Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world. Researchers say the answer isn’t to stop following current events—it’s to build healthier habits around how, when, and where we get our news.
Oh, great… more bad news.
I want to read this in Marvin’s voice from HHTTG
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’ve got me delivering bad news.
Your brain wasn’t designed at all.
Iteratively designed by evolution to maximize survival, I guess
Yeah, so you could easily say we evolved to, or our brains evolved to… And so on
No, in fact that is still teleological.
Is it? I’d guess ‘to evolve to do smth’ doesn’t necessarily need to be teleological. IIRC the verb ‘evolve’ means the fittest getting randomly selected, no?
I think I understand where you’re coming from but I think it’s fundamentally different to ‘being designed with a specific goal in mind’
Don’t mind me, I had a prof who was uptight about it. I am sure it would only matter for formal or technical writing, like a scientific paper.
Oh I don’t mind. I just thought it an interesting question. I would like to know your prof’s reasoning for his insistence.
Because that would mean that ‘evolve’ can also be used teleologically, imho.
Evolved into or evolved with may reduce the implication of an intention.
- Our brains evolved into structures capable of supporting complex language.
- Our brains evolved with the capacity for complex language.
I just took issue with the very literal interpretation of the phrase “not designed for” and I couldn’t hold my tongue
well, my fingers, I guess
Yeah I dunno about design as much as iterative adaptations over incomprehensibly large periods of time.
Evolution did as much design as my socks design themselves to stay in their drawer. Evolution doesn’t design, it works with what it has and nothing else. It doesn’t even optimize because optimization requires choosing between options with intent. Evolution has zero intentions. Evolution creates un-“optimized” things that go extinct all the time, but it’s not because it “failed” at designing because that implies it “tried” to design, but because it’s not a designer, it can’t design. No design made fish have legs. No design gave elephants their tusks and no design gave flies their wings. Evolution won’t ‘design’ new vertebrae segments, but they still might happen—it just won’t be because of any design.
Natural selection is actually technically an optimisation algorithm. Its just a kind of crappy one that only ever finds local maximas because it can’t traverse valleys (the thing just dies). So we end up with optical receptors on the wrong side of our retina. Ooof.
Neanderthals evolved to traverse valleys just fine
I don’t mean literal valleys.
That was just my highly-evolved sense of humour
And see where that got them!
Figure of speech. Perhaps “optimized” would be more accurate?
Ok
And the people who are in charge and doing evil things know this and are using it to their advantage.
It’s literally written down as part of the playbook.
There’s a book? A new one or is it just the usual suspects?
Project 2025 has a book.
Amazing how much history rhymes.
Is Jar Jar the key to all of this?
How high are you
I remember when Majorie Taylor Greene left the government she made a comment about something regarding a playbook she was given when she first came to Congress. I wish someone would dig into that more because I’m fairly certain it contained things like how to belittle people when they ask serious questions or how to revert to whataboutisms as soon as you’re confronted with damning evidence.
Don’t tell me that then, you’re just making it worse.
I am painfully aware.
Isn’t this the thing we are doing by being on Lemmy? My mental state is better when I scroll the feed here, as opposed to scrolling reddit.
I do both still, but I’m nearing the phase where Lemmy gets more attention.
It’s just fucked that I read too much so I might run out of content on Lemmy which pushes me to read the news then back to reddit untill I wake up again
You might take some of the time you’re doomscrolling and read a silly book. Not a lot, like 30 mins.
I’ve found my attention span destroyed now. I don’t read much any more at all, it’s kinda sad.
I think it’s also because I work from home and a commute used to isolate me and I’d be forced to read.
I read books too.
Try this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You can keep clicking it too!
When you finally decide to leave reddit, remember to make some posts or comments inviting people to join lemmy
Oh no I’ve been banned so many times since the fascist took over
Don’t have an account anymore it’s not worth it. Lurking is fine. Mental health way better not being able to respond
It’s really bad now even just saying fascists should be punished gets you banned. Imagine that.
Here, I hope, I am free to say things. Even:
Hang Elon musk and burn Trump alive. Prosecute all of the evil people to the max. Kill dictators, fight the power. Bleed for each other and see the new sun rise.
I’ve noticed recently that reddit just makes you a random username and you can comment without having an account. I’m sure it’s still tracking you somehow but it’s kinda nice to still comment on something you’re looking up info for. I guess it makes sense with the AI modeling data usage now. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they have enough data now to weigh comments based on the information they have about each user. Like if someone works in IT their comments get a little bit higher accuracy scores in the IT subs and same for any profession and it’s corresponding sub.
This is a problem I struggle with philosophically. I have lived in the US with a degree of privilege and I feel the price for that should include knowing how the proverbial sausage is made, that is, knowing all the crap that is being done to allow me to live in (meager) comfort.
It’s Poor Things cranked up to eleven. The British empire is holding the beer of the American one. It’s just too much.
The continual rush of news, propelled by the addictive properties of the YouTube algo, have driven me quite mad, albeit, I suffer from behavioral health problems already. I haven’t found a balance to this.
I feel like, between starting to pay attention to politics in 2000 (also starting puberty), 9/11, the ensuing rise of authoritarianism, trump v1 and trump v2, I’ve achieved levels of depression and anxiety that have propelled me into a kind of nirvana.
Ultimately, I don’t want the human race to end, but the human race seems to. Why try fighting that?
Our brains were not evolved for any of this. The modern world is very alien compared to the mundane life of hunter gatherers.
I’d argue that it was never designed for this much stimulation full stop. All the constant noise and things competing for attention all the time around you. Bad news is just the nasty icing on the cake.
The environment we have created is so fast-paced and complex that our brains are often in a constant state of overwhelm. We were never meant to be always available, always aware of everything and always caught in the belief that we have to react to everything at a time.
I remember coming back from a long backpacking trip, totally disconnected from the media. When I got back I couldn’t stand TV, especially commercials, for a while.
I’ve largely stopped actively following news because
- most of it is stuff we knew already
- I already find out all that I need to know and more involuntarily through occasional social media visits
I’d like to read summaries of a given week’s news on the world, EU, national, and maybe local level once a week, tho. I’ll check if there’s anything like this for the world and EU scale and report back here if there is.
News apps are the worst because the algorithms will shove more of the same articles at you. “You liked a financial article? Ok, here are 50 more that are virtually identical.” Then there is the constant click-bait. It has gotten to the point where I skip any dramatic or open ended headline because I know it is actually nothing.
- most of it doesn’t affect you directly
- you have almost no direct input on major world or regional events which become headline news
Shit’s happening in the world. You can do nothing to stop it from happening. This is in stark contrast to everything else going on in your life.
I’m not sure I understand what “build healthier habits around how, when and where we get our news” exactly means and how that would help. I mean if TACO drops bombs on little kids, I can’t think of how digesting this differently is going to be any healthier for me.
One thing I see a lot is the same event repackaged repeatedly with various headlines from different angles to elicit despair and outrage. If you heard about it once already, that is probably enough.
Spending an hour a day reading news from reputable sources is a lot healthier than doomscrolling for 8 hours on Reddit and Instagram.
If you say so, but he still diddled children.
It means that you are not in control of any of it. You can’t impact any of it meaningfully as a single force, at least in real time. People used to watch a “news hour” once a day. You could artificially recreate that, and then detatch for the other 23 hours using self control, muted phone notifications and browser filter extensions. And maybe your brain will thank you.
Of course you could have a separate rule for local alerts that may be more relevant, but local news is dying unfortunately, soo… You could probably just check in once a week to see how the surviving local paper verbatim reprints favorable press releases from the city’s PR person that they retain from the local municipal consultant group with a forgettable acronym.
What is the question here? You take kids to do your work?! Die! You even just slightly have sexual dreams about kids?! Die twice! Kids must be protected and sadly that doesn’t happen as much as you think. Anyhow.
Yooo, wtf?? Who the hell is having sexual dreams about kids? I mean if you are then it means you are probably sick and should get therapy for that. Help is available.
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But the news isn’t really like that, though. Like, currently my news feed has multiple items on the aftermath of Trump’s Lincoln Reflecting Pool project. That is something on the other side of the continent with no impact on my life and which I cannot do anything about. Every local murder gets a news story, even though most individuals are much more at threat from other things. Apes together strong, but maybe not this together.
The cognitive dissonance on display in this article is crazy. The idea that anyone should be concerned by the mental damaged caused by endless bad news before the impact of life in a world of bad news is just about the same as turning off smoke detectors in a fire to limit the stress they cause constantly going off (sorry I guess here it would be like asking people to build “healthier habits” about when they hear the alarm).
I think it would be more akin to your smoke detector going off anytime any other smoke detector in the world went off. Personally I probably would unplug my smoke detector if that’s how it operated. Just because it might one day alarm based on smoke in my house I’d have lost my mind and have no discernible way to tell beyond seeing or smelling the smoke myself at that point anyway.
It’s part of why I’m now only looking at socials for like 30m a day- and usually only lemmy and YT at that. I have enough problems to worry about over here, I don’t need to know about all these other problems that I couldn’t even fix if I tried
In Soviet Russia, observing an event changes your outcomes.
My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.
“The human mind has not adapted to this level of bad news”
I feel like it kind of has.
Otherwise, people who are about 40+ years old would all be driven mad by now.
That’s our secret, we just hide it well.
bro I just turned 40 and… it doesn’t seem far off
I think I was wrong, the human mind adapts on the fly however it needs to. I should have kept it closer to the original: “The human brain has not adapted to this level of bad news.” All of our minds have adapted, right, one way or another?
Sure it has, meet my brain’s healthy levels of bitter sarcasm and bitter cynicism!
Yet
I’m going to stare into the abyss until it blinks first
Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?
That’s the mind, not the brain. The way I see it, the opposite mistake that I made elsewhere in the thread.
We must leave behind the fiction that a God created us. There is no God, we have no souls.
