Of course it is. Knowing the events shaping your world have repercussions on your personal decisions. What should I eat? What should I learn? What career should I embark upon? What should I invest in?
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
I mostly agreed with your first paragraph, but then the examples killed it for me.
Especially the second one: what a profoundly sad existence that someone would define their learning interests by what their boss recommends, with the sole goal of advancing one’s career. It isn’t even guaranteed the advice would be useful—bosses can be incompetent and petty too. And pray tell, if your boss follows that same advice, where does it stop? When does anyone have one original thought to pursue?
Food in the grocery store is stocked by corporations who have no concern for your health and want to fill you up with addictive fat and sugar. Eat instead natural ingredients, preferably from local growers or a farmer’s market.
Don’t limit yourself to local careers if nothing calls to you. Dare to dream even just a big bigger.
401k is a US concept. Most of the planet doesn’t live there.
Most people don’t consult their family doctors when food isn’t available or when they are confronted with a variation in recipe. It isn’t the case that most people blindly follow their boss’ advice. Most people don’t decide their careers based on short-term local availability. And almost no investor who’s financially literate enough to consider an index fund would consider volatility as a metric of attractiveness of the fund.
I was going to say that your arguments only hold so long as you oversimplify what are inherently complex decisions that require multiple and current information sources, but the very foundation of your line of questioning is just plain wrong.
I'm going to disagee with you there. You are seeing the world through a different lens driven by constant churn in the tech industry.
In many industries if you are just a drone that does their job reasonably well, will work overtime every now and then when it's available and have shown willingness and ability to improve, management will make sure you stay at that company. Your only actual fear would be that the company fails but then very likely you are on the shortlist for that same management at their new company.
Assume incompetence not malice, people aren't out to get you and trying to get the worst for you, they want to best for themselves and if you make it so that making you comfortable also makes them comfortable then you aren't at risk.
Regarding food... Buy what's on the shelf, nobody needs their special kale only diet or whatever is the trend. What the parent was saying is follow general food guidelines, avoid excessive meat, keep portion sizes reasonable, half you plate should be vegetables etc...
Same with the index fund thing, if you start investing with a reputable investor when your are in your 20s even if it doesn't beat the market you will retire comfortably.
You don't need to minmax life. You can hit autopilot and just go where life takes you while just make small course corrections every now and then and you will be fine. You wont have a great life or a bad one. You will fall close to the middle of the bell curve and that's actually good enough.
Focus on the things that are important, spend time with your loved ones etc.
Trust me I understand your point of view as well, that's me I can't be vanilla with these things, my mental health doesn't allow it. I need to shoot for the moon and do it as efficiently as possible. I just know that's not necessary.
You nailed my intent here, although I wasn't really advocating for it either. More just reminding HN readers that we aren't representative, and that (as the replies here confirm) we seem to forget that.
The world is filled mostly with people who read below the 6th grade level. Those people have average life expectancies, average local jobs, and will retire with average savings if they retire at all.
I'm not judging those average lives, just trying to encourage the high achievers here to consider the way the 24 hour news cycle impacts the average, barely literate, person who just wants to survive their day without falling down either slope of the bell curve.
> Whichever index fund option in your 401k is least volatile.
That would be a govt bond fund or, worse, a money market fund. That is no different than telling retail investors to avoid equities, and only buy bonds. That is a terrible investment strategy. Literally: I have never seen an investment professional recommend such a portfolio for any one of working age.
Better advice would a broad based US/Europe equity index, e.g., S&P 500 or FTSE 100 or EuroSTOXX 600.
Given how terrible that advice is, it makes you reconsider the other items. The whole post might be clever satire: "Don't just do what you're told. Don't just eat the crap pushed by Big Ag. Do think."
That seems unwise. The comparison point for me would be 1920s Europe - in hindsight it seems likely they'd have had a lot of telegraphing in advance that things were about to go really badly wrong - disasters of the magnitude that engulfed them aren't easily missed. The average person wouldn't have been aware of it because the lack of an internet would have resulted in an insanely biased view of the data being presented that probably obscured just how bad things were getting. Today we have a much better level of information access available.
The answer in the 1920s if you can see the 1930s and 1940s coming wasn't go local, it was some combination of fortify, fearmonger and/or flee. People needed to be alerted that the situation was really bad and immediate action was required at all levels to avert disaster - but action wasn't taken and we saw an economic crisis unfold, followed by a military one.
The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? How many people do we think were realistically in a position to make a change to the economic conditions and still uninformed? How many were in a place to make a change to the military conditions and similarly uninformed?
Hind sight is 20/20, and its easy knowing a massive war was coming to say people should have been getting the hell out of Dodge. But moving your entire family to a new country let alone a new continent is a massive undertaking. How many people even if they had the warnings would have pulled the trigger on that move rather than wait and see? What sort of huge, global war scale negative things are being telegraphed today and what major life altering decisions on the magnitude of leaving your entire community and extended family behind and seeking asylum in a foreign country do you foresee yourself undertaking to address them in response to your unprecedented levels of modern awareness?
Or does your unprecedented access to that information simply make you feel helpless and hopeless? Are you actually better equipped to attend to the impending doom or do you just know that it's there. One wonders if we had the ability to know the exact month and year we were going to die, would we think our lives were made better by knowing that, or would we find that having that knowledge does little to change the quality of the life we live in any positive way, and largely adds stress or other negative experiences. There's a balance to be struck with any amount of being informed, but like everything else in life, I suspect moderation is the key.
> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation?
Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically.
I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.
> Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things.
Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were.
> The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless.
I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.
The "events shaping your world" are a handful of currently trending narratives promulgated by an engagement-optimizing algorithm or a literal popularity contest, not an epistemologically meaningful sample of reality.
Making quality decisions with incomplete information is a higher order operation than
(as this study shows) surfing whatever has a compatible emotional valence.
I am keeping up with my steady tide pod diet, learning about how much God loves me, training to be a YouTube influencer to make thousands of dollars per month without leaving my home and investing in helping a Nigerian prince move his funds out of the country. Yet I still feel there is something missing. Which Gab group would you guys recommend for knowing the truth about the events shaping my world that they are hiding from us?
Exactly. Use less plastic for food containers. Don’t use plastic cooking utensils, filter your water, etc. This is one you do have some influence over.
Go to a blood donation center. You'll notice the blood bags say "VOLUNTEER" on them. Not because some people are getting their blood stolen. The alternative is "THERAPEUTIC". We still bloodlet today.
That's an interesting assumption. Is it really?
I suspect that informed citizens are better for society, but it might be worse for the the individuals.