Like OOP said, that was a surface level thought. Finding evidence in evolutionary psychology seems like a big leap from that.

News of bad event could directly impinge survival. News of a good thing happening to someone far away does not really improve comfort and stability.

The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.

I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.

I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.

But more seriously, the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help.

For example, if your car breaks down and your cell phone battery is around 30%- you have time to make a few phone calls, but instead of wondering if your friend can pick you up (assuming he has a cheap pickup truck that can tow), you rationalize- he might be sleeping, working, unwilling to answer the phone. You have three phone calls to make, so you decide you'll compare the rates of the two nearest towing companies.

Which do you call? You have money and time to spend, but you don't want to be stranded for a very long time, even assuming you were able to pull your car over to the side of the curb. Being pessimistic is just being prepared, and similarly, you want to try to save for a rainy day.

I take it you are a conservative. This is a perennial city people (liberal) versus rural folk (conservative) discussion that will never have a resolution.

Liberals generally don’t believe in the idea that "no one is able to help" because they live in larger urban populations that see the government as beneficial.

Conservatives tended to live in more rural areas where there weren’t as many people to help them, and they couldn’t depend on the government.

There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before.

So the rural conservative view and values on social interaction is more based on repeated interactions with people you already know, whereas the urban liberal has values and prefers systems that work well with anonymous people; the government needs to step in to help people in need (because their neighbours won't).

Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.

Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.

https://lit.newcity.com/2010/12/20/nonfiction-review-please-...

I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how small towns generate trust between people they personally know. The only thing I would disagree with here is the notion that some people believe there is a helping hand to be had; I think this is more of a political myth. What I was originally getting at is that liberals believe government can and does help people, while conservatives, at least in the US, promote the idea that government should be hands off.

I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,

What I find interesting is that there is a study of this viewpoint, and it's called Primals: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-Primals-Project-resear...

I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.

There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.

Strange thing to say in a hospital bed? Also, if the doctors know you are dying of Covid you can hardly talk right? Seems fishy.

It's strange until you get the hospital bill in the mail.

Your investigation didn't involve a simple Google search?

In an ideal world, news outlets aren't pushing news that is shocking for the sake of being shocking (and therefore, increasing viewership/readership), but pushing news that is actually relevant to a good percentage of their viewers.

Sure, report things like severe weather forecasts, boil water advisories, etc.

But I don't need to know about every crime, or every scandal in Hollywood, etc. -- and this is most of the negative information that's covered. Not the things that are genuinely relevant to most of us.

Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.

Are they the things that matter to the people who have the perception, though?

I don't think it's all about the news.

And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days!

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02...

I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.

I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH—

suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage!

woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit?

since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!

I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.

Then recognized same pattern in every TV ad afterwards, almost all target some sort of insecurity or feeling of lack.

catching oneself in that circular road and taking another turn off that wheel, that aha!, that enlightening moment is what some people invest heavily into, time, energy even money.

and you have it just like so, ten years ago, from that news article on racists blaming anti-racists for a racist anti-racism gig...

what a gift :-)

and thank you for sharing!

Yet all I ever see in the media are ridiculous parodies of the other side. I've basically stopped almost all politics reading at this point. It's no better than gossip columns, and big brother level entertainment, it's just packaged for people who think they're more intelligent than those who watch big brother.

> Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.

I think this is the attitude most people have if they stop consuming so much news. And I think it dissolves a huge amount of animosity we see between different groups in western society atm.

I have a feeling a lot of people across the political spectrum feel the same. Some day one of the parties is going to find not pandering to the emotional appeals of their brand of extremists is actually a huge political gain. I hope for that day, but not much.

It's telling that I literally can't tell which side you're referring to, as both sides seem dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage. I guess amplifying that garbage is exactly what sells, which is why reporting of each side focuses on that.

Welcome to the equanimity of Stoicism.

This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.

Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy.

Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick.

Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.

It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.

A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.

> A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.

I don't think that's true, but how do you define "net health positive". My understanding is that you are better off without it, but a little won't kill you.

That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire.

While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.

32 links to stories above the fold for my browser

3 are emotionally neutral or positive

---------------------------------------

https://www.foxnews.com/:

6 links to stories above the fold

0 are emotionally neutral or positive

The only thing next is to just be the violence network

It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage.

We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.

Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.

I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats.

If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does.

I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.

Similarly, working on campaigns reveals that most political commentary isn't even wrong, so not even worth debating.

PS-

> about how the US puts cars first

And the flip side: How anything less than full throated praise for and life long devotion to cars, such as asking for safety improvements like sidewalks and bike paths, is part of a grand anti car conspiracy. Sure. There's 1.4b cars in the world, and growing. And me peddling to work 3 days a week is an existential threat to the world order.

News generally doesn't "educate" (eg add knowledge to your views that then updates them), it confirms biases.

* NY Times: Attacked from all sides by those in power, and for a good reason.

* Washington Post: Smaller, and if I had to say, maybe not quite up to the NY Times

* Financial Times: Expensive, but on par IMHO with the other two.

* The Guardian can be excellent, but signal-to-noise (consequential-to-not) ratio isn't as strong as the others, IMHO.

* The Economist: Free-market ideologues, but if you have to read one thing, they are most efficient. Not really journalism (they don't go out and dig up information, nor report their factual basis transparently with quotes, etc.; but short, efficient, sophisticated, very wide-ranging analysital pieces.

* Poltico: I'm not sure what I think of them; I don't trust their ownership entirely [0], but they are seriously competing with the others, at least in national/international political news.

The Wall Street Journal seems serious, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch. If people trusted the WSJ before, I don't know how they do now after the Dominion case revealed Murdoch openly manipulating reporting to favor Trump and others.

----

Another good options is curated news summaries. I'd look up Just Security's, for example. Politico also has some newsletters like NatSec Daily. Memeorandum can be great, if you skip over the less important stories.

[0] Look up the NY Times reporting on Axel Springer's owner (Axel Springer bought Politico recently).

> With few exceptions, positive stories

and then you wrote

> a whole section for feel-good features

"Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.

Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.

--The Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof

But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.

But large notable news probably still drives clicks, yeah? The moon landing was the most watched program in history, after all.

This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment.

To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.

I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.

I suspect discussing knowledge of the news is some kind of social signaling.

What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.

Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them.

It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.

A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.

Think of the stories you see day to day and imagine in 100 years if these are the go-to source for information about our time how skewed a picture you would have of how things actually were.

These examples are more "sensational" than negative, but it is essentially the same idea.

And setting the record straight, where "straight" is whatever the powers-that-be want.

We even have an age old saying for this: History is written by the victors.

Historical records, and by extension journalism, have never been concerned about recording the facts. They have always been concerned only about defining the narratives and truths for the powers of the time.

Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?

I think you’re close. There was a lot less repetition of news. Now the need to fill endless hours with content means stories are repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that repetition is known and used as a torture technique. “Repetition is an important neural linguistic programming interrogation tactic to influence the target mind” [0].

[0] https://neuralguantanamo.com/no-touch-torture-techniques/

It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.

Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.

Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?

---

1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.

2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.

3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).

---

#1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news.

#2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet.

#3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety.

I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.

For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics.

PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be.

Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).

Corporate vs. public ownership matters a lot less than institutional standards and the org's cultural commitment to a rigorous journalistic mission. BBC has a relatively strong commitment; NPR (my favorite whipping boy for bad journalism packaged as Thinky Stuff) does not.

Corporate sponsorships are, at an average 39% during the same period, the largest source of funding. Contributions (what we'd call donations) are 12%.

Put another way: Local donors may (or may not -- I don't know) form the backbone of funding individual stations. But corporate sponsorships fund most of the content that appears on most of the stations, and also funds its distribution.

Since you're an expert:

How do you find and consume news?

If you were made King/BDFL, how would you "fix" investigative journalism? A la the documentary "Fit to Print".

* Reading rather than watching/listening.

* Going out of my way to consume content from authors/publications whose worldview I disagree with. Ditto for non-U.S. sources.

* Filter based on seriousness rather than passion. The whole information ecosystem is full of people and institutions ready to be passionate about almost any topic; the number willing to be serious is a lot smaller. This, more than any other filter, will improve your news-consuming experience.

* Read what the journalists are reading to get their story ideas. That means niche-y Substacks, newsletters and industry websites.

Investigative journalism: There are some nonprofits doing an very good job, like ProPublica. But too often, those newsrooms are political/cultural monocultures. To use the ProPublica example, you're much, much more likely to see stories about evil billionaires and how government should have done something(tm), than investigations about how, say, government is holding people back.

Some of this stems from hiring trends in journalism, which have skewed more and more to hiring coastal, degree-holding (relative) elites compared to the more blue-collar newsrooms of the past. Hire for monoculture, get monoculture results.

But the other part is funding diversity -- left-leaning donors have embraced nonprofit journalism in a way right-leaning donors have not.

When the right gives to journalistic efforts it tends to take the form of local investigation (and there are some GREAT reporters doing local-market work with that model), open-the-books efforts aimed at government transparency or, these days, own-the-libs clickbait. This reflects the growing delta between how much the right and left trust the press in the U.S.

But I am very comfortable critiquing the consistently low quality of NPR journalism.

That doesn't mean that they're in the same league with the worst of cable news. However, some of the dynamics are similar:

* Journalists interviewing other journalists;

* Stories with no balance from opposing-view sources; and

* Facts regularly asserted by the journalist rather than a credible source.

Now I won't say PBS or NPR are above criticism -- and as the kids say, "there's a lot to unpack here", but let's be honest, is NPR's journalism really low-quality? Or is it more likely you have a bit of grievance with NPR because you feel they do not favor your own particular political bias? Since we are internet strangers and have little context to go on, I can only assume the latter is the most likely.

If I was drinking coffee my monitor and keyboard and mouse and desk would be ruined right now.

I hope it's a joke. No one could say this with a straight face

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64855760

I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement.

Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by using shady NSFW ads. That's the closest to the libertarian anarchy ideal we had in 90s.

There's of course alphabet agencies mining data and pushing narratives, but that's fine.

For example, if the readership of this news service was entirely US-based, then it would only publish a single article on the Ukraine war---when it started---and then might only ever mention it again if it has a direct practical effect on US residents, like travel restrictions.

That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'?

Your opinion is worth the same as the next guy's. Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better no matter how you try to rationalize it. The only problem is that it makes is harder to tell the signal from the noise (noise being fake stuff, tangential topics, hearsay, bullshit, etc.). But the opposite is much much worse.

And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my list. In things where you'd never know the difference if it were true or not, because it would never affect you either way.

The reason I thought a news service like this would work better as a government service than a private entity is because a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws. "Likely to materially affect people" is something that you could reasonably argue about in a courtroom, just as much as other fuzzily-defined legal concepts like libel or false advertising.

I'm imagining a news agency whose legal responsibilities were defined in such a way that it could be sued if one of the following happened:

1. It reports something that no reasonable person would believe meets the criteria.

2. Readers experience some kind of material harm that could have been avoided if they had read news reported in another outlet but not this one. And this harm is not the result of the reader being in some very small minority of readers (say, <1%), because after a certain point this will always be true for things that affect a very small number of people.

The problem is whoever controls the government and controls the news is also the one enforcing the laws.

You want to see suppression of “fake news”, aka anything that makes the ruling party look bad, then look no further than government run media services.

I think they thought long and hard before they add freedom of the press to the bill of rights.

NPR does a half-assed good job of providing unbiased news (they unironically claim that title) as long as it isn’t some hot button issue like Roe v Wade. In those cases they go into full on partisan politics propaganda machine mode. My absolute favorite, as I enjoy the absurd, was trotting out some kids who grew up in foster care with the implication that they would have been better off if their mother had had an abortion. Just an example, not a statement of purpose.

I know that it is not as applicable today, but you should really look into the whole 'separation of powers' thing.

Congress can pass all the laws it wants but they have no power to ensure they are being acted upon. And sometimes have no power to stop them from being violated like the whole Trail of Tears thing where a sitting president blatantly violated the law with no repercussions.

What does the Judicial branch do again?

Since you brought up that abortion segment, here is another from last November when they ran audio of an actual abortion. Beware - it's brutal:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/03/1133790770/what-its-like-insi...

Why do you think this? What is your basis for this claim? Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda, so your claim that the only problem is distinguishing signal from noise is false by your own stated standards.

Agenda in reporting is a problem, there is no question, but I don’t buy for a second that anarchy is “always” better or even often better. I would agree that there are times when it helps, but I think it’s closer to few and far between, and that the noise and chaos in the mean time is detrimental and damaging to someone’s ability to see truth when it does come through. To use the example from this thread, 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.

Are you talking about trivial news reporting ("this thing happened today")? If so, yes.

If you're talking about important questions in society, no. I mean, if you want full-on propaganda you can read the New York Times or The Atlantic, or Washington Post, etc. Aside from tangible reporting, your probability of finding truth about important questions in society is extremely low, while they tout it to be really high -- extremely disingenuous. And yes, in all of these places the Opinion section has adquired so much relevance that they are no longer newspapers in the traditional sense.

On the other hand, if you want actual truth, you'll have to read through tons of bullshit, slurs, memes, jokes, fake news, fake tweets, CIA narratives, Mossad/JIDF narratives, but it will be there... buried somewhere deep in a 4chan thread. The great thing about this is that there's no pretense, it's: come at your own risk, use common sense, take everything with a grain of salt, "everything said here is satire".

> Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda

That's definitely true, there's even specific slurs for those pushing propaganda. But that's the beauty of it, there could be conflicting narratives being pushed at once, and there's no way to tell whether someone believes it or is just shilling. At the end of the day, it's just an anonymous comment and you can only determine it's value based on the content of the post. You can't even safely tell if it's a human or a bot nowadays.

I have no doubt in my mind that the free flow of information is always better. Now, you can argue about the practicity of this, and you'd be right. The thing is, this is a symptom of the state of affairs. Think about it, there are 8 billion people walking on Earth, a great proportion of which have a computer with an internet connection and a high quality camera in their pockets. That means that this year will be the most commented on, most recorded in human history by far. On top of that, there are governments around the world spending billions of US dollars in propaganda. It's no wonder 'truth' is obfuscated and almost impossible to come by.

This twisted argument seems to be claiming that 4chan is more trustworthy because it’s less trustworthy. But you’re demonstrating a double standard. If you can excuse and overlook the unending ocean of fake news and propaganda and bullshit on 4chan, then it’s only fair and consistent to do the same for mainstream news, where it’s also true that not everything is propaganda. You’re whole complaint boils down to you writhing against the “pretense”, but why does that matter, exactly? You either care about the truth or not, so the reputation shouldn’t be a factor for you, especially if you seek information from disreputable sources.

So the bottomline of what I'm trying to say would be: if you exclusively consume mainstream news, you're probably more vulnerable to adhere to a narrow viewpoint, and maybe not even know there are people who disagree.

Similar to how HN operates when discussing a blog post, especially clickbaity posts -- when reading the comments you may see that there's more to the story or that the author is wrong about something. Sometimes that has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on a specific topic.

This is why “Q” claimed to be a high-level government official, for example, to attempt to establish authority. Pretense, or just experience or expertise or authority, is always there even with the stuff on 4chan.

The authority of a source is a shortcut for evaluating the truth of a source’s information. I think this is what @t12hrow meant by the question of practicality. It takes a long time to verify information on it’s merits alone.

In a funny way, this incentivises swiming against the current, so there's never a consensus.

Karma on the other hand only creates a chilling effect, beacuse you're either banned or shadowbanned or somehow silenced. Take HN for example, if you post something controversial here not only it doesn't get more visibility, but it's grey-ed out and thrown to the bottom.

The reality these places are pushing, including HN, is out of touch with society. Even the European stuff is so out of touch I get crazy looks and responses when I’ve asked people (Europeans) about them.

Of course, it's still small scale in relation to behemoths like Twitter, FB, Insta, TikTok.

Some boards are incredibly slow given the popularity of the site as a whole, threads on boards like /n/ can stay up for weeks with barely any replies.

Citizens that are active and care, is what's necessary for democracy to work, that is, citizens which actively monitor, and participate in, political developments. Mere "informed voters" just voting once every 4-5 years do not really make democracy, even if we were to be generous and assume that the elections-very-X-years model and the existing representation hierarchies system are adequate.

Beyond that, for real democracy to work, the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.

In other words, voter who 99.9% of the time tend to their private affairs alone, can't make democracy work.

How can the real life experiences of people I know possibly inform me about Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy, the SVB bailout, pandemic issues, etc. etc. etc.?

State level policy depends on public support or opposition. For example, re Ukraine, US policymakers and others - from Fox News to the Russians to internationalists and many others - are carefully monitoring public opinion and trying to shape it.

They are investing a lot of time and resources in that. Why are they doing it if public opinion doesn't matter?

Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.

The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.

To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/153358567932...

[1]: https://www.racket.news/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american (search "Khashoggi")

[2]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/marc-edwards-...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/c1fk5l/newsweek_in...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

Also notice how I said "the number one source of information" and not "the sole source of information".

And it's not just about "people you know". When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.

People and citizens movements were networked and exchanging experiences and perspectives, and they didn't even have internet, they had to do it by mouth, snail mail, real world gatherings, indie press, and so on.

1. I think serious news media (not just any news media) is more reliable than 'people you know'. People you know, now manifested in social media, is the vector for the virulant phenomenon of disinformation and misinformation.

> When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.

Could you give some examples or evidence of that? Did you experience it yourself? I'm not saying people had no information then, but I think they have far more now via the Internet (information including disinfo and misinfo).

Active citizens are like leaders of a group. A group needs a leader but a group also needs its members.

Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.

> 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.

> 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).

The stories people classify as "positive" are exclusively category 3. Crime stories are entertainment, charity porn (especially about children doing charity work), stories about sick people and animals that got well again, all entertainment. Sports. Stories about soldiers and cops that are framed as inspiring and patriotic. None of it is news, it's messaging.

It only makes sense. News that affects people is mostly news of problems, or more accurately, actionable news. "Ongoing Processes Maintaining Themselves As Planned" isn't news that affects you unless it's a followup on "Potential Problem Found In Ongoing Process." The other actionable news is "Event Occurring That You May Wish To Take Part In," and the "news" doesn't care about those unless the "event" writes a check.

Bad news usually does that - in that it helps us reflect that “well at least i’m not THAT guy!”