News focused on the negative, is overly dramatic, leads us to false conclusions about the world and is largely pointless speculation, fear and dlick-bait headlines designed primarily to attract eyeballs to advertisers. News is also largely a waste of our time, says Psychology Today.
Some great examples of how people make decisions – and conclusions – based on marketing propaganda. Many now choose “almond milk” because production doesn’t produce as much green house gases (notably methane) as produced by dairy milk. Except it takes 6.098 liters (1,611 US gallons) to make 1 liter of almond milk, and most almonds are grown in California which has high variability (e.g. frequent drought) in rainfall. People make supposedly environmentally friendly choices based on incorrect information, limited information, or missing critical context.
Factfulness is an important book that opens our eyes to how our views of the world have been skewed, if not corrupted, by poor thinking skills and various groups, including the media, that focus on the negative and often inappropriately generalize small issues into seeming huge problems. The reality, as well documented in this book, is that the world is getting better, often way better – which is surprising when we are buried in negativity all day, every day.
Social media is filled with “inspirational quotes” that are often nonsensical gibberish, or as one professor suggests “pseudo profound bullshit” 🙂
Instagram intentionally makes it very difficult to upload photos from a PC. Instagram wants everything to be smartphone-centric. Many people use a variety of tricks to get around this upload problem including processing photos on their PC or Mac and then transferring them to their phone or tablet for upload using the Instagram app.
Because of this (dumb) limitation of Instagram, users wanted an easy way to upload photos from their PC. A malware company developed Gramblr as an easy way to upload from your PC. Their software was very sophisticated on many levels, one of which was that it secretly viewed Youtube videos behind the scenes each time you upload a photo to Instagram. Their business model was to sell Youtube video views and likes, and to deliver those views through the Gramblr bot net.
As of the summer of 2019, Gramblr has disappeared and their website is gone. The Gramblr botnet has been shut down (or at least no new users will get infected).
Post lots of selfies on social media? Others may view you more negatively than those who do not post lots of selfies.
Twitter does not represent the views of the people: it represents the views of a very tiny minority of angry and miserable people (most tweets come from about 2% of the population, a group that seems to very outraged and angry). There is a word for this: it’s miserablism, or the philosophy of pessimism and the enjoyment of being miserable.
Correlation is not causation.
An incredibly lengthy news article spins a story that a top athlete and scholar’s death, due to suicide, is likely due to the increasing pressure on young women to accomplish great things. 10 pages into this 14 page, single spaced news article, does the author mention she had suffered a brain injury just prior to her suicide, and even that mention goes into less detail than contemporary news reports shortly after her death. (I have had multiple and serious TBI’s myself, which is why I found the reporting on this terribly sad story to be a rambling odyssey that seemingly wanted to avoid reality.)
Reuters is called out this week for leaving out critically important details from their photo (cropped) and text description.