Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear. For a while I played along but then I quickly realized that all this stuff is manufactured to manipulate people. Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.

Humans are at their core emotional creatures. You don't get engagement with logic and facts. Instead you go after emotional stories. It takes immense mental effort to see through these stories and to hold back the immediate emotional responses. Many people have no clue that they are being manipulated in this way.

I came to the US in 2000. At first I found the constant excitement in TV news interesting but after two or three years I noticed that I couldn't handle it anymore. It just wasn't comfortable for me.

Is it maybe that most people have checked out too and only a small but loud minority is addicted to all the nonsense? On Facebook it seems it's only a few people that constantly post web links or engage in flame wars. Most people I know are very quiet.

Just because they are quiet doesn't mean they aren't impacted.

I know someone who only ever posts about gardening, and yet I know for a fact she reads almost everything people post. Her husband on the other hand is constantly posting and commenting on far-right posts. They are still influenced the same way, they just express it differently.

> Most people I know are very quiet.

That's by design and intentional. Anything you say online can be used to convict you in some obscure court of public opinion where your viewpoint didn't align with the mainstream viewpoint.

There is also the symmetrical problem of not reacting strongly to a story that deserves it. Plenty of people, it seemed, were quite non-reactive about the Snowden disclosures. It just wasn't an exciting news story, whether you were for or against him.

(This, I think, is the real lesson of computing in the modern era, that subjects will not object to being surveilled if they don't notice it. The abstract argument against it is predicated on possible future action, and the inability to stop it.)

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum?

Will it ever happen? If not will the economic repercussions leave us with a decent world or some kind of dystopia?

Not long. We're at the stage where virtual assistants are being deployed through the population. As soon as people find reliable ways to ensure their loyalty, a strategic turn will make them unstoppable.

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum?

Such things started forming on YouTube (with some problematic elements) but were defunded with an eye towards attracting more old media ad money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfHXXV45EjE

Phillip DeFranco isn't perfect, but he's graduated from YouTube punk to what passes as a "moderate" there. (I think he's a good way to keep track of the middle of opinion in new media there.) He's also decided to start his own online news network.

I don't think they will, they'll turn off the news completely and follow "news" about other stuff instead. Sports, video games, hobbies, they'll ignore current events and politics or anything else they might find anxiety inducing.

That's what I do anyway, I'm much happier for it.

I suppose it is possible that a critical mass of people will give up. That seems unlikely to me, too many care for better or worse. The people that care will either remain poorly informed for gradually get more informed and by our electing of Trump it seems quite likely misinformed with reign for some time. (I am not trying to politicize this, but trump got huge help from crazy news sources like breitbart)

Could we build a plugin that alters headlines to reflect reality?

thats why i made this : http://TrumpTweets.io - is powered by caring humans

That would be fantastic. I'd love a plugin like that.

There is a problem in curation / moderation though. Who do you trust with correcting headlines? The public, with voting? Easily manipulated still.

Another problem this doesn't correct is the selection of what events to report on. To use an example from the article, terrorism would still dominate your news feed.

For the terrorism example you could have a nifty bot that keeps track of worldwide terror stats and local terror stats and report something like: odds of dying in terror attack rise from .00005% to .00006% (obv made up number) after {city} attacks. Would have to figure out how to do this while still respecting those who were affected though.

Or for clickbait science headlines immediately report the statistical significance of the cited paper/credibility of journal based on the number of citations that journal recieves from other scientists.

Some types of articles would be tougher than others for sure but that doesn't mean we couldn't grab at the low hanging fruit.

I suspect fear and outrage releases some natural addictive brain chemicals. The fear and outrage porn industry certainly resembles an addictive substance scene.

At some point you should start getting bored with it. Same with porn. For a while it's interesting but then it just gets boring. Obviously I have no first hand experience watching pron. I only repeat what I hear from others :-)

Thing is that while the addictive use becomes 'boring' after a while (desensitized), an addict will still continue doing it. Often will go more extreme trying to compensate. Goes for porn, heroin, adrenaline and probably social media.

They do! Fear, anger, and outrage create a rush that stimulates your reward circuits with dopamine, in the same way that a thrill ride or a good workout do:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-shrink/201508/a...

They also cause the release of cortisol, that depresses your immune system, unlike healthy behaviors like spending time with your friends or taking a good walk in a park.

I feel the same way, but it took time to get there. At first, it was more exciting to be plugged in... then you start to notice the patterns, and the lack of anything substantive. For some of us, that leads to disengagement, but maybe that's because we already prefer to focus on other issues?

I formed an opinion on a political event this year. I was right, but I didn't back my call and it cost me $40k - in the sense that I knew what to do (sell, shift to $) and I had the opportunity to do it, but I had a "doesn't matter to little guys like me" perspective. Last time I'm going to be disengaged....

Dopamine. We market excitement and adventure to children like sugar (along with sugar, which is what's actually being sold a lot of the time), then most of them get into the workforce and discover that most jobs are bullshit and while the political system is nominally a democracy, most corporations and public institutions are authoritarian dictatorships. Some people accept this and can be bought off with holidays or being consumers, more intelligent ones who can't can be redirected into being angry at Those People.

In general, you can sell 3 things: 1) fear, 2) greed, and 3) sex. 30% percent of Internet content is porn. So you have number 3 covered. Selling greed is hard, so lets do fear.

Wait... index funds, e*trade, 'you can day trade your way to retirement at 29!'... quants and HFT, the fact that there is a Wall Street after 2008...

Money still sells most of all. Fear is just catching up now that the "news" is instant.

Desire for money is still driven by fear, greed, or sex.

Also, almost all of the B2B sector is selling greed (cyber-security being a notable exception), as is every ad-supported business out there. The whole financial industry as well.

Because they have no lives and posting emotional responses on the internet makes them feel important. Pretty simple.

And of course they'll rather challenge you to a duel with kitchen knives before admitting the real reason.

So yeah, emotional creatures. Most of the "humans" are more like "animals in human body form".

B/c we haven't completely evolved beyond our animal instincts yet. Merovingian said it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHW0FgiB7TI&t=4m16s

1) It's very much easier to be negative than to be positive.

2) Negativity is more contagious.

I agree with 1, but positivity can be contagious too, just gotta keep fighting to stay positive in the face of others negativity.

This has its roots in our evolutionary history. Missing something positive might have meant missing dinner. Missing something negative might have meant being dinner.

> I don't understand why so many people are addicted to outrage, anger and fear.

I know right? It's outrageous how people are so addicted to outrage, anger and fear. :)

> Now I can't even stand watching CNN or watching a campaign ad.

I stopped watching cable news a long time ago. I also canceled my subscription to useless things like NYTimes, NPR, etc.

It's amazing how much media influences the way you think and contorts your viewpoint to their extremism.

"I know right? It's outrageous how people are so addicted to outrage, anger and fear. :)"

Knowing that these people are around makes my blood boil!!!!

"I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!"

The great Tom Lehrer: National Brotherhood Week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPNsr0mhcrY

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