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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.284s | source
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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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Bhilai ◴[06 Feb 25 15:59 UTC] No.42963639[source]▶
> Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.

I struggle with this. It's incredibly challenging to find reliable, unbiased news sources these days, especially with the perceived slant of many major outlets. It's discouraging when even subscriptions to reputable publications like the NYT and WSJ leave you feeling like you're not getting the full story. It's also concerning when editorial content undermines the perceived objectivity of the news reporting, specially with WSJ. So what are people reading?

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1. mihaaly ◴[06 Feb 25 20:43 UTC] No.42966291[source]▶
Almost every story has sides. Multiple at a time. Depending on people and their cultural background involved or observing. Ask one people about a story, and might say completely different things than another. This is just the nature of humanity, nothing novelty was said here.

Choose something where they at least try.

My long time favorite is The Economist. They have writers there committed to a certain kind of message, true, like everywhere, putting on a glass supporting their preconceptions, yet the overall tone is somewhat analytical, at least trying to look behind and around, trying to use multiple viewpoints. If they miss some, you might add yours pretty easily (on your own or from other sources), and so you will be empowered by better vintage point at the matter than without their help. That's much more than nothing, at least compared to the vast majority (I believe).

I am sure there are even better alternatives where the being emotional first and professionally outraged all the time is frowned upon too. Definitely avoid bbc.co.uk despite their facade of being in depth and balanced. They actually say nothing more than repetition of the events mixed with lots of emotions nowadays, even their selection of topics are outrage oriented.