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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 16 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 1.346s | source | bottom
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majgr ◴[06 Feb 25 07:03 UTC] No.42959854[source]▶
Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:

- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.

- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.

- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.

- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.

- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.

- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.

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1. CrimsonRain ◴[06 Feb 25 07:14 UTC] No.42959917[source]▶
Are you sure these high value professionals are fair? I saw this story the other day; don't have much idea about Poland. So verify yourself.

https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/02/03/polish-billionaire-of...

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2. purplezooey ◴[06 Feb 25 07:23 UTC] No.42959962[source]▶
Digging up a tiny, poorly funded left-wing publication as a whipping post doesn't support the point you are making.
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3. notTooFarGone ◴[06 Feb 25 08:17 UTC] No.42960235[source]▶
but what about THIS anecdote????!
4. magicalhippo ◴[06 Feb 25 10:18 UTC] No.42960932[source]▶
You know what you can do? Subscribe to multiple papers, from both sides. Then you can do some comparison to see when things are reported differently.

When I grew up we had at least two papers, sometimes three. One was leaning left, other leaning right.

These days it's what Ground News[1] is trying to do from what I can gather, though haven't tried them as they don't cover the news in my country.

[1]: https://ground.news/

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5. magnetometer ◴[06 Feb 25 12:04 UTC] No.42961583[source]▶
Why should there be only two sides?
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6. magicalhippo ◴[06 Feb 25 12:11 UTC] No.42961621{3}[source]▶
You can consider as many dimensions as you want. As I mentioned, for some time we had three papers regularly delivered, for additional perspective.

However typically, a single dimension is a useful first-order approximation[1], and so that's what's done in politics as well. As with all approximations, sometimes it works well and other times it does not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_approximation

7. majgr ◴[06 Feb 25 14:09 UTC] No.42962454[source]▶
I think it is fair, because professionals do not use cheap tricks, but at least they are trying to distance themselves when writing a report. I like discussions when Sławomir Sierakowski (from Krytyka Polityczna) is present, because he always have some new ideas, new ways to describe reality. Although, I do not follow Krytyka Polityczna.
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8. mistermann ◴[06 Feb 25 14:41 UTC] No.42962790[source]▶
When someone is hired into a professional job, is there something in the laws of physics that prevent them from doing wrong?
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9. TeMPOraL ◴[06 Feb 25 15:16 UTC] No.42963152{3}[source]▶
What is the job anyway?

Almost all of the publishing is ultimately funded by ads, therefore the primary job of everyone involved is to generate ad impressions.

What's being attributed to "professionals" in this thread is actually the opposite of what the job pays for.

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10. CrimsonRain ◴[06 Feb 25 15:44 UTC] No.42963449[source]▶
Hmm. You're in bargaining stage or what?

fwiw, read/listen/watch actual events instead of some "professional's opinion". Then make up your own mind.

11. mistermann ◴[06 Feb 25 15:46 UTC] No.42963470{4}[source]▶
It is very funny how humans experience reality eh? Like, the literal assignment of a word to something can cause the representation of it in a person's mind (aka the reality) to change. Also weird: it is essentially not possible to talk about the phenomenon in a serious way (participants range of possible actions become highly constrained, and therefore highly predictable).

I really wonder if this normative phenomenon will be able to survive in the age of AI.

12. CrimsonRain ◴[06 Feb 25 15:48 UTC] No.42963499[source]▶
Yes, this is a good idea. Alternatively, instead of reading "news"^ go to source and read/listen/watch it yourself. Then make your own mind.

^: which somehow became someone else's opinions in last decade. There's still opinion column. But there's no difference these days. It didn't use to be like this in the past. Journalists used to report events and facts without commentary or would add commentary in the end with some label on it.

13. majgr ◴[06 Feb 25 15:50 UTC] No.42963527{3}[source]▶
> When someone is hired into a professional job, is there something in the laws of physics that prevent them from doing wrong?

No, but work of journalists is highly visible. Probably, this creates more incentive to write according to rules of the trade. There are examples of journalists who went with ruling regime and got monetary prizes. Some are switching to it now, betting that regime change again and their dedication will bring rewards.

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14. timeon ◴[06 Feb 25 17:30 UTC] No.42964531{3}[source]▶
That was probably mentioned from US-centric point of view where they have two-party system.
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15. magicalhippo ◴[06 Feb 25 17:59 UTC] No.42964820{4}[source]▶
I'm from Norway where we have currently ten parties in our parliament[1].

We still mostly talk about them as distributed along a left to right axis. Though as I mentioned it's not a perfect approximation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storting

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16. timeon ◴[06 Feb 25 22:07 UTC] No.42966988{5}[source]▶
Seems like Norway has also many constituencies which can favor dominant parties. However unlike US you have also leveling seats which balances it a bit.