It needs to be pointed out that this is an option that originates from privilege. Ignoring the news means ignoring politics. Ignoring politics is tacit support of the status quo. The status quo does not put everyone on equal footing. Disadvantaged people would therefore suffer more from disengaging with the news than people of privilege.
I disagree. News != politics. In fact, if I replace the "status quo" in your statement with "reality", the meaning will change significantly. I don't need a journalist to tell me that the healthcare situation (to pick an example) is absurd, or that taxation (fed+state) in some states is already at European levels, yet without any healthcare or education benefits. It's easy to be aware of these facts, you just have to be alive.
But I also don't need journalists to be brain-washing people by suggesting different ways of sharing the costs (insurance? single payer? have rich people pay for me?). The real solution is, of course, to lower the cost to the levels comparable to EU countries, but the costs are rarely discussed in the mass media, only cost sharing is brought up. Why? Because it's an unpopular solution among people who set the agenda. Fixing health care (i.e. halving its cost _at the very least_) means dropping US GDP by a whopping 9% [1].
So it's not about slow vs fast news. It's about controlling the public discourse. The old system of setting the national agenda [2] is obviously not working well if a populist with a Twitter account can override the MSM narrative and get himself elected.
I don't know what you are intending to mean with your first point. Yes, you can change a word in my comment to a word with a different meaning and it will change the meaning of what I said. That doesn't mean what I said isn't true.
Healthcare is really too big and broad of an issue to really highlight what I am saying here. There is no way not to at least be aware of it if not interact with it and it has been one of the biggest political issues in this country for decades. However you can take a look at certain pieces of that to see my point.
For example, a tiny minority of people reading this have any reason to know the price of a month's supply of insulin is over $450 or that 1 in 4 people with diabetes are rationing themselves insulin in order to afford the drug. But more and more news stories are highlighting this issue which is leading to political pressure to address it. Just today there was a congressional hearing on the subject. I have no idea if something will be done to reduce the costs of insulin, but I know the price wouldn't go down if people just ignored every news story about it.
> I don't know what you are intending to mean with your first point.
> Yes, you can change a word in my comment to a word with a different
> meaning and it will change the meaning of what I said.
> That doesn't mean what I said isn't true.
By using the inflammatory vocabulary, you've re-framed the issue as a class conflict, pushing the proposed solution (ignoring the news) out of scope. This is a classic move straight from Animal Farm. I simply suggested to re-read your comment using less polarizing language. This re-focuses us back on the original proposal, and suddenly we may realize that not listening to sponsored "suggestions" proposed by the media may have us voting for (using my example) a working healthcare system, which would be great for all people, disadvantaged or not.
>suddenly we may realize that not listening to "suggestions" proposed by the media may have us voting for (using my example) a working healthcare system, which would be great for all people, disadvantaged or not.
Maybe, but what are the odds of that vs. being kept in a state of aloof hypocognition that reinforces the status quo though?
Without hearing of disasters or San Franciscan homeless slums from the news, I'd barely know about them because I don't go out of my way to research things like that -- the time and interest isn't there. Left entirely to my own perspective, the biggest problems in the world are the ones I'm facing -- usually programming or computing related.
I really don't know what to say to you if you think "status quo" is inflammatory vocabulary. And I never said anything about suggestions from the media. You are mixing fact based news with opinion based news. You can be informed by ignoring opinion based news, but you still need fact based news to have an educated opinion on an issue.
The problem is not jargom, it is tone. If we criticize the ideas instead of the people we can reach an understanding. But by using "you" it becomes more personal and more inflammatory.
And, so what percent of the contemporary news media would you suggest is "fact based" and what percent would you suggest is "opinion based"? Keep in mind that opinion based does not simply mean the article begins under the section "opinion". Articles on issues that are littered with opinions are, in effect, opinion based. One other important nuance here is that while the existence of a quote may be a fact, if it expresses an opinion - it similarly adds little more than opinion to an article.
This is dangerously naive with respect to how marketing works in the era of social media. Questions you should be asking yourself... Who controls the influential twitter account or blog? Do they make money from it either by posting sponsored content or do they run ads? Could someone who controls a botnet or clickfarm manipulate them by either granting or withholding likes, traffic, and clicks?
I try to post in-depth and reasoned comments to this exact point whenever someone in my social circle posts ranty "news" articles, but they just get completely flat-out ignored.
I've never seen anyone argue that this elite vs the rest pickpocketing isn't actually happening and (what we call) the culture war is the real battle.
It would be helpful if there was, because then I could try to understand the mindset behind the dismissal of our view— it's driving me crazy.
You're out of your ing mind. One of tbe greatest abuses that lower classes have to endure is the 24 hour propoganda and emotional hijacking machine known as "the news".
God forbid people have the freedom to have cognitive peace, quiet, contemplation, and free play.
If anything, the "disadvantaged" have more to gain from disengaging from constant cognitive hijacking!
I am really hoping that one day we can somehow arrive at clean useful and possibly actionable news streams which balance issues and positive/celebratory information.
Today’s news large outlets create anxiety rage and suffering and serve as a tool for separation and propaganda. This experience is extremely toxic and one needs to exercise high level of discipline and often sacrifice well being in order to stay informed.
People point this out all the time. I think it’s used as a non-sequiteur argument to invalidate people’s opinions who have privilege.
Just because someone was born into privilege does not mean they can’t have opinions or that those opinions are incorrect.
I also think ignoring the news has nothing to do with privilege. So, you’re saying that if I did not have privilege then somehow reading the news is going to change anything?
99% of “news” is absolute garbage and a distraction from actual issues.
Strong disagree with the black and whiteness of this. Ignoring all news and politics, full stop, is less a privileged and more an ignorant position to take.
But I'd argue the worst position is one of non-stop media bingeing without action. In fact, I'd say the only way to act reliably or with clear intention is to not binge on media, to not stay in the zone of manufactured outrage. But instead to keep sanely abreast of what's happening and engage only when meaningful action can be had.
I found when I disconnected from the news and politic in my own country that the people around me didn't really have well developed retention of the new's they where talking about. For example, news event A occurs on day, and everyone in the office talks about A, and how it made them feel. Then news event B occurs the next day, and there doesn't seem to be any cognitive awareness how A connects to B, instead A is forgotten and everyone emotes about B.
I've had to use the analogy to people how weird it appears. It's like everyone talks about a blue cat one day, and the next day talk about a red cat. Everywhere you go everyone talks about the same colored cat's.
> It needs to be pointed out that this is an option that originates from privilege.
I don't know if this is what you intended, but I'm reading this as "many or most people who ignore the news are privileged". For instance, this would include many people who are at a 7th grade reading level.
I'm... not sure that's what you meant to insinuate though. Could you clarify?
Depends which news sources and whether the news is ingested without any critical lense. Ignorantly consuming news can create far more tacit support for the status quo (or opposition agenda based on bias) regardless of actual political outcomes.
Highly disagree. I can ignore the news and still be politically active. I put a lot of effort into insulating myself from whatever the latest freakout is and I also invest a lot of energy into voting any time we have an election.
my take on this is that's it's better focus on major actions taken during a mandate (and that's what people who don't care too much about politics do) to then inform the next vote.
that's why politics before the rise of the internet were much more formal, people remembered what was done and said.
now there is just so much noise it's very hard to distinguish the signal, which leads to people being influenced and directed into "identity politics" (are you yellow or green, blue or red, left or right, good or bad?)
Like disadvantaged people are gonna read something in the NYT and then successfully lobby their congressman to change it?
Serenity to accept what you can't change is absolutely the most effective strategy for those who don't have the means to change things. Worry about your family first, work within the constraints you have. That's reality for a lot of people. I'd argue it's 'privileged' to think otherwise.
They can't change it but they still need to know to prepare for it. If the GOP killed the ACA, millions of people would need to immediately take action to find alternative support. Most of us on here would be fine either way.
Immediately take what action, specifically, in your ACA hypothetical? Honestly asking.
Best I can come up with is "hope your kids don't get sick", followed by "ignore calls from debt collectors on that emergency room bill".
Reading the news obsessively and buying into the culture war actually does nothing to make those strategies more effective. Just saps energy that could be spent elsewhere.
Fair question. It would depend on the individual, lots of people would also probably run to their doctors and get increased length/dosage prescriptions so they have some emergency supplies. Younger low income people might just cancel their insurance entirely, those with pre-existing conditions would have to consider employment changes potentially (contractor -> full time) and similarly for those on the marketplace.
Edit: To get on my soapbox a bit here, I think people are being a bit black and white as usual. Yea, you don't need to read every political opinion piece by Fox, CNN and NYT, but you also should read more than exactly zero. Neither of these extremes can possibly be optimal for everyone (or anyone probably). HN really likes the narrative "Title: X is problematic and we should fix it. Top Comment: Well I completely stopped X because it was bad for me and now everything is awesome and I'm a 10x dev!" but it's never really that simple.
Knowledge about the Individual Mandate matters a lot to lower income folks. We have to follow the news to learn about such things, whereas the privileged techie does not.
Can you explain your tax planning situation around the individual mandate? Like, did you, as a low income hacker news reader, read something on the news that you used to save money when filing your own taxes?
Because being politically active at any thing but the most basic level requires knowledge of the issues and knowledge of the issues requires following the news. If you are not politically active you are supporting the status quo because you are not putting in any effort to change the status quo.
Or they could do actual research instead of reading the "news" - which largely amounts to professional blogging these days. Following the news does not make one more knowledgeable about politics or current events necessarily. Some of the most ill-informed people I know watch news regularly. There's no guarantee that news is accurate or balanced in it's reporting.
Right, when it comes voting time look at actions a candidate took and what they said they would do. Make your judgements from there and vote. That's all that matters. Everything else is like watching a drama.
And I'd also add that it's hardly even a well conceived process. Most people ideologically align themselves one way or the other and then vote that way, regardless of anything else.
For instance Chicago has been exclusively under one party's exclusive control for going on 90 years now. And so this party has had decades to carry out whatever grand vision they could ever imagine for the city. So we'd expect to see what this grand vision would culminate in. And we see a city with a broken school system, rampant crime, tremendous financial problems, horrible inequity, and that is just in general - broken.
Yet the people keep voting for the exact same party and general ideologies. It's just not logical, but it's how most people operate on most topics. They pick a conclusion they want to be true, and then find evidence to support it, instead of examining the evidence to come to the most reasonable conclusion. Perhaps in large part because the latter process often yields conclusion that we very much don't want to be true.
Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo. In fact they’re not good at it at all. Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.
Also, most people’s personal issues trump any macro issue by far. You can change your status quo. It’s almost impossible for an individual to change the status quo and definitely not through typical political engagement.
>Uber and AirBnB changed the status quo far more than any politician in my lifetime.
I am sorry, but that is just depressing if you believe something like that. The ACA is one thing that comes to mind. Improving healthcare for Americans would have a much bigger impact on people's lives than giving people who already own a home a way to make a little extra money.
> Politics aren’t the only way to change the status quo.
The status quo is a political arrangement. It's just a way of referring to the state of power's distribution across institutions and people. That's political.
There is literally, definitionally nothing apolitical that affects the status quo.
Changing the status quo is--inescapably, apodictically--political.
Uber and AirBnB are highly political institutions.
By this definition literally every interaction with the outside world is political. Is a definition that broad really useful?
When people talk about politics they’re almost always talking about interfacing with the government. Taking an Uber is definitely not a political statement in most people’s minds.
No it means you should analyse your motivations for doing so carefully. If all you do is read it to get angry at something, or dismiss the opinion of whoever is speaking, then why read/watch it at all?
I'd go further and say if you're doing it just so you can give a hot take on politics to someone nearby, or have your opinions validated by them then also stop doing that (it's hard) and be mindful that whoever they are may actually disagree with you but isn't interested in having their views criticised as a part of someone's entertainment schedule or to be lectured too.
Most articles are little better than click bait. Journalists writing about X usually aren’t trained in X and usually have little time to build expertise in X. They are by training writers, so for the most part they’re reduced to parroting the narratives peddled by this or that group or political party. It’s very rare I read a general news article within my areas of subject matter knowledge and think “oh, this writer really understands and has highlighted the important issues.” I have to assume the same is true for subject matter I’m not familiar with, like tax policy. In reality, for a lot of these subjects, nobody knows the answers, not even the “experts.” For those things, journalists have neither the space, time, or education to even do a good job raising the relevant issues, much less elucidating the answers.
This is a reductive and misleading summary of what journalists do. Every blogger on the Internet also writes, with varying degrees of training and success. What reporters do that bloggers don't is reporting --- surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
That's the job of a reporter. Not knowing everything, but being willing to do the legwork to find people with firsthand knowledge of things, and then relating what they have to say. That's why we call journalism "the first draft of history", and not the textbook of history.
Like every profession, journalism has limitations and is itself practiced with varying degrees of success. We're fond of Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" on HN, but ignore the Djikstra Amnesia Effect, holding journalists to a standard we rarely achieve in our own profession, where our own errors routinely cause direct harm to people through ignorance and omissions.
I don’t disagree with your first paragraph. As to your second, I think that’s part of the problem: those people with first hand knowledge are often relaying a sound bite, a piece of packaged narrative. And the journalist doesn’t know enough to really add anything to that narrative. That may be a limitation of journalism, but I question whether given that limitation, journalism is a useful vehicle for educating the public about the highly complex issues that underpin our society.
(Someone on HN changed my mind recently by pointing out that, while judges sometimes invoke history, they are generally bad historians. It was a thought provoking assertion, because it’s not uncommon for judges to justify opinions by reference to economics or social science. But they have neither the training nor time and procedural flexibility to do a good job of such analysis. My conclusion was, therefore, that such analysis simply isn’t useful. I think journalism might suffer from the same problem.)
Sturgeon has something to say about journalism just as Crichton and Djikstra do. It is not my claim that all of it is good.
But then, there's also a 4th amnesia (so many amnesiae!), a reverse Gell-Mann, where we forget all the incontrovertibly good journalism; for instance, John Carreyrou brought Theranos down, despite any personal expertise with phlebotomy, just through the power of bird-dogging primary sources.
> surveying and cultivating sources, visiting places, making a zillion phone calls, working with fact checkers (itself a tedious job that has little to do with the craft of writing).
I highly doubt that the average article even in prestigious news organizations (e.g. NYT, NPR, The Atlantic) goes through that level or rigor, given how frequently they cite provably false information. The overwhelming majority of the news articles I read, even from preeminent news outlets, amounts to summarizing a story that a different outlet broke. Often with several layers of indirection. I've seen plenty of stories about things posted on social media, and the author of the news articles doesn't even bother to link to the primary source. The latter is especially pernicious, it signals to me that the authors wants me to take their words at face value and not facilitate me viewing the relevant information and forming my own opinion.
If I were in that situation, I would want all the relevant news possible, in any and all formats available. TV broadcasts of cease-fires are great news for someone who wants to get out, as are radio reports of major hot-spots, etc. Getting the relevant news can be the difference between life and death in these situations.
Don't the yuppies generally vote democrat and the democrats usually oppose these things while the very-not-yuppies tend to vote GOP and the GOP usually likes/is ambivalent about these things? Like, I get it, gotta grab a side in The Culture Wars, but we should at least be fair about it shouldn't we?
But you can just ignore the news and vote Democrat and get the same effect. It’s not like those yuppies were going to vote Republican until the NYT opened their eyes.
What are the things that the average person who doesn’t like the status quo does? They vote every 2 years - it’s the only power that most people have that really moves the needle. Otherwise for national issues there’s almost nothing one can do without dedicating a large portion of life time and energy.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? I seem to have noticed you doing it a lot again recently. It would be good if you'd take a step back from that because this comment is over the flameline. That's not cool, regardless of how good or right your points are, and I'm sure you can make them without that.
My read was that he was making a rhetorical point, which he continued carefully and at length below, not actually calling people here "bad". This would be an odd thread in which to accuse him of flaming people.
I don't blame OP for choosing his macbook and burning man over a single Bangladeshi child when OP is likely paying rent to and also employed by people who are personally hoarding wealth to feed millions of starving children and instead using that wealth to invent new ways to make people pay even more for a basic modest existence.
The point is that you have no moral obligation to read the news and learn about the suffering of distant people in some ill conceived attempt to try and empathize with them. Humans aren’t built that way. You don’t have a generalized obligation to inform yourself about the abstract struggles of others and give up your own priorities in some token gesture of support for those people.
Take two people who both go to Burning Man instead of changing some kid’s life in Bangladesh. A reads the news and votes for X out of concern for some disadvantaged group. B doesn’t read the news and votes for Y because he doesn’t perceive the struggles of that disadvantaged group. Notwithstanding that difference, radius of empathy of A and B are almost the same. Both exclude the majority of those suffering in the world—billions of people—from their radius of empathy, not caring enough even to give up a frivolity for themselves.[1] Excessive moralizing over that small difference is indeed rather hypocritical.
[1] The moral rabbit hole here runs very deep. For example, all else being equal, buying an ICE car hurts people in Bangladesh who will suffer the most from rising sea level due to global warming. But at the margin, taking the extra money you’d spend on a new electric car and just giving it to some kid in Bangladesh will do more good than the incremental environmental benefit from buying that electric car.
Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News, regardless of how wrong or annoying you find someone else's comments. Personal attacks, in particular, are right out.
No more of this please, especially since we've hard to warn you multiple times in the past.
Exactly. And my initial point wasn't even criticizing or assigning blame. I was simply pointing out an action that is available to many of us that we may not realize isn't available to everyone. I know in the past it has helped me build my own empathy to learn that I choice I have made isn't open to others and why that might be.
It also needs to be pointed out that the only political system where people aren't allowed to be indifferent is known by the charming name of "totalitarianism".
Truly "disadvantaged" people have little to win from any sort of politics and have little time for it. I don't think hobos give a lot of thought to the supreme court.
