I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a “firewall” layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said “when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest”. I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as “incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!”. The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
Your mind is subject to cognitive biases that are extremely difficult to work around. For example, your statement is an example of egocentric bias.
All you need is content that takes advantage of a few of those biases and it’s straight in past your defences.
I am fairly armored intellectually, but emotionally, I find it draining to be reminded that war is at my doorsteps and that kids are dying gruesome deaths in conflicts I barely know about.
Yeah I understand people are pretty flawed, and vulnerable to some degree of manipulation. I just think that the idea proposed in this post is not only an overreaction, underestimates people’s ability to reject bullshit. We can’t always tell what’s bullshit, sure, but we don’t need to be treated like we’re too fragile to think for ourselves. Once that happens, we would literally become unable to do so.