Facebook heavily encourages people to write and share headlines like this (true or not) and then promotes them prominently in your news feed.

This can take a heavy emotional toll on people over time and gradually make them more unhappy

    I noticed the following facts about people who work
    with the door open or the door closed. I notice that
    if you have the door to your office closed, you get
    more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more
    productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you
    don't know quite know what problems are worth working
    on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in
    importance. He who works with the door open gets all
    kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets
    clues as to what the world is and what might be
    important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect
    sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is
    symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can
    say there is a pretty good correlation between those
    who work with the doors open and those who ultimately
    do important things, although people who work with
    doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to
    work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but
    enough that they miss fame.

In this case, as it turns out, bacon does give you cancer. The relative risk of high "processed meat" consumption is in the neighborhood of 20%, i.e. RR of 1.2, for colorectal and lung cancers. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16991129/

In the US, there are about 200k deaths per year from these two cancers, out of 2.7 million total deaths. So your chances of dying of one of these two cancers is about 7.4%, if you live in a place somewhat like the US. And that increases to about 8.9% if you eat a lot of processed meat.

It seems to me like a 1.5% chance of dodging a death by cancer, and thus living an extra 5–20 years, is worth a single disrupted morning.

Anyway, doors are nice because you have the luxury of opening and closing them. Just remember what open and closed doors are for. Open it to see what's worth doing; close it when it's time to go do it.

Ideally this all applies in the metaphorical sense to social media too, if one has the discipline to handle it that way. But the problem for a lot of people, and the problem with this door analogy, is that a door doesn't nag you, Hey. Hey. Hey. You haven't opened me lately. Hey. Tons of cool stuff is going on beyond this door. Hey. Are you okay? I'm worried about you and so are your friends. Hey. Still there?

Also the door doesn't record your phone calls and so forth.

If only social media were as flexible, disinterested and unobtrusive as the lowly, everyday door.

> is worth a single disrupted morning.

We're not talking about a single "disrupted" morning. We're talking about chronic depression, which can lead to suicide.

Many people I tell that I don't keep up with current events like to claim I'm ignorant. At which point I ask them to name the most important thing they learned from news two weeks ago. Haven't had someone come up with anything substantial yet.

Knowledge is valuable, it is a form of wealth, and there are many ways to get it. I do not believe we receive knowledge from modern mainstream media today. Most of it is ephemeral drama that does not matter in the least.

With instantaneous feedback, and click-based advertising? All that crap is out the window. (Although you can make a good argument that things got really out of hand with the rise of cable news and the 24-hour-news cycle.)

It's all emotional manipulation now. Nothing else. It looks like for a lot of folks, it doesn't even matter if it's true or not.

50 years ago, if you didn't the paper, you were ignorant. Today, if you consume a bunch of online media, you're not ignorant, you're stupid: you are purposely filling your head with emotion-laden content in lieu of actually learning anything. If anything, you're most likely making yourself emotionally ill.

The best source I have for learning what's going on is the opinion columns. The format drives more honest out. As an opinion-writer, you're expected to have a thesis, an argument, and supporting data. Your bias is direct and up-front. It's a much more tractable way of evaluating information sources.

The "news" has been like that for a long time.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

-Thomas Jefferson, 1807

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...

While Jefferson neglected to read newspapers, he read many books and was arguably one of the most important figures in the Enlightenment.

This is my goal. Well, at least being more erudite by reading books and research papers and ignoring the news. I think I missed my window on being an important figure in the Enlightenment.

Work with the door closed some of the time, when you need to slog through a task uninterrupted, then open the door to allow the serendipity of uncontrolled interruption.

It's not a "single disrupted morning"

Has any major medical body ever classified sugar as a carcinogen, or is this bro-science?

https://www.wcrf.org/int/research-we-fund/our-cancer-prevent... (currently "down for maintenance", but available in gcache)

Sugar is only partially correlated with obesity, and I have never seen anything implicating sugar itself with cancer outside of paleo / bro-science circles. Plenty of people drink multiple sugary drinks daily for decades without getting obese. Warren Buffet is a good example. So is most the population of Japan.

Mostly, I refuse to clutch and cling to life out of some sentimental attachment to the world around me. Also, there’s the cliche of preserving one’s self during the worst period of old age, and prolonging that portion of life. But then, there’s also the degree of enjoyment one derives from life.

Most people are stuck in some shitty rut. There’s a lot of obvious self-help schlock to tell you that a rut is your own fault, but I can look out at the rest of the world and anticipate outcomes for people who will never ever ascend beyond a certain ceiling of success, and I can take that same degree of qualitative assessment and point it in the mirror.

Some of us have obvious limitations, and would prefer to cut to the chase.

Really not sure how lung cancer figures into this anyhow. I don't see anything about lung cancer in your NIH link. Nope, not in the full article either.

In any case, the numbers you spitballed about eating bacon are definitely off.

Counting the years you live always struck me as distracting from the things that matter: quality of life, and sticking around to see things that you might reasonably hope to see. In this worldview, bacon might totally be worth the extra 1.5% absolute chance of colorectal cancer.

That said, I was under the impression the problem was more the preservatives and the smoking part of bacon rather than the "red" or "processed" part of meat.

I have not had broadcast/cable TV on in the house in perhaps 18 years.

And yet when I take the family to a hotel and there's CNN/Fox/etc. running in the breakfast room it always seems like the world decided, at that precise moment, to inch close to the brink of Armageddon.

Fires blaze in the background behind the reporter, a palpable tension and urgency is heard from the talking heads....

And then I remember that it is just what the news "does" these days — and then realize that the beeping I am hearing is my waffle that is done.

Is it your friends who share that kind of stuff or is it showing up as ads or? And why are those people encouraged to share stuff such as bacon giving cancer?

In my feed I only see the stuff from friends, such as travel photos, various fun experiences, poems and sometimes comments on local political events. And of course intermittent flooding of happy birthday messages.

Not to mention the flood of pro/anti gun posts after each massacre.

I'm guessing maybe it's because I'm in/from Sweden and they haven't set up newsfeeds for this place.

I do see how showing negative news to people would have affect on what people post. And maybe it's a cultural thing as well - one of the hot topics in Sweden is immigration but very few people post about it, probably just because it's such a divider and few good things will come out by starting a Facebook discussion.

Get this. Every single time you visit facebook, right above the fold is some depressing news. Every. Single. Time.

It has an effect on some.

I've also noticed that FB now has a "snooze for 30 days" option that you can select, instead of just unfollow/unfriend. Not sure how long this has been around (I'm a very casual FB user) but it seems designed with those people who can't help spouting off over and over about a particular current event in mind.

Either your have horrible friends or you've responded repeatedly to this type of article in your Facebook feed, resulting in the algorithm promoting those posts. You can remove posts like that from your feed by clicking on the little gear in the top right.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-out-your-mind/20...

This is precisely why I stopped paying attention to news and am not on social media.

I even take struggle to mark EVERY SINGLE advert on facebook as a spam or inappropriate - I think that may make me a facebook user with most unrelated adverts to my actual interests - and I recommend everyone to do the same.

I had to do a double take and check that I hadn't been redirected to The Onion.

These headlines are all over the news. It's not like not logging to facebook will magically prevent one from seeing them.

All you need to do is turn on a local news channel and voila..

Same with that famous pastor who died last month.

same with the bridge that collapsed in Miami near Florida International University.

The thing about it is, I don’t watch the news much already. I lost all respect for the news during the election when they would literally spend a week covering some sensational / gossip topic. It’s not news it’s entertainment with the occasional coverage of actual news topics. So without social media beaming every trendy headline into my eyes the moment I log in, I am ignorant to a lot of depressing stuff. Someone has to go out of their way to text it to me or I probably won’t see it. And that’s fine by me. (Yet somehow Tomi Lahren still finds a way to make it onto my SMS conversations -_-.)

In any case, aside from the depressing sensational media, facebook is also toxic because it can make you compare every aspect of your complicated life to other peoples’ highlight reels.

(There is some good investigative journalism still being done on TV, but it's overwhelmed by "gotcha" stories and naked if-it-bleeds-it-leads sensationalism.)

Not that social media is the same thing at all. But I have a degree in philosophy and was trained in my formative years to argue with folks. That's a terrible mode to be in on social media-- it doesn't serve the people around me and it doesn't serve me at all.

So I stopped arguing and just posted nice things, like songs I sing or good things that happen to me or pictures of my kids.

The problem (for me, maybe not for everyone else) is that:

- I can't really get out of the mode of arguing - I'm constantly encountering people I love casually sharing memes that say that "people like me" are the root cause of all societal problems - I'm constantly reading between a bunch of lines and seeing where folks I love are in fact doing terrible things for their families and relationships.

So, like, that's not at all a fun mode to be in

And it's worse when I have an impulse to check in on it dozens of times a day. To add to conversations that are dumb, to check in on some situation or other that has nothing to do with me, or whatever.

So no, I don't think that there is a super healthy way for me, personally, to work with Facebook specifically. The other stuff, I dunno. I don't mind message boards, instagram, etc. But I really gotta stay off FB.

Just like alcohol, it did a bunch of good things for me and I was using it for those good benefits, but just like alcohol it bundles its own problems.

Interestingly, the way we often teach debate is: Someone can argue either side of an issue, and be judged on the approach, successful influence or tactics used, with insufficient weight on the merits of the position.

I suspect this helps promote the climate that is reflected in your followup statement:

>I can't really get out of the mode of arguing - I'm constantly encountering people I love casually sharing memes that say that "people like me" are the root cause of all societal problems - I'm constantly reading between a bunch of lines and seeing where folks I love are in fact doing terrible things for their families and relationships.

Much of my thought over the last couple of years centers on how much of our rationalist skills are honed around developing resistance strategies.

I believe that we have far more and better mental tools at our disposal for telling us that we are being rational than we actually have tools for being rational.

Maybe that is, in itself an irrational belief. It's kind of difficult to justify, but it feels correct, so I kneel doan and act as if I believe it, especially with regards to my own thought patterns.

At the very least, however, logic and rationality only operate well if we have a common set of quality premises.

So even with a good education in rhetoric we often can't get out of our heads enough to look for truth instead of seek the gratification of justifying ourselves.

Heck, my MA concentrates on rhetoric and community, and I have a hard time simply being okay when I generally agree with folks who are saying nutty things because of their poor logical skills. And so I can't really be around an environment that foments that kind of casual bad thought.

For me, I have realized people are often not simply ‘unskilled’, but instead just do not follow the script of your specific language ideology. They might be saying interesting or smart stuff if you know how to interpret it.

https://xkcd.com/386/

I have friends from all over the spectrum, from poor to wealthy, simple to intelligent, young to old. However I find something in almost all of my friend's posts (or reposts) that I highly disagree with (either by fact or opinion), and feel socially compelled not to stand up against their message. I've tried engaging in logical or political conversion with my friends, but it almost always backfires, usually because either a) the conversation is too much for them and they concede, or b) swarms of like-minded bystanders join and dominate via mob-rule. Usually, in neither of these situations does the original poster really consider changing their position.

Topics that I come across that make me cringe could be family who perpetuate crystal healing or conspiracy theories, or co-workers who repost anti-Constitution political rhetoric. How is a moderate Libertarian supposed to survive on social media, ignoring nonsense from their friends and family?

Also consider that most people don't have your writing skills and will get frustrated when they try to engage in a debate with you in writing. Most people are more comfortable when speaking (especially face to face) rather than writing. That's why most of the real political discussion continues to happen offline, even today.

Given that, I also strive to direct message the poster and ask the leading questions or point out the problems. They might even take down their post or alter it. You have to be willing not to get any credit and go unseen, which probably feels alien to many social media users.

If I was reading a novel instead of Twitter, I wouldn't experience that unhappiness.

The thing with social media is that the content is in such little morsels it's easy to say "just a few more," and the platforms are carefully designed to serve you the kind of content that will keep you saying that. So it's easy to "accidentally" spend way more time reading social media rather than (for example) reading a novel. That can tilt the balance toward more "makes me unhappy" content and less "makes me happy" content.

And sadly, the more tired I get, the easier it is make that sort of mistake--and also, the more that sort of unhappy stuff tends to affect me.

Employers (and potential employers, for job applicants) don't use access to social media only to see what you post to social media and judge you by that, they can (and do) use it to see who you are connected to on social media, what they post about you, and what they post about other things, and judge you by that. They can also use it as a pretext to discern things that are protected by anti-discrimination law and which they would not ask you about directly for fear of lawsuits, as a means of difficult-to-detect unlawful discrimination, using, again, not only what you post, but information from others that is connected to your profile.

Now, you can limit your interaction in one of the prime mechanisms of social communication in modern society to mitigate the risks that poses (which itself undermines the point of legal protections, especially for things like religion and, in California, political affiliation), or you can, as many people do, create what essentially amounts to a bogus profile that simulates doing that which is shared with prospective employers, but neither of those are ideal.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately in calling and sending emails to my government representatives, attending marches and protests. By definition, these are done in public; there's no point otherwise! But there's nothing preventing my employer from deciding they don't like what I'm putting out there and doing .. something about it.

I don't see anything to be done about this, certainly not in the short term, but it's a very different sort of thing than supposing there's something on social media I would be "embarrassed" about my employer seeing.

Additionally, how would you even prove "well I didn't hire that person because they belong to the wrong political party" short of someone actually saying it and documenting it against themselves? Racial discrimination laws can be exceptionally difficult to enforce, as I understand it.

In an ideal world, what my employer thinks shouldn't affect my political actions. As usual, real and ideal are far apart.

My union doesn't do collective bargaining negotiations.. I'm a tech worker...

It covers me legally should employers take too much of an interest in my personal life, etc...

They also run a news paper about engineering topics..

Also, not trying to overstate my "struggle" or anything -- the reason I'm active politically is because of the impact on people I care about, not the impact on me. I'm fully aware I'm pretty damn privileged to be able to write what I wrote above.

Another possibility occurs to me: you are on a path in your life where, for whatever reason, you rarely engage politically with the world. Or at least you rarely engage politically in a way that would bring a substantial risk to your career, personal, or political life. Or you are lucky enough to be in a situation where you don't have to do that in order to protect yourself.

I'm not implying that you do this consciously (though that is a possibility). It may be something like the mathematician who finds a job at the NSA that fits their interests like a glove and burrows away their for the rest of their life. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with the person who just "clicks" with adversarial political action their whole adult life.

However, while I'm not particularly political myself it takes me maybe 3 seconds to imagine people who are (esp. people affected by Trump administrations policy toward immigration). So I'm left confused by your apparent inability to do the same. I am certainly not unique in being able to empathize with people who's safety is at risk from Facebook's creepy, leaky, sniff-it-all system of social media.

Why do you think arguing on social media is the only or even best way to engage politically with the world?

> So I'm left confused by your apparent inability to do the same.

Inability to do what?

If Facebook is one of the primary ways you interact with a set of people, then it is natural you would exchange political ideas with them on Facebook. Having to take any political (or other potentially controversial) discussion to a separate communication medium makes Facebook rather bland. It's requires a form of self censorship.

Not everyone has that freedom. Gay people in rural Alabama, women in the UAE, undocumented immigrants in Arizona. People fleeing abusive spouses.

> Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media?

Doubtful, but you are a person who doesn't face serious consequences for existing.

But you do bring up a good point. My place of privilege in society makes it a lot easier to use Facebook without fearing the same repercussions as other people.

Not me because I haven't been on social media for years but I'm guessing it's comparison. If your friends are posting photos of their holiday in Bali and you only managed a camping trip over the weekend then how is that going to make you feel? Add in the doom and gloom in the news that tells you things have never been so bad and you can see it isn't healthy.

Happy that your friends are having a good time? Why does the default mode of human interaction need to be seething jealousy?

You are confusing a propaganda campaign against social media with actual news. Also keep in mind that the author of the Op-Ed was pushing a book he was writing.

Billions of people have a healthy relationship with social media. Just like billions of people have a healthy relationship with alcohol, food, working out, tv, sports, cars, etc. But it's funny how every day we are bombarded by the news media on social media ( ironically enough ) about how evil facebook and social media is.

OP's post is from November 2016. Why do you think it was posted on HN? Billions of dollars being spent on "cambridge analytics" style firms to put pressure on facebook, google and social media in general. So expect to see a lot of social media bashing as the elites try to reign in social media.

That's all it is. Once zuckerburg bends the knee like most social media entities have, the media and the will back off. Just like they did with reddit and google/youtube.

You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects. It's called a news cycle. People write stories about things people are talking about. All year, Social Media has been in the spotlight for privacy blunders and news that nation states spread propoganda with bots. So people like Cal Newport are talking about it.

Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning? That's how news works, for better or worse.

To better control it?

> I'd want them revealing all the intimate details of their life, so I can better manipulate them with targted advertising.

Yes. As long as they control the targeting and advertising.

> You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects.

It's not a conspiracy. It's reality. It's what happened with every communication medium. Print, Radio, Film, TV and now the internet. To believe otherwise is the real conspiracy.

> It's called a news cycle.

It doesn't span years.

> Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning?

Crazy how quickly that downed down huh?

That the elites want to control the means of communication is standard policy for thousands of years. And it spans all nations. The chinese elite, russian elite, saudi elite, the european elites, etc all want to control communication. Our elites aren't different. Societies, like humans, have similar organs.

I haven't had a Facebook since 2011 or so and I don't even remember why I got rid of it...but there has been no compelling reason for me to use it since.

Me either, but maybe there's a chilling effect going on here.

EDIT:

> I always hear stories about how people are "so much happier" after they quit Facebook. What is happening on your Facebook that's making you unhappy?

I personally believe this is because it's orders of magnitude easier to be negative than positive. Negativity breeds more negativity and drama. So, when people quit Facebook they get a boost from not being around so much negativity.

At this point, the only social media I use is Facebook through mbasic.facebook.com. This is really just to act as a rolodex and see peoples' pictures. I hardly interact with it. The reason I use mbasic is to save space and bandwidth, and to prevent Zuck from invading my phone. Because there's no infinite scroll, it prevents me from wasting more time on it. I also simply hide or unfollow anything I don't care for. A friend posts too much political/conspiracy nonsense? Blocked. I followed some company page years ago and now I just get inundated with promotions? Unfollowed. Too many vacation and "my life is great" photos? Blocked.

I've consistently avoided the social media anxiety I once had.

Facebook is(can be?) a useful product, as much as I don't like Facebook as a company. It wouldn't really be that difficult for someone to build a competitor to Facebook that really just did these few things really well, skipping all the other crap few people really use. Maybe people just assume that in order to have a viable social media product, they have to compete with Facebook on all fronts?

I can't. Some algorithm at Facebook has deemed my posts not worthy enough for his feed. If I could keep up with life events on it I would still use it. But I can't. My news feed looks like chain mail from grandma.

The thing is, I don't really use the feed, more interesting for me are notifications from groups, the messenger and the instant reconnection potential of FB since near anyone is there.

I don't think I post anything bad, but I'd rather not have an employer start making assumptions about me based on a few small bits posted on the internet. I've always felt that the less personal information my employer/co-workers know the better, but I am also one of those people who have a pretty barren cube.

The thing that makes me unhappy about Facebook is that it almost seems like too much work to make it worthwhile. Adjusting privacy settings, blocking/limiting certain peoples posts, etc. is just something that I don't like to do. I could care less that someone commented on a video or shared some garbage click bait.

I suspect most suffer from facebook because of its Skinner Box nature and due to comparing their real selves with their peer's crafted outward-facing personas.

Now you have to ask yourself if linked In is selling this private information to new employers about this recent bad-role. Also, there are firms that sell info to your employer about you updating your linked in (because it may mean you're looking to quit).

So it could affect your career negatively, even if you're super happy and don't see the effects directly.

Go anonymous, it worked in the 90s and now it's like we've been spellbound by corporations to go personal.

Is social media bad? You can definitely have a non-healthy relationship with it. But it didn't "break politics" [1] or "elect Trump" [2]. It was mostly just another vector for advertising.

We've known of the privacy issues with Facebook for a while and the whole Cambridge Analytica thing had been in the news before this spree of bad press. We've known Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are distracting for years.

I'm starting to wonder if what's going on here is some sort of war/defence by established media against big tech/social media. We know Murdoch was straight about going to war against Facebook [3] (apparently they lobbied heavily against Google in Europe before too). It wouldn't surprise me if other big-media magnates are in on this too. After all, didn't Facebook cut a bunch of newsfeed traffic to news sites in January?

Big media has always been an incredibly lucrative, power-wielding business, because it largely controls the public's opinion. I almost feel like it was bound to happen; big media was bound to claim it's the bastion of truth and scare people out of social media.

Now, of course, things aren't black and white. I'm not saying one is good and the other is bad, but that's precisely my point. I see traditional media focusing very heavily this past two weeks on painting social media as bad. Trumps election and the whole "fake news" accusations apparently was amazing for their business [4]. The NYT crossed $1billion in revenue in 2017, with strong growth [5]. Asking people nicely won't get you subscribers, when people are scared because "democracy is at stake" then they pour in.

I don't know. Uber literally just killed a woman with a self-driving car: I would've assumed the repercussions of that would be huge and everyone would be talking about the legal aspects of self-driving tech, the future of testing, security, safety, and investigation, etc. But I have seen more articles about Facebook and social media in general in a day than I saw about Uber all of last week.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/12/15259438/s...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/06/is...

[5]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

I recall seeing editorials in the past (not NYT) about how facebook is kicking the feet out from under content producers by making facebook the only viable source for content. Producers began promoting their content through FB to reach a wider audience, but the audience has grown in a walled garden and now facebook has total control over what content is shown and what isn't, so are now charging producers to promote their own content. And fake news is prominent throughout social media. I can see why news organizations would want to fight both of those things. Feels pretty underhanded if that's what they're doing today though.

As I’m not capable of seeing into the future, the only sane choice is not to share in the first place. Close and meaningful relationships with other people were possible before they were cynically monetized by social media, and they’re still possible without it. When it comes to social media, the only winning move is not to play, and/or be anonymous.

The alternative is that some 14 year old can DOXX you, SWAT you, and generally make your life miserable. The alternative is that your boss sees something they don’t like and you lose your job.