Saving your sanity from Doomsday News
Is the seemingly never ending torrent of Doomsday News worrying you, distracting you, keeping you up at night or even worse? Keep in mind Doomsday News is nothing new. What is new are technologies that enable us to consume Doomsday News as never before in human history. Just like the fast food industry, we have super-sized fear! What is happening and what can we do to avoid being paralyzed by fear or even worse overreacting to real or imaginary threats?
THE PROBLEM
We have rapidly improving new technologies capable of generating unprecedented levels of fear disconnected from our day to day directly experienced reality and routinely triggering the powerful, life-saving but sometimes inappropriate and dangerous fight or flight response.
These technologies include extremely high quality, realistic video with stereo sound on increasingly large, high definition and realistic screens. Increasingly we experience the “news” and other online content as if we are observing distant arguments, conflicts, and brutal warfare through our window in our neighborhood or even inside our home. This appears to increasingly bypass our critical thinking and trigger primal reactions.
We have increasingly believable audio and visual special effects that appear entirely real in many cases and they are only getting better. These include both CGI and newer AI methods as well as huge advances in convincing makeup, prosthetics, and props that have made possible stunning fantasy and sci-fi movies.
Ultra powerful computers make it possible to perform detailed statistical analyses and use AI techniques to tailor these audio/video messages, even in real time, to push our buttons, often with deep levels of fear. The messages are being personalized to bypass our critical cognitive functions with fear and other strong primal emotional appeals.
There have been significant advances in our understanding of cognitive biases and other cognitive weaknesses. These new insights are being weaponized to sell products and policies often with unprecedented high levels of fear. Empirically, knowledge of cognitive biases does not increase our resistance to many of these emotional appeals.
Think about all the critical thinking gurus and other intellectuals who “steelman” their opponent’s arguments and somehow never find out they were wrong and always conclude they were right from the start!
The Paradox of Knowing about Cognitive Biases
People familiar with the increased knowledge of cognitive biases mistakenly believe this immunizes them or makes them highly resistant to these biases. They then attribute contrary evidence and even direct experiences contradicting their views to the cognitive biases of those who disagree with them! This type of thinking increases fear and ironically worsens the biases.
SOME SOLUTIONS
What can we do? The fix for this growing problem is not at all clear. One thing that almost certainly helps is to limit or completely avoid frightening context (“fear porn”) in the same way prudent persons limit or entirely avoid the use of powerful mind altering drugs or alcohol.
Some Tools and Methods That May be Helpful:
https://unhook.app/
A web browser plugin that blocks YouTube suggestions, comments and much more.
https://getcoldturkey.com/
Cold Turkey is a powerful and configurable blocker program for computers. On Microsoft Windows it can be configured to block programs and windows with a title matching a keyword or phrase. The blocks can be scheduled for date and time ranges as desired.
https://getcoldturkey.com/story/
https://socialfixer.com/
Social Fixer is a add on for Facebook that has built in filters for politics and other distracting topics as well as custom filters the user can set up.
https://socialfixer.com/about.html
Just to clarify, I am not suggesting anyone completely ignore world events or the “news.” Rather what I try to do and suggest is to limit the time spent on such issues to a few hours of dedicated time once a week or every few days, not a daily ritual let alone 24/7.
These are all programs I use regularly.
An additional suggestion:
Do not subscribe to “Doomsday News” sources on YouTube or other platforms. Rather, put links to their channel or web site in a folder in your browser — one level down so you are not seeing “Doomsday News” or whatever you choose to call the folder every time you use your browser. Check the “Doomsday News” during your weekly, monthly or even quarterly Doomsday News time.
John
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems by developing complex mathematical algorithms, including data analysis, gesture recognition, speech recognition and video compression technologies. Dr. McGowan is developing tools and algorithms for automating complex data analysis — including public policy, medical, financial, science and engineering data — to increase speed, reduce costs, and improve results. He has many years of experience developing software in Python, C++, MATLAB and many other programming languages and environments. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).