Mean World Syndrome | Hacker News Reader

Mean World Syndrome

en.wikipedia.org

46 pointspessimizer28 comments

It's not just television media that contributes to this, but also just the people around you. For example, many people I know who are firearm hobbyists seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the possibility of armed intruders. When enough of them are together, they get themselves really worked up about an extremely rare event that none of them have actually experienced.

No, most of these people are just itching to shoot somebody. I no longer share my firearms hobby with others after finding this to be true time and time again.

Could you briefly expand? Do you mean they want to be found in a position where they can be justified to shoot?

It's a fantasy many have, yes. It's an almost desperate yearning for some.

There's a lot of overlap with the survivalist/militia types. These people "plan" (such as their limited, stunted mental faculties permit) for apocalyptic scenarios and the destruction of our government. Many even view themselves in the role of a redeemer--they'll form the nucleus of the new society that will develop. And so on. There's just a whole strain of lunacy in this area.

You can argue against someone's beliefs without using such unnecessary appeals against someone's "stunted mental faculty".

These people are cognitively impaired on a deep level. There's no argument against their beliefs, because their beliefs are a word salad of conspiracy theories and absolutely insane fantasy. Many of them should be in mental health facilities for treatment.

> Do you mean they want to be found in a position where they can be justified to shoot?

Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. Except, "justified" is even a bit of a stretch. It's more of a "justified in their own mind" and not exactly per the law, and then thinking that they're so high, mighty, and personable that they'll be able to win over a judge/jury with their reasoning.

I'm honestly not trying to exaggerate, it's pretty fucking scary and unsettling. Gun nuts will tell you some fucked up shit if you physically look like what they think to be a "good" person.

The only slight restoration in faith I've had in a few years was upon meeting a dude with well over 200 guns, including two .50 cals, an exceptionally beefy .458 SOCOM build, a few transferable machine guns, and over 250,000 rounds of assorted calibers of ammunition (that was all that was in his immediately visible storage)

I was with a buddy (no longer friends with because they're batshit insane) who is incredibly gung-ho about personal carry, everywhere he goes, including where it's posted to be illegal (banks, hospitals, etc) who wanted to know what the dude enjoyed to carry. Dude fairly quickly explained that he's never felt the need to carry and doesn't even have his CCW, and asked why my buddy felt the need to carry where we live (there is absolutely zero reason within a 30mile+ radius, unless you're perhaps a farmer with large livestock that could knock you down - but that's not even really CCW-esque, as you're on your property)

My buddy was quite visibly miffed by his response. At a later time the dude and I were together, he mentioned he never really talks about his guns because of the amount of crazy mofos in the hobby, and that he got the idea my buddy was one of them (he was)

Now, how exactly did we meet and see all of his guns he typically doesn't show people?

Sewing. We were all also sewing hobbyists, with multiple fairly large machines. His large garage/second house on his property is where all of his sewing/guns/woodworking equipment goes, that he typically doesn't bring people to unless they're coming for sewing or woodworking. And so, in the end, why all these guns you may wonder? I obviously don't know the intricacies of his mind as I do mine, but we're both mechanical engineers (and I a hobby machinist), and there's something very much to enjoy about guns from that perspective. Just as there is in sewing, woodworking, and machining. But goddamn do the crazies (which seem to be the norm now) ruin the gun hobby.

Wow - this is a powerful account of why you don't judge a character given the mere choice of hobby. Equally inspiring to hear of enriched private lives; thanks for sharing.

I wouldn’t say that it is most people. But yes I have met gun lovers who dream of becoming a “hero” by shooting somebody/anybody for whatever reason. They obviously have serious mental issues. They usually tried to get in the military but were rejected.

To be fair I had the same fantasy. When I was 11.

... while completely ignoring the more likely event that the "intruder" ends up being a cop who shots you when you have something that even looks like a weapon.

I usually say it's far safer in the current US to not have a gun.

If the police will shoot you for simply possessing a firearm...do we really have the right to bare arms?

I guess we have the right to store an unloaded firearm in a gun safe.

> do we really have the right to bare arms?

No. It's why I wear only full sleeve shirts.

My wife has revoked my right to bare toes when going out to eat. It's just the right thing to do for civilization.

You’ve got the right but they’ve got something better: qualified immunity.

Way back when my mother mentioned the most common intruder is going to be your daughters boyfriend. Or your drunk neighbor.

That depends a lot on your zipcode

I know a firearm owner who’s immediate family has experienced two incidents of violent armed robbery. Yes, that did shape their worldview. While I get the vibe your poking at, some are very justified in their caution and desire to be prepared for the worst even if the worst is admittedly very unlikely to happen.

Were those incidents of street robbery, or armed home invasion?

"It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war."

Alternatively, I wear a seatbelt despite never having been in a car accident.

I can't find the source now but I remember hearing that the number of gund deaths by homicide is lower than by suicide.

So if you are worried about someone dangerous coming into your house with a gun.. You should be most worried about yourself.

While the concept intuitively makes some sense, I doubt it could ever be proven. How do you make a controlled experiment to prove something like that?

Also the article focuses on murders on TV, but I personally find the sanitized "A-team like" violence where people get beat up all the time, but nobody ever dies, worse. What conclusions should a kid take from viewing a steady diet of that.

My understanding of Mean World Syndrome was that it is related to what gets shown in the news. The news media get more eyeballs and engagement when they focus on bad things happening in a community. This can lead people to believe that only bad things are happening, or that more bad things are happening than before.

The book Factfulness makes a pretty good case that people generally think the world is falling apart but that objectively the world is currently in better shape than any other period of history.

As far as a controlled experiment - this is anecdotal, but I tend to feel less safe outside at night if I have been spending more time inside watching the news or consuming social media. I tend to feel more safe outside at night when I have been spending time disconnected from those trying to tell me how the world is.

> The book Factfulness makes a pretty good case that people generally think the world is falling apart but that objectively the world is currently in better shape than any other period of history.

The book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler also makes the same point about how focusing on the negative can obscure the good that is happening in the world.

https://www.diamandis.com/blog/the-world-is-still-better-tha...

Hans Rosling had a talk about this topic[1] 6 years ago, albeit less about "mean" and more about how "bad" the world was, and more importantly, how bad people thought the world was compared to how it actually is.

Not too surprisingly, even media and journalists scored worse than random guessing.

So it's hard to point fingers to the viewer getting wrong impression of the world when the information senders themselves can't measure it (or send it) correctly

[1] https://youtu.be/Sm5xF-UYgdg

Something like the opposite also seems to exist. During the floods in Germany, some people ignored the warnings, claiming that nothing really bad had ever happened before.

I've worked in a hospital setting, and one of the things that struck me was just how much you don't see on the news. The news is aggregating over a wider area, so to speak, so I do think it provides an amplified experience in an important sense, but there's also a lot that doesn't ever make it into the news to begin with.

That Wikipedia article about the influence of violence especially on children does consider TV, newspapers, photographs and social media, but does not mention games a single time. Am I missing something? Why the free pass for video games?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com