Consuming news online is spiritually unwholesome. If you absolutely must read the news you should go down the street and pay with coins for a paper. Then keep walking and read it in a cafe. When a friend comes in you'll remember how little the news matters and put it down.
even better just buy one newspaper, ever, and read it over and over for a few years every time you feel compelled for news. This may cure you.
the guy wandering alleys downtown picking up used cigarettes to find the good ones left has keener powers of observation than a person who is compelled to be 'informed' by the news
if something actually important happens 3 guys carrying trumpets ride through the street on horseback announcing it anyway. It's not like you won't know.
A good newspaper would be a subscription where once a month an envelope is mailed to you with 12 printed photos or drawings or paintings of things that happened that month. There should be no context beyond the photos.
I don't know. You probably don't even need 12. Here's all of human history in 2 photos.
Here is all of human psychology in 2 images
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I thought it strange - my parents never really gave me advice growing up. Nothing about career, finance, romance, even small things like what to read or how to dress. It was as if they felt it was not their place.
What I learned since is that this is absurdly common
I was an extremely quiet child that went to a very small (8th grade graduating class: 21 people) catholic school. I stayed mostly mute until I went off to college. I grew up, in a way, on the internet. This world was closed to my non-technical parents.
My father had no father, and grew up very poor. He became a breadwinner as an early teen. I think he found it difficult to be a father, how to relate to adolescents anyway. I don't really blame him.
I have written about that slightly before, long ago:
It's actually mysterious how many smart single people there are that cannot find a partner.
So many people want a well-defined thing, and that thing exists in droves, and they cannot find it. Also it's each-other.
On paper it seems like smart people should have the easiest time of all with (social) assortative mating.
The numbers are low, but you have the most signals and avenues to find each-other, the most resources, ostensibly the best coordination mechanisms etc etc etc
and yet
of course I'm making it sound more easy than it is, I'm not trying to be glib "just go to the husband/wife store".
But I feel like something is *off*, given the stakes. Some dating dark matter that's just way off. Hence mysterious.
"only net taxpayers voting" is how nearly all democracy was originally conceived
people have a hard time because philosophically there is an enormous gulf between "voting is a reasonable way to achieve good governance" and "voting is about fairness"
yet we switched from "good governance" to "fairness"
reminder: Senators used to be appointed. We stopped doing this and switched to popular election (1913) not bc we wanted super extra more fairness but bc ostensibly appointments caused more cronyism than good governance.
even that was controversial, it was basically the publishing magnate Hearst using the power he had to agitate for it with what could kindly be called fanfiction about how bad things were. nonetheless it was enough to really get the ball rolling
The zero-interest-rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release, it happened because of the end of ZIRP which occurred rapidly in 2022.
the extreme over-hiring and then bloodbath is visible from space. Also visible from indeed dot com data, indexed to 100 pre-covid.
The AI post-hoc story is doggedly self insistent but its completely false.
People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's employees by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not because he just thought he could run a lot leaner.
We're on year 3-4 of other companies wondering the same thing.
consider for an obvious example how h. pylori was discovered as the cause of peptic ulcers
RCTs might be used to develop new drugs to treat ulcers, but that's obviously inferior to discovering the cause. One is more scientifically important (the one that won the nobel prize)
Why *did* so many western nations seem to decide on a policy of infinity migration so suddenly, with seemingly no fanfare or public debate or even mention about it prior to backlash?
for example the change in Canada here from 2015-2019 looks genuinely crazy. Huge change to a previously conservative system, more than doubled. Possibly it made local news but not in the US.
But then the post 2020 change blows *that* out of the water
2022/2023 more than doubled the 2015-2019 averages in a lot of countries. And some of those 2015-2019 averages were already high, as we see with Canada, which makes these bars look less weird than they really are.