> We have institutions to work on things, do we need each individual citizen to be constantly worried about everything that goes wrong, will go wrong, can go wrong or won't go at all?

To give an accompanying reply to the sibling commenter saying "that's why we have democracy, so we can delegate": that's why democracy in its current state works so poorly; a disengaged electorate.

The "we have institutions to work on things" line could only be uttered by someone so disconnected from reality that they actually believe those institutions can be effective without oversight.

Does each citizen need to become a vigilant member of the general public oversight committee, spending his days and nights making sure that the institutions work correctly, are responding appropriately to the threats etc? Are they qualified to evaluate that? Do they even understand the severity of the threats?

Or are they, in effect, the amplification apparatus for journalists who, by and large, also know very little about the things they write about?

I understand the point, it feels like a noble and important thing, to be informed, have an opinion and be ready to tackle the problem when the White House calls. But they probably won't call, not me, not you, not anyone getting their information about anything from the daily news. They'll call the people who are giving the information to the news.

Who said we ought to wait to act until the White House calls?

Obviously the news cycle thrives on panic and style over substance. This does not change the fact that "knowing" about the world is valuable. Effective action to address a threat is nearly impossible without an accurate model of it. People don't need to be experts about everything to become relatively well informed about many things, nor do they need to try to solve every problem at once.

The appeal to institutions as trustworthy problem solvers is also disheartening. Institutions are supra-human intelligences. This does not mean they are necessarily more intelligent than any of their members. They're often less so, and in any case they usually have their own incentive structures which are entirely separate from (and often antagonistic to) people's wellbeing.

Not all knowledge is equal in value, and time spent learning one thing has an opportunity cost - it's time you can't spend, say, learning something more useful.

Understanding what went wrong, how it could've been caught, how to prevent it from happening in the future, options and tradeoffs for how to resolve things now that the damage has been done, etc. - this can be extremely useful and empowering. Even if you have no ability to impact the specific problem being discussed, you can draw parallels from those problems to the problems you do face in your own domains where you can have an impact. There may be no perfect solutions, but there may be better solutions, a better understanding of the problem, and an example of moving forward as one is best able to. This isn't exactly a message of "doom" though.

On the flip side, one can see yet another retelling of beating yet another dead horse - be they unpredictable black swan events with no real useful takeaways for planning, no useful nonobvious changes to policy to propose, or yet another deadlocked political quagmire of shouting heads that even the experts can't untangle - or something where the lessons are obvious and spelled out hundreds of hours of content ago and being applied - isn't terribly useful, encouraging, or empowering. Quite the opposite - if anything, they're depressing and disempowering.

To put it another way - flooding our information channels with low quality low content unactionable unrelatable useless unresearched unvetted "the sky is falling" shallow summaries of our inevitable doom displaces useful content about the problems of our world and more in-depth discussions about what we're experimenting with to try and fix them, what seems to be working, what was tried and failed, etc. Framed in this light, much of the news cycle has negative value: while it may let you "know" "more" about the world, you would've spent your time much more wisely by trying to learn from what other people are trying to do to fix things, or by attempting to fix things yourself.

I agree with everything you said.

How is "knowing" about the daily Corona virus data from around the world good for you? I get the basic idea: know to wear a mask, keep your distance, avoid groups of people in areas that aren't well ventilated. But what how does the number of deaths in some city you don't live in or near help you?

> People don't need to be experts about everything to become relatively well informed about many things, nor do they need to try to solve every problem at once.

My impression is that people are generally not well informed on anything. They know some factoids, they can repeat some headlines, but they don't understand half of it. And how could they? Even the journalists don't. Read the daily news about a topic you are an expert on and assume that they're as correct about everything else you're not an expert on.

Kony wasn't stopped by people knowing about him and his crimes and everybody spreading Kony 2012 and other Clicktivism. It doesn't change anything, other than your state of mind, which will be in a much, much worse condition.

If you do something, that's great. But it's obviously not connected to watching the news. Almost everybody watches the news, but almost nobody does anything.

I think we're talking past each other. I agree with what you're saying here. Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I agree that e.g., watching cable news and skimming headlines will not give one a particularly accurate or useful picture of the world, and may even harm one's mental health.

I'm saying there are better ways, and their value is not diminished by the firehose of low- or negative-value information most people consume.

I'm replying because you're obviously being downvoted for the content of your comment, not the quality. It appears to me that you're contributing to the conversation in good faith with tough questions.

What your questions triggered in me was to reject the notion that the institutions set up around me will solve much. I'm sure most people have lost faith in these institutions at this point, on all sides.

But I agree with the part of your comment that implies that we're being lied to in the process of entertained. It's the end goal, right? Fear drives clicks which drives revenue. I'm sure it's one of the foundational blocks of modern journalism.

I believe that "the institutions are broken" is similar to "the youth has no discipline, is rude, and our future is doomed": every generation believes it and it turns out we're okay anyhow. I'm not saying that having institutions is a fire-and-forget solution that you never need to worry about once they're established. But generally, we have institutions so you don't have to worry about it constantly. And it works tremendously well in most areas most of the time. Being individually hyper-aware isn't necessary.

It's also an interesting thing to watch from outside the US: there's a lot of arguments that it's the US institutions specifically that are broken beyond repair, willfully being destroyed etc. That may well be true, but it has nothing to do with the news being what they are, we see the same kind of news coverage pretty much everywhere, the actual circumstances don't matter. And we have the same sentiment in Europe, it's always this close to the edge. In my opinion, it's emotional manipulation, but it's really hard to get out of it once it has become a habit.

I'm not sure it's a modern thing either. Here is Thomas Jefferson on the same issue, albeit writing about knowledge of facts, not so much the psychological cost of constant fear: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...

No, our institutions are purposefully broken. “Knowing” about ways to reduce exposure to the virus is the difference between life and death.

By monitoring the performance of elected officials and institutions, we can influence future policy with our votes and our wallets