alt Hacker NewsThere's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs.
We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers.
People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news.
But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible.
Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables!
Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades.
I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom.
Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
It's the same perspective that asks, "If he's so bad, why doesn't she leave him?" And when she doesn't ultimately reconciles it by blaming her.
It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality.
Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest.
Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.