Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world. Researchers say the answer isn’t to stop following current events—it’s to build healthier habits around how, when, and where we get our news.
My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.
“The human mind has not adapted to this level of bad news”
Yet
I’m going to stare into the abyss until it blinks first
I feel like it kind of has.
Otherwise, people who are about 40+ years old would all be driven mad by now.
That’s our secret, we just hide it well.
bro I just turned 40 and… it doesn’t seem far off
I think I was wrong, the human mind adapts on the fly however it needs to. I should have kept it closer to the original: “The human brain has not adapted to this level of bad news.” All of our minds have adapted, right, one way or another?
Sure it has, meet my brain’s healthy levels of bitter sarcasm and bitter cynicism!
We must leave behind the fiction that a God created us. There is no God, we have no souls.
Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?
That’s the mind, not the brain. The way I see it, the opposite mistake that made.
What do you think the mind is other than a physical thing directly molded by the environment around it?
That and, you know, all the microplastics in there.
They make it run faster. What are computer chips made of? Duh.
/S
I use RSS now for news.
Its been so liberating. I can read offline, save articles for later, no ads or paywalls, no algorithms, no bullshit.
I highly recommend.
I’ve been doing the same. The issue is finding high quality feeds with full articles. Most are just a snippet of the article with a link saying “read the full story at…” (The Verge, PBS, The Guardian). Others are even worse and just link directly to the shit-laden website (Ars Technica). The best quality news feeds I’ve found are Techdirt and The Intercept. Would you care to share some good RSS news feeds you’ve found?
So for those style websites, FreshRSS (my server)/and CabyReader (my client) offer options to parse the linked article for content.
They mostly get the full article without tinkering but other sites I use css selectors to get the article section of the website.
Then I press the “parse” button if the article is just a summary and it’ll get the whole article.
That said, I do put more emphasis on following individuals rather than large sites like those you mentioned. So I have a couple dozen individual blogs followed, but also a handful of sites like NewScientist, BigThink, AndroidPolice, TinyBuddha, VICE
Okay, that’s very cool. I’m into self-hosting and will look into running FreshRSS to parse sites and feed me articles. Much appreciated!
what’s your favourite rss aggravator?
What’s an RSS?
It stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s basically a subscriber feed of websites - you choose a website to get updates about and the aggregator will keep an ear out for updates.
I mostly use it for webcomics.
bad news, everyone: bad news is bad for you!
its by design from murdoch, to putin and bannon its called flooding the zone, so your other heinous acts get drowned out. its whats trump doing in the news right, epstein is barely registering at all on news right now.
I strictly get my news on the toilet
“where we get our news.”
And then they link to Reuters. LOLThat should have prefaced that headline with “I hate to break it to you, but…”
In the past you didn’t get everything on earth reported to you. Now I think, “Do I really need to know 30 people died in a bus crash in Peru? What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?”
I think the bigger issue is actually more on the positive side than the negative. In a social media world, it is hard to gain esteem from realistically achievable effort.
I’ll use my hobby, woodworking, as an example. I’m a hobbiest woodworker. I’m a far better woodworker than all of my family and all except maybe one or two of my friends. But then again, all the others don’t do it as a hobby. They have their own pursuits that I can’t begin to match their skill in. I can show my works to those in my immediate circle and receive genuine admiration and praise for a job well done. My work is legitimately impressive to those around me.
But on social media? Suddenly I’m comparing myself to people who have done this all day everyday for 30 years as their profession. Or I’m comparing myself to people who present a very curated version of their work. I can’t do this full time. I have a day job. I will never be as good at this as someone who spent decades doing this and nothing but this. And if I compare myself to people like that, then it will make my own work feel less valuable.
We weren’t meant to compare ourselves to the most skilled people on Earth at every single activity and craft. We’re meant to produce things and to make things and do things that are legitimately impressive to those around us, but are still achievable with realistic effort. You shouldn’t have to spend decades doing something before you can achieve even a modicum of social esteem. That’s not how humans are evolved to exist. We’re met to live in and seek to impress relatively small groups of people.
I agree. Following the news is important, but it’s healthier to limit how much negative news we consume and choose reliable sources
Living the lie, by choice no less.
Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.
But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.
In my experience, there are very few people who actually “don’t follow politics”.
In most cases, once I have convinced a person that I truly won’t judge them for their politics (I do, but I keep it to myself unless I think I can actually impact their way of thinking), they are usually happy to disclose their preferences and biases, which is usually plenty to determine their political leanings.
In all but a few cases, they “don’t follow politics” because they have problematic or hypocritical politics and don’t want to explain themselves.
A close-ish friend of the family is employed in data center design for in Social Media, and later Google. He is very progressive and aware of the issues that face lgbtq people in today’s age. Yet, he is completely incapable of accepting that their high paying job is contributing to the degradation of the world at large.
Long story short, if people’s livelihood is tied to fascism, they will make whatever excuses they need to to continue benefitting from that system.
I tell certain types “I don’t follow politics” when I believe that my politics will be problematic to them and I don’t want to hear about it, but the other way around from what you’re describing. The people I have to deal with have started shouting at me when I simply give a different perspective and have no chance of budging in their views at a 5 minute conversation wont override the hours of fox news they watch everyday. I live is a somewhat small community, so not only do I need to worry about these types no longer patronizing my family’s business, I also have to worry about my truck getting vandalized. I’ve actually heard one of these types proudly proclaiming they want to get into a fist fight with climate scientists.
I should clarify that my experience is based on my interactions with people in the rural-ish Midwest.
I do try very hard to not make those assumptions when meeting someone new, as I know how it feels to be a progressive trapped in a dark red area of a (in my case) blue state.
Do what you need to do to survive. Hopefully one day this shit will get better and we can force the bigots and edge lords to keep that shit to themselves or be forced into social exile.
At this point in my life, if I catch a whiff that someone is anything other than a secular humanist, I’m done. I have zero interest in any continued interaction, nor in sanitizing my perspectives to make them comfortable. Unless I am forced by extenuating circumstances, I disconnect my existence from them in every possible way.
I’m tired of trying to change narrow-minded people.
Same, but these are professional relationships. Not friendships.
Oh, great… more bad news.
I want to read this in Marvin’s voice from HHTTG
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’ve got me delivering bad news.
Your brain wasn’t designed at all.
Iteratively designed by evolution to maximize survival, I guess
Yeah, so you could easily say we evolved to, or our brains evolved to… And so on
No, in fact that is still teleological.
Is it? I’d guess ‘to evolve to do smth’ doesn’t necessarily need to be teleological. IIRC the verb ‘evolve’ means the fittest getting randomly selected, no?
I think I understand where you’re coming from but I think it’s fundamentally different to ‘being designed with a specific goal in mind’
Don’t mind me, I had a prof who was uptight about it. I am sure it would only matter for formal or technical writing, like a scientific paper.
Oh I don’t mind. I just thought it an interesting question. I would like to know your prof’s reasoning for his insistence.
Because that would mean that ‘evolve’ can also be used teleologically, imho.
Since we’re all being pedantic about words here, we wouldn’t say our brains evolved to X because it’s our ancestors’ evolutionary precursor brains that evolved into ours.
I’d suggest we just back off the pedantry in general. The headline could have said “your brain isn’t suited to…” if they wanted to avoid the possible implication of a deity but I think we know what they were trying to say.
Evolved into or evolved with may reduce the implication of an intention.
- Our brains evolved into structures capable of supporting complex language.
- Our brains evolved with the capacity for complex language.
I just took issue with the very literal interpretation of the phrase “not designed for” and I couldn’t hold my tongue
well, my fingers, I guess
Yeah I dunno about design as much as iterative adaptations over incomprehensibly large periods of time.
Evolution did as much design as my socks design themselves to stay in their drawer. Evolution doesn’t design, it works with what it has and nothing else. It doesn’t even optimize because optimization requires choosing between options with intent. Evolution has zero intentions. Evolution creates un-“optimized” things that go extinct all the time, but it’s not because it “failed” at designing because that implies it “tried” to design, but because it’s not a designer, it can’t design. No design made fish have legs. No design gave elephants their tusks and no design gave flies their wings. Evolution won’t ‘design’ new vertebrae segments, but they still might happen—it just won’t be because of any design.
Settle down.
Natural selection is actually technically an optimisation algorithm. Its just a kind of crappy one that only ever finds local maximas because it can’t traverse valleys (the thing just dies). So we end up with optical receptors on the wrong side of our retina. Ooof.
Neanderthals evolved to traverse valleys just fine
I don’t mean literal valleys.
That was just my highly-evolved sense of humour
And see where that got them!
Figure of speech. Perhaps “optimized” would be more accurate?
Ok
And the people who are in charge and doing evil things know this and are using it to their advantage.
It’s literally written down as part of the playbook.
I remember when Majorie Taylor Greene left the government she made a comment about something regarding a playbook she was given when she first came to Congress. I wish someone would dig into that more because I’m fairly certain it contained things like how to belittle people when they ask serious questions or how to revert to whataboutisms as soon as you’re confronted with damning evidence.
There’s a book? A new one or is it just the usual suspects?
Project 2025 has a book.
I think Steve Bannon articulated the press blitz approach clearly even before that, back when he was a Trump inner circler, back in that farcical first term.
Amazing how much history rhymes.
Is Jar Jar the key to all of this?
How high are you
Right now? Not very much 😇
Don’t tell me that then, you’re just making it worse.
I’m not sure I understand what “build healthier habits around how, when and where we get our news” exactly means and how that would help. I mean if TACO drops bombs on little kids, I can’t think of how digesting this differently is going to be any healthier for me.
One thing I see a lot is the same event repackaged repeatedly with various headlines from different angles to elicit despair and outrage. If you heard about it once already, that is probably enough.
Spending an hour a day reading news from reputable sources is a lot healthier than doomscrolling questionable content for 8 hours on Reddit and Instagram.
It means that you are not in control of any of it. You can’t impact any of it meaningfully as a single force, at least in real time. People used to watch a “news hour” once a day. You could artificially recreate that, and then detatch for the other 23 hours using self control, muted phone notifications and browser filter extensions. And maybe your brain will thank you.
Of course you could have a separate rule for local alerts that may be more relevant, but local news is dying unfortunately, soo… You could probably just check in once a week to see how the surviving local paper verbatim reprints favorable press releases from the city’s PR person that they retain from the local municipal consultant group with a forgettable acronym.
What is the question here? You take kids to do your work?! Die! You even just slightly have sexual dreams about kids?! Die twice! Kids must be protected and sadly that doesn’t happen as much as you think. Anyhow.
Yooo, wtf?? Who the hell is having sexual dreams about kids? I mean if you are then it means you are probably sick and should get therapy for that. Help is available.
