To take a safe and neutral example, consider quantum computing. It's obtained a vast amount of headlines that consume substantial time and mental energy to assimilate. Yet years after those headlines? The largest number we've factorized using "pure" quantum computing (as opposed to drastically reducing the search space using tricks like cherry picking numbers optimized for rapid solving by Fermat factorization) is 21. Yes, 7 * 3. All of the mental energy, interest, excitement, and general 'consumption' one might have dedicated to quantum computing over the past has largely been a waste of time, energy, effort, and interest.
In cases where people become much more emotionally or mentally invested in the news, it's largely just quite sad. Even more so because the news regularly works to manipulate and exploit people's emotions, as in the case of Sicknick. And they're quite good at it!
Ciao (chow is what you eat).
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 [1]
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20 years ago this quote would have been quite hyperbolic. Now it's certainly scathing, but it's also completely appropriate and rationale. The current apparent chaos, deception, and disorder we are now entering into is not some novel and unprecedented era. The brief era of peace, trust, and general "sanity" that we "all" grew up in was the novel and unprecedented era. And so as we return to the past, the wisdom of that era becomes more meaningful than ever.
Welcome to the past, my friend!
https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...