Honestly I'm surprised more people aren't burnt out on this. I can only be angry and get triggered by the same bullshit for so long before it just doesn't work.
Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
Even the dumbasses who stick paper clips in electrical outlets because they think it would be funny or looking to get high wouldn't do that because it not only is obviously dangerous but not likely to get high. Smoking random literal area weeds would be more fun and less stupid.
This is an amazing thought experiment. I wonder if using this method, but extrapolating to multiple competing news sources could get remove bias both in recency as well as consistency.
Doesn’t matter if the emotional jerking doesn’t work no more. Your mind is still hijacked.
Only 150 more years till we can apply to Starfleet...
It does take more of your willpower and effort to do all that, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a more objective view of something. Back in the old days, the access to information in the first place was what people had to work hard for. In the age of information abundance, you still have to work to get it, but now you have to do more filtering and less figuring out how to access it in the first place.
I can say without a doubt it has made a significant improvement to my general mood and demeanor. I no longer get sucked into a trap reading infuriating news about the government or inane comments on social media sites. Now when I do happen to come across a clickbait/ragebait headline, my brain seems to just ignore it and carry on with life. Sometimes my friends will bring up the latest "omg Trump, did you hear?" news while we hang out and it will devolve into a bitchfest where they get visibly angry as they talk about it, meanwhile I just sit back and say "I have no idea what you're talking about". Ignorance is bliss, and I say that completely unironically.
It is a little sad because I previously loved being "in the know" and always kept up with the news and wanted to be involved in politics. I miss that aspect a little bit, and I'm certainly wary of the greater effect if everyone in society just disengaged from public debate, but for the most part the improvements have far outweighed that negative.
If you find yourself spending more than even a couple minutes a day being angry/stressed at current events, I strongly recommend limiting, if not totally cutting out, that type of news. It really is great.
The local news people don't put every fire or robbery through some ideological/woke lens, generally, it's just facts.
Moreover, that it happens near to you gives it some extra empathetic relevance.
When it's 'people you kinda might now' you don't think of it as an abstraction.
I'm in Montreal and I watch PBS Vermont often. Burlington/Montpellier local news. It's so provincial it's almost funny.
It's really refreshing to see regular people, and to know that even if the events are 'local' - it's these kinds of events that are actually most relevant to most people's lives. The political stuff is weirdly not that important.
For the news, pay less attention to the content of the news, but the style in which it is delivered, paying particular attention to word choice, chosen perspective, suspiciously excluded details, double standards, epistemic soundness (how would one actually know the "fact" that is being reported), etc.
For internet conversations, try to remain undecided on the particular issue being argued, but closely observe the nature of the conversation, using the same techniques as above.
I think if you can manage to do this skillfully, what would normally be an exercise in frustration and stress can transform into a pleasurable study of the nature of human beings, if you're into that sort of thing.
It seems fairly unlikely that this is a novel idea, but I've yet to come across any literature that discusses it directly. I imagine part of the problem is that studying such a thing would be incredibly difficult.
[0] I say "seems" because I am running purely on heuristics derived from aggregate patterns of aggregate behavior, comments, and voting - to be more certain, one would require the ability to somehow monitor individuals to see if this theory can actually be observed at the individual level.