Public outrage is one check on societal institutions. The police are a check on general lawlessness and disorder, and the fact that sometimes they kill someone they really shouldn't have doesn't make us think, "well just get rid of the police then altogether I suppose". Why would we get rid of public outrage, just because sometimes it's wrong?
Public outrage is what makes journalism function as the fourth estate, after all. Investigative journalism of national-level issues in particular: what would the point of all of it be, if nobody read or cared? Thus, the author's argument is also an argument for investigate journalism of any non-'local' issue to cease to exist. Does this sound like a good idea?
As I mentioned in another comment thread, I don't think the author objects (and I certainly don't object) to in-depth investigations of national or global issues. That's a vanishingly small portion of what the news as instantiated today does.
Commercial news by definition is looking to shock/sensationalize/rile up. It may not be on a conscious level but it's a race to gather & keep attention - boring stuff won't cut it.
I'm not supporting author's point mind you, I believe education/informedness is the only thing we have approaching a silver bullet. But the amount of internet justice and vigilanteism we have today, a lot of it inspired by various kinds of news - from local cable TV news indicating our suburbian neighbourhoods are a pithole of violence, to politically charged national news, to hilarious reporting on science and medicine... it all outrages and most of it is at best numbing, at worst utterly wrong.
The way I see it, of something as trivial as a fishing video can be reported on so completely and utterly incorrectly, without the slightest regard for even the tiny amount of facts provided alongside the video, then why should i assume anything else is reported correctly?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
The 24 hour cable news cycle is toxic, yes, but there are still daily papers and even less frequent periodicals with generally calmer perspectives.
We don't. The outrage isn't even remotely what it ought to be. We see the videos, we perform grief, and then we forget. I don't see where this belief that we're somehow overreacting comes from: every couple of months, one of these murders in broad daylights happens to have the cop fired, only for them to be later rehired elsewhere. If your fear of overreaction reflected even a tenth of reality, they simply wouldn't be wearing, "I can't breathe," shirts.
>Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit.
-- Daniel Kahneman
I don't think the author is arguing you should NEVER be outraged, just that you should be more selective about your attention.
> Some meta analyses and studies have questioned the size and existence of the ego depletion effect.[3] The ultimate validity of those later studies is not universally agreed.[5] Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisrantis, whose 2010 meta-analysis seemed to support the existence of the ego depletion effect,[5] subsequently performed a pre-registered 23 lab replication study which found no ego-depletion effect.[6]
> ...
> In 2016, a major study (2141 participants) carried out at two dozen labs across the world using a single protocol failed to find any evidence for ego depletion.[3][31] In response, Baumeister argued that his original protocol was rejected by the project coordinators, and after discussion was stalled, he only reluctantly agreed to a task that differed to some degree from the original 1998 studies.[32] Replication difficulties have also emerged for 5 additional protocols (operationalizations) of the basic ego depletion effect.[33]
> A 2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[34]
> In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[35][36] Michael Inzlicht and colleagues praised Carter's meta analysis, but argued that bias-correction techniques are not precise enough to give a precise control size estimate.[5][37] In response, Cunningham and Baumeister argued that Carter and McCullough analysis contained errors in its data collection and in the various analyses used.[5]
> Ulrich Schimmack (2016) conducted a meta-analysis of published studies and found that most studies could produce significant results only with the help of random sampling error. Based on the low power of studies, one would expect a large number of non-significant results, but these results are missing from published articles. This finding confirms Carter and McCullough's meta-analysis that showed publication bias with a different statistical method. Schimmack's replicability report also identified a small set of studies with adequate power that provided evidence for ego-depletion. These studies are the most promising studies for a replication project to examine whether ego-depletion effects can be replicated consistently across several independent laboratories.[38]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
Beyond that, how would you be more selective about your outrage if you're skipping the news to begin with?
No, “the news”, as in the propaganda emanating from the corporate hegemony machine, does not count. But, checking out entirely is nonetheless the worst thing one can do.
Not to mention, some of his reasoning conflicts with itself. Behold:
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> ...
> But it's different from hearing about the tsunami destroying a village thousands of miles away.
Surely the author is aware that people commonly do, in fact, take action and donate money when tragedies -- such as tsunamis -- take place very far away. In some cases, the foreign donations add up to quite a lot! So I'm not sure how he reconciles this in his head, both in the sense of the way he's describing things is factually incorrect, and also that the implication here is that you'd get less people helping with tragedies simply because they occurred somewhere foreign.
And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?
The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment.
I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
> But to what end?
> Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction.
> “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!”
> Do you really?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
> Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage.
He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
That's where we disagree and I think I see the root of our disagreement. Reading your last paragraph, you seem to link news consumption and actual actions like protests, riots and revolution. I don't think this link exists. Most of those are actually started by activists and stem from local engagement (unionism, political organizations). It is very removed from news consumption which is not the only way of being informed.
There's an easy compromise: it's likely that some people are better off not watching the news. This group might be more sensitive to disruptive news and opinion pieces. It'd do them good to stay away from news.
This is similar to certain food allergies. Peanuts are good stuff, but some people have negative reactions to it. They are better off without peanuts.
Similarly, if your response to news is highly psychologically disruptive, you'd do well to stay away from it. It doesn't have to mean that you are shirking your responsibilities as a citizen. Rather than exhaust yourself by responding to local and temporal events, you could conserve your energies for longer-term projects that help the society at a fundamental level.
In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about how schools were so concerned about Peanut allergies, a lot of places removed peanuts from school lunches and banned them from lunches people brought in. The result? Peanut allergies went up. Kids weren't being exposed to peanuts and it made the situation worse.
He uses it as an analogy to our ability to deal with things psychologically and how any attempt to remove bad/dangerous ideas (he calls this the "What ever doesn't kill you makes you weaker" fallacy) has made it more difficult to deal with controversial ideas and leads to a cultural of "safetyism" (e.g. safe spaces) in University/Academic environments.
My counter-argument is specifically that if you scale up this advice to everyone or even most people, the implications are really awful.
Outside of people being targeted for no reason, this news cycle just polarizes the American public. People have their set of news sources that only push them the news supporting their opinion, and spin the news in their favor, moving peoples opinions further to the extremes - politics stops being about real issues, and there is no room for real debate. In a building I lived in they had CNN constantly playing in the games room, and all they ever seemed to have was talking heads discussing Trump, mostly speculation about Russia at the time - does that really lead to anyone being more informed, or cause any positive action? I don't think this cost is worth the few cases where the public outrage was correct and effective.
I think it would be a huge problem if the general public stopped consuming any national/international news at all, since injustice would go unnoticed unless it affected you directly. And of course with things like COVID it is important to be informed about what is going on. But I think we would all be better off if instead of looking at the news every day, we just looked at the top stories once or twice a week on a set of reputable news sites, and stayed out of the comments.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
The summary is that controversial issues are the ones that go viral. Not the ones that necessarily deserve to go viral. That is the theory of the post I linked -- I do not make any commentary whatsoever about any individual event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
You combine that behavior with social media, especially Twitter, and the symbiotic relationship with the news media. It's a non-stop anger generation machine. Rapidly iterating on these thoughts, packaging and surfacing the most potent, viral version. Any nuance and context long ago removed.
Well you need to compare against wasted time on framed narratives, misguided outrage leading to self-defeating policies, etc.
It's like saying poking holes in the ground randomly is a good method for discovering oil because someone lucked out.
This seems like the author is explicitly arguing for the tragedy of the commons. Yes, any one individual getting 'wound up' doesn't accomplish much, but the public 'at large' getting wound up can and does effect real change sometimes.
Like, it's very easy to point to a variety of topics, about which there was sufficient public outrage from a news story to cause some change. For example, the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger in Georgia. Before the public outrage that followed the release of the video, the killers had not even so much as been arrested.
If the author here had gotten his way, nobody would've seen the video, nobody would've been outraged, and nothing would've happened after Ahmed was murdered. Am I supposed to believe that this is an improvement?