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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Your argument doesn't justify getting worked up about any of that without far more obvious reason.

I don't lose sleep over the next pandemic everytime someone in Africa shags a chimp and catches a novel zoonotic disease, that's the WHO's headache. If you fret every time someone around the globe falls sick with an unexplained illness, you're going to fall sick yourself.

There's an expected value to new information as well as a cost to your time and energy in acquiring it. Both are small, but in most cases, the latter is larger for anything you see on the news. We don't have the luxury of caring about everything, our brains aren't good enough.

At any rate, I am terminally online because I find it enjoyable for its own sake, and especially since I'm pragmatic and detached enough that little really fazes me. Not because I expect most of the things I read to matter in the least, my life hasn't changed for the worse since I stopped watching Indian news a decade ago, and my exposure to world affairs is incidental to whatever I run into online.

I agree. Just because a given political issue doesn't affect your life today, doesn't mean it will never affect your life in the future. But if it doesn't affect your life today, it probably isn't healthy to react as if it does.