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Notes -
This post was spurred by the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine Show and me accessing the frontpage of my national brodacaster and seeing only one story on the right hand that directly concerned the lives of people living in this country.
The News Problem
It occurs to me that much of the connected world is gripped by "News Problems". A "News Problem" is a problem that ceases to affect you the moment you turn off the news. To determine whether something is a news problem or not, ask yourself this question: if I was suddenly made to forget the information I had just watched or read about, would my life be any different?
An obvious example of something that is not a News Problem would be stories about inflation: inflation trickles all the way down to the consumer. It is made immediately obvious when the price of your favourite foods goes up, or when your money gets you less petrol than it used to at the pump. The topics involved in the story are those that directly affect the material world around you. To go back further, during the terrible time when a large chunk of the world was denied Freedom of Association over a virus with a 99%> chance of survival, the information coming out of the news outlets was of varying utility. For some people, Covid: The Virus was a just News Problem but for almost everyone, the actions taken by the State to control the virus were not News Problems.
In regards to story I initially mentioned, whether the debate starts begins on who you are: if you have family or friends in the region, or if they have been affected by the recent attacks, then this is very much not a news problem. If you are Jewish and living in a city with a large Muslim population (or a population of people who care very strongly about the issue despite neither being Muslim nor Jewish), you may or may be directly affected by the events as they occur in the region, but you may certainly care about how that population responds to you, particularly if you present as being Jewish.
So, can you ignore news problems? The answer, to my eternal chargin, is no. Even if the story has no material affect on my life, I am still surrounded by people who care about it, and in turn expect me to care about it. Should the conversation emerge at my place of work (so far it hasn't, and for that I am extremely grateful), I may be asked for my opinion, and my genuine opinion would piss off everyone in the room. During the summer of 2020, depending upon your position in society, you might have faced social repercussions if you didn't agree with the rhetoric at the time. This could have been something as simple as nodding along to what was being said, or, if you were in a position of power, expected to divert your resources, energy and face to something you strongly disagreed with.
Will there be an end to the News Problem? The obvious cure is to take the grillpill, which in this sense means turning off your device and going outside, but this only works if everyone takes the grillpill. Had you taken the grillpill in a city, you might have bumped into protests about the dispute.
How about: "I'm on a fast from following the news cycle in order to focus my mental energies on friends and family and my own well-being. But from the nuggets that I have heard, it all sounds terrible and tragic. I pray for peace." If you know the person's affiliation, maybe also give a nod of sympathy toward their position.
TBH, I'm a bit relieved that we finally have a Current Thing that I do not have to follow all that closely, because there is nothing actionable about it for me. For this conflict, following events closely and really figuring out what is going on doesn't seem to have any prospect of informing important decisions that I might have to make, so I can hopefully just mostly ignore it.
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I think this hints to a more serious problem: we are a species designed to live in hierarchical high-trust communities, and instead we live atomized under untrustworthy authorities motivated by capital gain.
Humans are designed to black box their cognition but this only works if you can sufficiently trust the inputs and outputs. Many people do not legitimately trust the “grey boxes” today. Worse yet, those who do are continually duped. Something as simple as buying healthy food is fraught with needless issues: what counts as truly organic or grass fed or wild caught, whether organic is actually important, what counts as actually healthy, whether nutrients are even to be found in them because of soil depletion, whether you’re being duped on calories, etc. Buying a vehicle requires that you dump an extra needless ten hours to ensure you are being sold the right thing with the right terms. Moving apartments requires that you scope out reviews to ensure your landlord isn’t a sociopath.
For news it’s all the same problems made worse. Unions bad because GDP? Is GDP relevant to me? But GM workers just got a 25% pay bump. Should I dwell on crime? Should I dwell on immigration? Do I have an obligation to consider the war? There is no organization you can trust, you have no idea who is running it and there’s been a “survival of the fittest” selection of liars, which is incentivized by consumer capitalism. If you are a rootless atomized American you become your own tribal leader, your own high priest, your own adviser, which means you feel obliged to pay attention to the news. You do that, or you become one of the mindless conformists which this forum shits on. What a great choice!
You make this sound like an extremely onerous burden, to me it sounds like the basic requirements for being a free thinking and even modestly rational person.
I don't think I'm particularly tempted by the idea of handing over control of my beliefs to anyone in particular, even if there are people I broadly trust like say, Scott, I disagree with him on many things and always prefer to think for myself in domains where I believe I can interpret the evidence.
Maybe what you describe is a far bigger issue for what we might less than politely term as midwits, who are smart enough to spot inconsistencies in the narrative but are incapable of delving deep enough to figure things out for themselves.
And where I can't do so myself, I have little problem in tolerating uncertainty or ambiguity.
Being a free thinking and rational person is not the normal state of humanity, never has been, will likely never be and can only be obtained at onerous efforts that only make sense for everyone to the ideological zealot.
The immense complexity of the world will be and already has become the doom of the liberal vision, because there is no stable world where everyone is an accomplished philosopher king.
Reason took it's best shot at hierarchy and trust, and is slowly seeing victory escape it's grasp as it is unsustainable on its own.
Trustworthy institutions must exist. And though tyranny must be prevented, all men can't be expected to desire freedom.
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I think the problem is that these self-made humans are going to be less efficient, less effective, and more stressed as a result of always needing to “turn on the news” and triple-check whether they are being duped. It decreases rationality as a whole because of the needless time spent thinking about whether we are being deceived in our daily or weekly decisions. It’s not about wit levels, but more that we are fretting away our wits needlessly. I recall what David Lynch said about eating the same thing every day at the same time and place, that it gave his mind the room to think about what truly matters. So it could be if we all had trustworthy authorities above us, as a hypothetical child might have an ideal father. If someone can outsource his cognition on trustworthy black boxes then a whole world of rationality opens up where you can think about more and truly important things.
I am the only SMH I have access to, unless I end up cloning myself, but it certainly doesn't seem to me like I'm any less effective or efficient, or even particularly stressed.
Maybe the latter, but I strongly prefer useful stress that motivates me in getting to the bottom of the mystery to blissfully becoming beholden to what pundits claim. And if I think that the stress itself isn't useful because I'm genuinely out of my depth, then while I can't guarantee it, I'm pretty good at just not worrying about it too much.
I don't really disagree, but such an entity doesn't exist, and likely won't until we make an aligned superintelligent AGI for ourselves. I'd still prefer to just make myself smarter with its aid so I can figure things out for myself.
In the interim, it's not particularly unbearable to stand on my own two feet atop my brains, and it beats the available alternatives I can see!
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Seconding /u/Jiro below. Just because something currently has no direct material impact on your life doesn't mean it never will, and forewarned is forearmed. It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future - The Black Swan spent 400 pages warning against the folly of doing so. It's doubly arrogant when we live in an extremely interconnected globalised economy: a person getting sick with an infectious disease in Wuhan might not have had much impact on the average European's life in the 14th century, but the same cannot be said in the 21st.
Your argument doesn't justify getting worked up about any of that without far more obvious reason.
I don't lose sleep over the next pandemic everytime someone in Africa shags a chimp and catches a novel zoonotic disease, that's the WHO's headache. If you fret every time someone around the globe falls sick with an unexplained illness, you're going to fall sick yourself.
There's an expected value to new information as well as a cost to your time and energy in acquiring it. Both are small, but in most cases, the latter is larger for anything you see on the news. We don't have the luxury of caring about everything, our brains aren't good enough.
At any rate, I am terminally online because I find it enjoyable for its own sake, and especially since I'm pragmatic and detached enough that little really fazes me. Not because I expect most of the things I read to matter in the least, my life hasn't changed for the worse since I stopped watching Indian news a decade ago, and my exposure to world affairs is incidental to whatever I run into online.
I agree. Just because a given political issue doesn't affect your life today, doesn't mean it will never affect your life in the future. But if it doesn't affect your life today, it probably isn't healthy to react as if it does.
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Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.
But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.
And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.
In a globalized world, these shenanigans impact Muslims and Jews living in my country. Muslims in particular are feeling unfairly treated, which can cause attacks to happen against Jews or non-Jews.
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You could get several thousand refugees settled in your neck of the woods.
This was happening in various places around the UK before recent developments. At best, this only accelerates something that already existed. The source ultimately did not matter until all the stars align and the knock on effects reached your doorstep.
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"But being neither Austrian nor Bosnian, and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which a political assassination in the Balkans could ever become relevant to me."
I mean, really? Israel is a nuclear power, backed by the biggest superpower in the world. Hamas is backed, formally or tacitly, by a host of Middle Eastern nations, at least one of which (Iran)
is a nuclear powerhas an active nuclear program. The Palestinian conflict has been threatening to spill over and become something much graver than a territorial squabble for decades.Even without literal WW3 breaking out, there are lots of ways the conflict could directly impact on you, personally, even without you being Jewish or Muslim. One example off the top of my head: a full-scale boycott of Israeli companies modelled on that enacted upon apartheid-era South Africa (as advocated for by Ilhan Omar, among many others) would have all kinds of unforeseen and potentially destabilizing effects upon the global economy.
Is the Palestinian conflict less relevant to the average Briton than, say, Rishi Sunak's economic policies? Of course. But I'd argue it's more relevant (or at least potentially relevant) than what Meghan Markle had for breakfast, or "underrepresentation of BAME people in BBC radio dramas", or Trump's dirty laundry - so it seems odd to use this as an example of the general trend of "media pushing non-stories to distract the hoi polloi".
I think there's a world of difference between making an educated prediction that [story] is unlikely to have any direct impact on your life, and explicitly stating that it never will. OP sounded closer in tone to the latter, at least as far as my reading went.
I don't think Iran is known to be a nuclear power, at least as I understand the phrase (possessing nuclear weaponry).
Upon further investigation you are correct, but the country does have an active nuclear weapons program and are working towards the goal of having nuclear weapons at their disposal. Or perhaps it might be accurate to say that any nuclear weapons Iran might possess are not a matter of public record as in the case of the US, Russia etc.
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Perhaps I’m playing devil’s advocate, but the assassination’s significance was immediately noticed.
The Washington Post, 14 July, 1914.
Sure, but imagine you pulled a list of the names of the British soldiers who died in the battle of the Somme. Do you think that if you went back in time to January 1914 and asked them for their thoughts on Archduke Ferdinand, the majority of them would have the slightest idea who you were talking about? I'm quite confident the default response would be something to the effect of "never heard of him, nothing to do with me". Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.
I'm not saying that anyone living in the UK is likely to die as a direct result of the conflict in Palestine escalating. I'm simply trying to illustrate that you never actually know which world events will eventually end up affecting you, and it isn't hard to end up with egg on your face. And if I was trying to pick an example of a global issue which has a negligibly small chance of affecting me personally, the conflict in Palestine wouldn't be at the top of my list.
Frank Ferdinand was de jure commander in chief of the Austrian military(as was at that point the norm for Austrian crown princes) and asking a British soldier ‘how does the top Austrian field marshal’s death possibly relate to your own’ would not seem terribly implausible even if the chain of causes would probably be wrong.
Sure, but lots of soldiers who died in the Somme weren't soldiers in January 1914 - a million men enlisted between August 1914 and January 1915, and the UK introduced conscription in 1916.
‘How does an Austrian field marshal’s death lead to yours’ has a pretty obvious answer for a British man in early 1914, though- I go into the army during a war.
Try asking young American men how a high ranking Russian/Chinese/Iranian military officer’s death could be connected to theirs. Most could point to an at least plausible chain of causality, even if they’re not that geopolitically aware.
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Something might have no impact on your life now, yet still have impact later through a chain of consequences. And the right time to do something about it may be now. It's a bad idea to ignore all steps of the chain other than the last one, on the grounds that they have no immediate consequences for you.
It's a problem of the boy who called wolf. Yes, we know there are real wolves. But you can't cry wolf anytime someone's 4 legged fury pet walks by your front door.
The analogy of course breaks down because different news events have different relevance to different people.
A hurricane is a real event with real danger, but if it's only gonna hit Florida I really don't need to hear about it. But people in Florida do need to hear about it!
I get that the differentiation is difficult. But I think the news channels (and their consumers) tend to prefer stories with drastic consequences and minimal reach over stories with minimal consequences and large reach.
I work with people that get on Fox news and talk about inflation. They get bumped all the time for updates about the latest scandal, or Trump Trial, or a war in country that most people can't find on a map.
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I think it’s mostly true, though I think one issue is that real evil can take hold a lot easier if everyone takes this sort of approach all the time. If America becomes a dictatorship tomorrow, the lived experience of the average person doesn’t change that much. You get up, go to work, raise your kids, play sports, watch TV or play games just as before. I would argue that the median American wouldn’t lose much power over the political process as he actually doesn’t have very much power now in a democracy. That doesn’t mean you can simply tune out on politics. Likewise, there are genocides happening all over the world. It won’t affect you personally, but I think it’s the height of privilege to say that because I am not in that position it shouldn’t be on my radar in some fashion.
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I disagree with the framing of this. Problems abound, for sure. However, the only thing you can reasonably control is your actions. Everybody has a Zone of Action and a Zone of Concern. Many - if not most - people have a Zone of Influence.
The problem you seem to be describing is that your Zone of Concern is far larger than your Zone of Action or Influence. That area is the Donut of Despair. Minimizing your Donut of Despair is a sign of mental stability, and there are three ways to keep it small.
Grill-pilling decreases your Zone of Concern. It increases your Slack, but does not exercise your agency. But what if you were able to increase your Zone of Action or Zone of Influence? If you are also not comfortable with your level of agency, this is likely to be more effective for mental stability than grill-pilling.
News Problems will exist with or without you - for now. What if your agency was large enough that you could create News Problems for other people? How would that change your perception of problems?
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My friend, I think you are underestimating the power of the Grill.
If you pass a picket of Palestine partisans as you procure some…charcoal, how should you proceed?
Assuming a nonviolent event, you can safely forget about it once you turn the corner. It’s still a News Problem.
It depends. Would painting rats in Palestine colors count as "violent"?
(if it was deep cover Mossad team in action, well done, mission accomplished)
edit: link
I…what? Were they dumping those in a public place?
I like a cute little lab rat more than the next guy, but that’s pretty dumb.
If that’s what I think it is, they dumped them in a McDonald’s in protest of McDonald’s feeding the Israeli army. Dumb, yes. Very dumb.
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One issue with your thesis is stated succinctly in the "first they came for..." adage. A problem doesn't need to affect you now for you to be justified in being concerned about it and for it to be prudent to fight back against it.
A second issue is that a lot of problems are indirectly caused by a problem further up the chain that might have gone unchallenged when it mattered. Did it affect me that seemingly every institution and corporation in the country decided to get on board with DEI/diversity hires? Probably not at the time and not in any given instance, no. But the downstream effects of that phenomenon certainly affect me now in many ways. But perhaps a lot of the Left's institutional capture would have been mitigated if people cared enough to put a stop to it before these people were hired into prominent positions in the first place.
In other words, you can't just ask "Does this affect me right now? If not, I don't care." You have to ask whether the what's happening now will have predictable consequences that, perhaps after some more iterations, will affect you later.
The advice to get off the internet and touch grass or grill is so utterly risible to me. It is the motto of the unprincipled and the cowardly, as far as I'm concerned. Evil (and problems resulting from good intentions) prevail when good people do nothing, and all that. (Now, if someone is of a certain temperament and simply finds himself too emotionally crippled by the problems of the world to handle hearing about them, I actually have no problem with that person getting off the internet and grilling. We don't literally all have to be engaged with these problems to conquer them. I also don't expect amputees to be conscripted into the armed forces.)
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