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I think for some people there's good mental health reasons to avoid news, social media, etc, but I also think there are huge pragmatic reasons. There are a few people out there pointing this out, but not many. Neil Postman back in the 90s and Nassim Nicholas "Black Swan" Taleb nowadays are two I can think of. The basic idea is an ancient one though: knowledge and facts do not equate to wisdom. The signal to noise ratio is very very low right now and getting lower all the time. Why would we want to know things anyway? Presumably to assist our decision making. But there is so much noise out there, some of it deliberate and some of it just careless (eg social media posts), that our decision making is actually impaired. It's very hard to see the forest for the trees. Or to put it another way, it's hard to tell what is something that's useful or pragmatic for you to notice, to help you make wise decisions. Taleb used to be a wealthy stock broker man, now he's a mathematics prof. that specialises in risk, probability and decision making in uncertain conditions. He talks a lot about how paying near constant attention to something generally leads to myopic errors. For example, evil investors who check their stocks every 10 minutes and react constantly to fluctuations in the market not only are super stressed out, but are much more prone to losing everything than someone who checks once a year. The person who checks once a year can see a trend going up or down and respond accordingly; the person who checks every 10 minutes trying to min-max can easily mistake a large temporary change for the start of a trend and buy or sell at a stupid time. That's basically how I think many "smart" people I know are living their lives these days: constantly reacting to ever changing micro-knowledge like a drowning man in the sea. Instead of only bothering to notice something when it actually needs your attention. Note I'm talking about decision making here, not opinion-forming. They're not the same thing. I really felt the crux of this problem when I was having a discussion with my friend about the 2019 Australian bushfires. He was tracking the fires constantly and I was checking once a day when they were kinda near our town or the towns of people I loved, and ignoring them when they weren't. Anyway we had a disagreement because he said he thought sitting in his armchair caring about the people in other towns, even though there was nothing he could do, was a good deed of some kind. I said it was the same as doing nothing, it IS doing nothing. Just making yourself upset and also sort of voyeuristic. Better to ignore it. This guy has a PhD and is a Rational Science Man. I think he's just poisoned by the idea that knowledge in itself is good and that an opinion is an act. enomie fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Mar 31, 2022 |
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Mar 31, 2022 06:34
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Discendo Vox posted:I got one alert push from the washington post on the slap today, and 12 on other stories. One of them was on Hunter Biden's laptop, but that's because the post was doing original research on that line. Until the same story that generated the push from post hit, the only coverage in the nyt appears to have been one opinion piece. This assumes that "importance" is objective rather than a product of your worldview and if your worldview is constructed by the intake of a large amount of news then everything is desgined to seem "important" in order to keep you consuming the product. It is easier and better for broadcasters to simply tell people that everything is important right now and there will be another important thing to care about next time you consume, than it is to encourage them to foster a worldview that causes them to be selective in their intake. There is no value to the broadcaster in you doing that, the ideal situation is you consuming them constantly and watching their advertisements and adhering to their political views.
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Mar 31, 2022 12:31
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I think "ignore what you can't change" is fairly common advice in general and would apply to "knowing stuff" too. I'm sure something horrible happens somewhere every second and there's no use learning all the details of a brutal muder or war crimes etc, it'll be just horrible for your mental health with no real upside. The rest is about prioritizing your time. Mexican politics are certainly interesting but I'm not going to be able to make the world a better place by spending hours on following what's happening there. Not only would it be at the expense of more local information, I could also be spending the time and effort on improving my own life by studying, exercising or even maybe going to parties.
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Mar 31, 2022 13:12
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Neil Stephenson's Of course you'd have to be extremely rich to pay someone to be your RSS filter full time.
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Mar 31, 2022 13:55
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Apr 7, 2022 08:06
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roomtone posted:Knowing more doesn't improve our own lives because we are usually learning about things which either don't effect us at all personally, or if they do, they are high level structural things which, again, we can't do anything about, so the effect is a net negative. We might feel momentarily more knowledgable, or righteous, having expressed condemnation of something, but afterwards all we've really gained is the knowledge of another problem in the world beyond our control. As a way to sort of help anyone attempting to shut off in this manner, remember that the thread title and framing itself is accidentally misleading: you aren't "knowing less" in any meaningful sense of the phrase when you disconnect from knowing about things you, personally, cannot reasonably validate or act on (e.g. what's happening in Ukraine or the current estimate for how many degrees C of global warming we'll get next year) any more than you are "knowing less" because you didn't read every page of the latest issue of GQ detailing the best ways for macho men to wax their assholes at home. Don't let your "I'm failing because I'm doing less of something" capitalist conditioning of PRODUCE MORE, PEON get in the way of just disconnecting from "Too drat Much Of *Gestures Everywhere*" especially if you're literally feeling anxious/it's negatively impacting you in some way. By disconnecting you're just redirecting your time to something else (ideally which benefits you/makes you feel better in some way, or at least OK/better than whatever is making you want to disconnect to begin with) almost as a different form of meditation (like practicing clearing your mind internally, you're clearing external stimuli which would require breaking habits, a very conscious effort). While agreeing that balance is useful (i.e. not saying you need to go full 180 disconnect) remember that if it's not information that can directly be applied by you in some way like learning a new skill or information that helps you improve your life somehow, or shared with the people in your life for a good--if not extra-ephemeral--experience (e.g. sharing pet pics or cute pet videos, like that baby monkey riding that goat omg) or otherwise useful in a way that makes you at least not feel bad, it's ultimately just some entertaining (like a horror movie) propaganda that you have to not only spend time consuming but also your own energy determining the worth/value/~truthiness~ thereof. Hell, in some cases you'd actually be "knowing more" by reading the magazine about the asswaxing if that's actually applicable to you, than you would be by hearing the latest hottake of events from NBC's fact checkers about how Zelensky has WMDs which is why Putin needs to remove them or else Ukraine will bomb Turkey to gas the Kurds so really the whole thing is just a policing action. I was going to say that it's also dishonest to frame the comparison between news vs history but then I realized nope, those are the same thing/still propaganda/ideology, you still have to put in the time to absorb and also sift through and judge/understand history, especially if you're resistant to the reality that historical materialism is the sole lens through which anyone can view the world if they actually care about "knowing" anything without lying to themselves every loving day
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Apr 9, 2022 08:19
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yeah, I didn't think about the thread title enough but it doesn't bother me because it's wrong in a way that focuses on the point of contention anyway. you've laid out the issue pretty well and i agree with that as an understanding and rule of thumb to apply when making decisions on what to invest mental energy in, as well as when trying to snap myself out of habits and reassess them. i have started making some changes in line with this. i work nights where i am alone, and previously i was spending most of those nights browsing online despite having other intentions. so i got a new ereader with no browser, and stopped taking my laptop every night. i read 4 books last week. 2 of them were cultural criticism which is debatably useless information but i was actually interested, rather than just taking what was served up. stuff like this are practices i'm going to start thinking of as part of my mental hygiene routine. the difference peace of mind i've had at work on nights when i've not taken my laptop and been intentionally cut off vs when i do is palpable. i think mental hygiene good phrase for me to keep in mind. not mental health, which is too dramatic for what i'm talking about and i think is used so much that is basically means nothing. i'm not sick, but my mind can get gunked up and feel like poo poo quite easily if i don't take care of it. could GET sick that way, maybe. but i'd say before recently i was living in a state of mental squalor. that's just the start though. i'll need to set up as much of my living spaces as i can to support this.
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Apr 28, 2022 15:27
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If you struggle with phone addiction, I recommend a few things. 1: Change your phone's display settings to grayscale mode. It's less stimulating. You might think it's a small thing, but think about how many times you look at your phone per day. 2: Pick up electric handheld yahtzee. Seriously. It's like the smartphone equivalent of a nicotine patch. You get the ritual of holding a thing in your hand and interacting with something that can display constant changes to you (only its dice rolls instead of a news feed). Also, yahtzee is really fun. Carry it around with you from room to room instead of your phone. By the time you burn out on yahtzee you'll have broken the habit of checking your favorite app/website every 5 minutes.
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Apr 30, 2022 00:56
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