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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 7 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.235s | 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. lostmsu ◴[06 Feb 25 14:13 UTC] No.42962493[source]▶
This is too complicated. There's a much shorter working plan:

- fact check exceptional claims

- report factual failures to the source

- if the source doesn't apologize publicly in the same channel, permanently remove it from trusted sources

edit: ok, after the rage comment I realized that one more item is missing: discarding sources with systematic reporting bias (when it is obvious they aren't reporting things that you care about that are happening)

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2. myrmidon ◴[06 Feb 25 14:32 UTC] No.42962671[source]▶
Factual correctness is a different dimension from how "outrage-inducing" news are. Those are orthogonal.

Consider: "Illegal immigrants strike again, having raped 2 teenagers already this year"

is outrage-inducing regardless of factual correctness.

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3. mistermann ◴[06 Feb 25 14:34 UTC] No.42962695[source]▶
Rare is the individual who does not make numerous errors while engaging in fact checking, in no small part because of our cultural norms of cognition.
4. lostmsu ◴[06 Feb 25 14:52 UTC] No.42962911[source]▶
What exactly is the problem with inducing outrage?
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5. myrmidon ◴[06 Feb 25 15:10 UTC] No.42963093{3}[source]▶
"Outrage fatigue can wear us down"-- the subtitle of the article :P
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6. lostmsu ◴[06 Feb 25 15:13 UTC] No.42963120{4}[source]▶
I don't necessarily see a problem with "outrage fatigue". It sounds like a self-solving problem: if a source gives you such fatigue, you will stop reading it naturally.
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7. myrmidon ◴[06 Feb 25 16:08 UTC] No.42963722{5}[source]▶
> if a source gives you such fatigue, you will stop reading it naturally.

That is not not at all how this works out in reality.

People are not subconciously opposed to being driven to outrage, especially if it reinforces their biases (the reverse appears to be true!).

Sanity check: If evoking outrage was driving away media consumer, there would be very strong selection pressure against that, and media would stop doing it or fail.

This is not what we observe: Almost all media is becoming increasingly outrage-inducing, because it works. It drives clicks, and it does not deter people from coming back.

Just consider CNN, FOX news, MSNBC , etc-- you can see the same trend over time, regardless of the position on the political spectrum.