Media Thread

- Left most of social media, turned off news in the feed for the ones I kept using. Social media algorithms are horrible for news, plus it gets exploited by influencers / pundits.
- Found some news outlets that are passable. Which means rejection of all the ones that subsist on ragebait and engagement bait, or the ones that only print articles you are meant to agree with. For controversial news, find double verification. Which doesn't mean 2 different articles or 2 different publications, but rather at least 2 different sources.
- Influencers and pundits is for the most part a no-go. The business of growing large follower counts or keeping them is almost invariably at odds with posting decent news. Pundits and influencers have also grown increasingly professional, and non-disclosed ownership, investment, sponsorships and payments is a pox on the entire industry.
- Avoid doomscrolling. It is a horrible habit, plus it is just manipulative ******* design meant to push ads. And no, blocking ads doesn't make it more meaningful.
- Won't read the news when it is about idiots. I'm pretty much done with news about the Trumps of the world. Life isn't long enough to waste time on idiots, and 10 years of stupid debates with people that would deny the existence of language if allows them to absolve their idols is enough for several lifetimes.
- For science, following a lot of the actors on social media is completely fine. Still, it is hard to be my own science editor, so magazines (AAAS or Nature, for example) is ok. Also, there are some decent podcasts, because this is actually a venue that has for the most part not yet been made into social media slop.

Still, it is getting trickier out there. The recent bombings in Iran were a good case of the post-truth society. The media was useless, statements by the actors involved were useless, the actors themselves were untrustworthy to the point of uselessness, social media was useless, leaks were useless. There was pretty much nothing of substance to hold on to. The only thing a person could do was to choose their favorite liar, which is what a lot of people did before they went and quarreled with other people over their favorite liar. In the end we're all still clueless about the entire thing.

It is a pretty dire warning of how the near future will be.

Then how do you keep up on the newest erectile dysfunction therapies?

I figure if people aren't posting about it here then it's probably not that important, although I will watch some Colombian and Brazilian news channels on YouTube.

Are you following Moraes drama with the US govt? What is the general Brazilian sentiment on this. Are Brazilians "circling the wagon" to support their guy. Or are they wary he is negatively impacting their lives to push his own authoritarian agenda.

I'm not following it too closely but Brazil is pretty polarized between left and right so something like "Brazilians circling the wagons" would be just as difficult there as it is in the US. Mostly everything there is about the economy as far as public sentiment goes and the Real has been one of world's worst performing currencies since Lula resumed office but it didn't take any sort of dive when Trump announced tarrifs.

Why not make a youtube channel to express your points? You can make it as reliable or not as you want and if you you're able to build up a bit of a following, youtube will pay you out monthly.

Because you clearly have a lot of passion and a belief on certain things and are willing to put in the work. But you're going to need an algorithm or something to get more like minded people interested in what you have to say than talking to people on a forum in which many here have spent years trying to identify better ways to take more of someone else's money.

Most of the unpopular autocrats that rule like Lula dont even hold real elections anymore. Do you (or anyone you listen to) see Brazil going this route, where Lula just makes himself like Maduro, Erdogan or Putin and just starts rigging elections to stay in power indefinitely?

With an optimistic bent.

Politico is often good. Though I'd say this topic is more about recognizing decent articles and developing a bullshit radar than it is about specific outlets. Because any outlet can publish a bad story, and while there are outlets that pretty much will never publish a good story... a fair bit of the more shaky ones will occasionally hit pay dirt.

Political preference or bias isn't the end of the world either. People can be biased and write serious articles, it is when the articles get manipulative or deceitful you get a problem.

I feel pretty confident that we’re going to see a collective shift away from politics in the coming years. To some degree, with how information is currently being delivered, I think people are going to just start tuning out a little more.

The constant information overload, mixed with sensationalized stories, can only lead to some level of fatigue at best. Add in the chronic stress of passive worry, the false sense of powerlesness, and the simple truth that the choices people make in their own homes far outweigh the decisions made in the White House and the whole thing just starts to feel -EV - plus all of the rest of the mental health issues that politics has flung on people here.

I think if we go back about 15 years, social media felt genuine and often was. Then the business portion of social media exploded and a lot of savvy people managed to ride this image of genuine messaging. So even as the messaging became manipulative a lot of us were swept along and fell for it.

Now I think we're seeing a growing awareness that a lot of this messaging is an unhealthy combination of business and performative bullshit, and since ownership / payments are so often undisclosed it also raises serious questions about corruption. This in the same way that if you don't know who owns or funds a newspaper, it isn't really a newspaper. Of course, this is all pretty anecdotal still and might not be supported by metrics. However, I suspect bot traffic and superconsumers of social media make such metrics unreliable.

The news however, was slow on the uptake going into the social media revolution, and now they seem slow on the uptake as it is changing. A lot of outlets are still all-in on hysteria. Editors make sure even serious and good articles have engagement bait titles.

And I agree with you. It is exhausting. I have been a news-junkie for the better part of my life, but now increasingly find myself uninformed. The hysteric portion of the news cycle is unreadable, but non-hysteric news have become increasingly stale as experts willing to engage become rarer. Not that I blame them, if an expert says something interesting or remotely controversial, the result is often a mob frenzy.

It is a lot when it muddles the picture of what is actually happening. I am ok with an outlet saying x y z is happening (with precision) then a very well separated statement claiming "and i (the author) don't like that it is happening".

Like the EPA gutting attempts have been covered like that by good leftist media. They don't claim the trump admin doesn't have the authority to reverse the endagerment finding of 2009 (which is the basis to justify EPA regulating CO2 emissions). They claim it's bad if they reverse that. Bad leftist media goes into a frenzy just claiming it's fascism and whatever.

Too often, they try to claim x y z is for example illegal, even if it is not, so they side with a lower court decision agreeing with them, without informing me that it has a sky high chance of reversal in appeal, and then they fail to cover the appeal that reverses... current examples would be the many cases where district courts told trump that he couldn't fire some people, and appeal reversing systematically.

As for the science the biggest risk is to find someone claiming there is scientifical consensus only to discover there isn't . That's something the left has attempted A LOT on climate change corollaries and even more during covid. They lied, completly, about a purported consensus existing about mask mandates working to significantly reduce cases for example. They lied about a consensus existing about hurricanes increasing in frequency and intensity. They lie a lot about these things. Systematically.

I can dodge that because i know it's objectively false that there is a consensus on those claims. But people can't be expected to check claims like that, especially because it's incredibly hard to verify. How do you even go and check what the consensus is about a SPECIFIC modeling claim in climate change or virology?

You've simply been actively misled to believe that what amounts to small academic agreements between peers are insurmountable differences between polar opposites. This has been one of the most common propaganda tools for discrediting climate science for the last five decades.

There is an organization that synthesizes current climate science into reports to base policies on. It is called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With 195 member states and their enormous amount of academic institutions it is a slog of an institution that is a bit too slow for the crisis at hand, but it is nothing if not thorough. You can find its reports here: https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/.

The last major assessment report was published in 2021, and the seventh assessment period is underway. The reports comes in three sections (science, impacts, mitigation) that are somewhat technical in nature. These are then summarized in a synthesis report that is more easily accessible to laymen and policymakers. You can read the full synthesis report here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downl...

For what it's worth: If your knee-jerk reaction to this is that you must immediately find ways to discredit the report, you should do us both a favor and simply move on instead. I'm tired of political zeal masquerading as skepticism.

What leftists in this forum including nut nut but not exclusively claim about the climate is dramatically more apocalyptic than what the IPCC assessments are. And that's because they hear the 5-10% most extremist "experts" .

And specifically about attribution, the IPCC is far more skeptical than what most leftists claim , regarding increase in intensity and frequency of deleterious atmospheric events, except heat waves ofc (but cold waves *which kill a lot more* are decreasing ofc).

I did REPEATDELY source the IPCC synthesis to leftists and they deny the IPCC claim and systematically use absurdly more extremist takes than that average take. Do you realize that? and ofc leftist media does as well.

It's not "minor differences" btw. The 10th percentile of the most extremist takes vs the 90th percentile is a difference between "if we do nothing the sea level increased 30 cm in 2100" vs "if we do nothing it increased 2m".

It's "miami will be fully viable under RCP 4.5" in 2100 with only minor increases in costs linked to mitigation vs miami will be 80% underwater and unlivable.

It's grotesque to claim the differences are minor.

If your knee jerk reaction to this is "no it's not true that leftists systematically claim insanely worse predictions than the IPCC" , have you ever opened the guardian?

for ex have you actually read the tables by the IPCC that claim that under RCP 4.5 the gdp of european countries is almost identical anyway, in 2100? *is that what leftists claim*?

do you realize leftist media systematically lies a lot more than rightwing media does about the climate, and it's not even close? because claiming NOTHING IS HAPPENING (which btw most rightwing media doesn't claim) is far closer to the truth than claiming "miami will be unlivable in 2100", do you agree?

If the actual scientifical assessment about a variable is , in prediction terms, that it will increase by 1 unit, being completly negationist about that is CLOSER TO THE TRUTH than believing it will increase more than 2 units.

It's impossible to be as far away from the truth as doomers are, on the negationist side, for obvious reasons. Because the actual scientifical predictions are of modest, minimal, changes, compared to what doomers claim.

So doomers are dramatically further from the truth than *complete negationists are* for the climate, and this is just one example of why hearing from doomers about "truth" in general is a sick bad joke: they are promoters of the biggest lies of the worst kind of propaganda possible. Huge, enormous lies used to attempt to change society completly. Literally the worst possible risk for the media.

And they want to discuss truth-finding lol. After they embraced the biggest set of lies being promoted in the current setting.

I mean, you are obviously not familiar with the report.

I can only suggest that you read it. The synthesis report is barely 100 easy-to-read pages written for laymen and policymakers.

I am. I perused it ad nauseam to discuss climate change policy proposals with leftists.

What did i wrote that makes you think i am not familiar with the report?

It's interesting that a 187 pages "synthesis" does NOT have a clear chart showing the scientific assessment of per capita GDP (by far the most important thing of all, plausibly more important than everything else combined) growth vs baseline/counterfactual under the various CO2 emission assumptions, by region.

It's literally the most important thing of all. They don't put it there. That would allow us to claim "scientifical consensus about climate change is that if the world emits this, this is the economic effect".

Then people can evaluate how much of a threat emissions are and so on, almost at a glance.

But no, they don't put it there in the "synthesis".

Let me show you know your stuff, and link me the papers , or even one is enough, with the numerical GDP estimates by region, in 2100, depending on RCP / SSP paths, that the IPCC uses and agrees with.

Note that if you don't have any or can't find any, everytime you heard anyone claiming that science says GDP would be X lower in case the world warms Y celsius, that's not science, and especially not scientifical consensus.

If you find what the IPCC bases it's reports on, for GDP, then you'll discover what they think about europe and you'll learn leftists lie obscenely about science.

I'm curious to understand your science background Lucifer. Which subjects have you studied ?

This is what the IPCC says in their most recent report.

B.2 For any given future warming level, many climate-related risks are higher than assessed in
AR5, and projected long-term impacts are up to multiple times higher than currently observed
(high confidence). Risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from
climate change escalate with every increment of global warming (very high confidence).
Climatic and non-climatic risks will increasingly interact, creating compound and cascading
risks that are more complex and difficult to manage (high confidence).

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downl...

Let me share a few defintions with you Lucifer

Compound - to add to : augment

Cascading - pour downward rapidly and in large quantities:

Complex - a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts

How can you possibly interpret this as being a benign statement ?

More from the IPCC

B.3
Some future changes are unavoidable and/or irreversible but can be limited by deep, rapid,
and sustained global greenhouse gas emissions reduction. The likelihood of abrupt and/or
irreversible changes increases with higher global warming levels.

"can be limited by deep, rapid and sustained ... emissions reduction" ..... that isn't happening.

B.6
All global modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot,
and those that limit warming to 2°C (>67%), involve rapid and deep and, in most cases,
immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade

Not happening