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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.
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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