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Comment by IanDrake | Hacker News Reader

>The World Is Not Falling Apart

Or, why I don't read anything but industry news.

Reading headline news will quickly erode your soul. You have nothing to gain by reading it and just about everything to lose.

When I tell this to people, the typical response is: "But I don't want to be uninformed". Information that you can't act on is not information; it's distraction.

The only thing worse than distraction is thinking you CAN act on news from around the world. If news from 100's of miles away is changing your behavior, that's bad. We're not going to die in a terrorist attack, a shark attack, from climate change, a new flu, etc...

These are the things people worry about incessantly. But we are going to die of cancer, heart disease, in a car accident, of old age, etc... how mundane.

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"These are the things people worry about incessantly. But we are going to die of cancer, heart disease, in a car accident, of old age, etc... how mundane."

Yup - when I teach probability, I start with the idea that what gets into the news is novel. What will kill you will not be in the news unless you are amazingly unlucky.

You do have some impact, as a voter. E.g. you might not be personally afraid of ISIS but the threat they pose to the region and Europe might be enough for you to think that the US should reverse its policy of trying to overthrow Assad.

Which of the two US parties are promising a meaningful change in international policy towards Syria?

And how long does it really take to figure out who you want to vote for obce every 4 years

There are meaningful elections at least twice a year. If you don't realize that, maybe that's because you're not paying enough attention?

Neither, I really should have said "as voter and a a citizen" since changing this policy might require more than voting.

But I think that this is something an ordinary citizen can do something about. The policy up until now was not created by arms manufacturers, or by neo-cons alone, but primarily by moderate liberals. Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein would say that these moderate liberals had been tricked into acting as pawns for the neo-cons. That doesn't have the ring of truth to me. I think they act according to their own ideology, albeit a hypocritical one that is liberal at home and right wing on the Middle East. This ideology can be argued and lobbied against by people with different opinions.

Chomsky wouldn't say that at all. His critique has always been primarily of liberals.

First you have to define "meaningful change." There are people on the right in the US who would define it as an invasion of the country. I suspect you are not one of those people.

Neither, possibly in part because they know those who would support that don't vote

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