation.

Edit: Closed parentheses.

Maybe the war in Syria will be the distraction.

It sounds really tinfoil hatish to say that but I worry about that too. Nothing like jumping into war to take the citizens minds off what ever it is they are going on about. I'd prefer it was some sort of 'good news' distraction of course.

That is tinfoil hattish. The Syria situation has been brewing for years, and the strategic factors that make it into a hard problem run back decades. I'm surprised we've managed to keep out of it this long.

I don't disagree. I keep hoping that passing meaningful immigration reform is the actual distraction planned.

That too has been in the works for many, many years. The public is distractable, but as I've repeatedly pointed out, only a small section of the public cares all that much about this issue to begin with. It's not logical to posit that everything else in DC is taking place in relation to the NSA scandal, any more than it was logical to assume that everything in DC revolved around the Benghazi thing last year. Now, a major new administration initiative that appeared out of the blue in the last 2-3 weeks would probably be a distraction, but it's unrealistic to expect every part of government to stop what its doing until everyone has argued out the NSA issue.

Isn't that the point of the article?

Let's hope they don't resort to bombing a major city in an effort to whip up fear and xenophobia..

Too bad the Royal Wedding already happened. Friday night that weekend would've been perfect.

At first I thought you meant the Red Wedding (Game of Thrones), then realized this was not a typo, but both are still 100% applicable.

Quick, have a celebrity reveal a naked breast in public. Nothing will provoke more outrage.

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