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Heavy- news- watchers be careful!

 

An apart from the book: Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker.

“News is about things that happen, no things that don’t happen. And among the things that do happen, the positive and the negative ones unfold on different timelines.

If a newspaper came out every once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such an increase in life expectancy.

The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because a mental bug called the Availability Heuristic = people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

Availability heuristicà stocked by the news policy “if it bleeds, it leads” induce a sense of gloom about the state of the world.

News gatekeepers prefer negative to positive coverage, holding the events constant that in turn provides an easy formula for pessimism on the editorial page.

The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Heavy news-watchers can become miscalibrated, consumers of negative news become glum and they become fatalistic.

Seeing how journalist’s habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count.

A quantitative mindset is the morally because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are close to us of most photogenic. And holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce them.”

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