<
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/24/opinion/i-read-more-news-than-anyone-trust-me-people-are-better-than-were-led-think/>
"For more than a decade, I’ve been sending out a newsletter called NextDraft,
in which I share summaries of the day’s most fascinating news. As part of my
process, I open up 75 news tabs in my browser at a time. I’ve probably perused
as many news stories as any human, and I can share this headline: People are
terrible. At least that’s what it seems like if you count the majority of
stories out there, especially the ones that really take off because they
confirm a bias we all hold to some extent: that other people are a lot worse
than we are. That’s why the original version of the Kitty Genovese story, in
which many of our fellow humans were so devoid of ethics that they’d sit by as
a woman was murdered, ended up going viral before we had the term for it.
If it bleeds, it leads. It’s not surprising that news stories tend to focus
more on negative events or that such a focus would affect our general view of
humanity. But our bias toward believing the worst about people is an
insufficiently recognized reason that you should be skeptical about what you
read. Misinformation is especially effective when it casts our fellow humans in
a negative light."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
