And ophthalmologists say you have to continually change your focus from near to far lest you damage your vision.
From Bloomberg, October 2:
We exaggerate the importance of breaking news but we also project illusions about the future. History really gets made in between the short and long runs.
Back in the summer, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and I were discussing the global economic and political situation. Just how bad were things going to get? Larry came up with a characteristically pithy formulation: “Events are 75% bad,” he said. “Trends are 75% good.”
I could see what he was getting at. His aphorism is a distillation of the argument of another longtime Harvard friend, the psychologist Steven Pinker. “Journalism by its very nature hides progress,” Pinker argued in a recent interview, “because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends … the press is an availability machine. It includes the worst things to happen on Earth at any given time.” But, he adds, “human progress is an empirical fact.” (This is a view Pinker has propounded in several books: Rationality (2021), Enlightenment Now (2018) and The Better Angels of our Nature (2011).)
It's certainly true that the mainstream media have a preference for bad news over good news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is an old newsroom adage for good reasons. Pinker isn’t the only academic who has studied the cognitive biases that attract us to adverse events. Even the BBC on occasion admits that the media have a preference for negativity.
As for the newer forms of social media, it seems that our demand for “doom scrolling” is so enormous that it cannot be satisfied by the supply of real disasters. Much fake news consists of imaginary calamities.
A good example was the recent flurry of internet interest in a supposed coup against Chinese President Xi Jinping. Beginning on Sept. 23, my inbox was filled with inquiries about a political upheaval that wasn’t in fact happening. Was it true that Xi had been arrested? It was hard to trace the origin of this story. My first glimpse of it was a tweet by a Chinese journalist I had never heard of named Jennifer Zeng:
****
The supporting evidence was a 55-second video of military vehicles.
Zeng has a website called “Inconvenient Truths.” However, the really inconvenient feature of her story was that in the subsequent 48 hours not a shred of corroboration could be found by any of the China experts I consistently read, such as Bill Bishop of Sinocism. On the ground in central Beijing, Georg Fahrion, the China correspondent of Der Spiegel, had some fun with the whole farrago (also on Twitter).
Of course, you might say that a military coup against Xi would be classified as good news, not bad news. But that would be to forget the entire bloody history of military coups in all the countries of the world. In any case, it wasn’t true.
The real issue I have has to do with the trends, not the news. To put it bluntly, I am struggling to see that good trends outnumber bad ones in the way that Summers and Pinker suggest....
....MUCH MORE
But...but...I saw it with my own eyes. Xi Jinping was placed under house arrest...it was on Twitter.
Breaking news Footage of xi jinping being escorted to his House #Beijing #China #chinacoup pic.twitter.com/ZaDJi0j19p
— Daniel (@Daniel93490317) September 24, 2022
