To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history: the court of Hadrian, of Antoninus. The courts of Philip, Aleander, Croesus. All just the same. Only the people different.
from Meditations: a New Translation by Marcus Aurelius, trans. by Gregory Hays (p. 139)
Since February 24, Russia has waged war against the Ukraine, and every day we’re bombarded with images of brutal and unimaginable human suffering. Many of us have been shocked far outside our comfort zone and have trouble focusing. Others merely go on with their day, consciously tuning out events of the world in order to operate normally. How do we maintain a balance between the need to function and the need to develop an awareness of what’s going on in the world?
I’ve already mentioned how digital interaction is remaking our psychological spaces and how taking in a lot of information can be bad or good, but those articles were written during peacetime, when things were a lot simpler and the stakes were much lower. How can we adjust our information intake during moments of international crisis?
This is the problem stated by Nassim Taleb in Antifragile (p. 125):
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales at your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to .5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.
Not to mention that watching real-time footage of a war going on can create genuine trauma in the viewer, even if they've never experienced war in person. Taleb goes on:
…the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that “science” means more data.
However, 2022 is a time of immense change, and there is a case for observing live information, no matter how shocking or chaotic, in place of cut-and-dried analyses of the war, pretending to display more packaged, logical progression than the uncertainty of the present moment. Observing the chaos of what’s going on might be as valuable than observing the narratives imposed upon it.
The accuracy of information in both mainstream and independent news sources has been mostly commendable if you look in the right place (such as the r/worldnews live feed). How fortunate we are that we have access to multiple news outlets, and that we’re not being fed censored or false information about the progress of the war, as is the case in Russia.
But the problem still remains: following the course of the war is traumatic. There’s no other way that the specific targeting of civilians, bombing of hospitals, kidnapping of children, and unfolding of war crimes could be rationalized in any other manner. If you follow what happens, there will be an emotional cost.
So what do we do?
Oliver Burkeman in his newsletter suggests rationing the flow of information:
I think there's a third option, more realistic than renunciation and more ambitious than self-care: adjusting your default state, so that the news once again becomes something you dip into for a short while, then out of again – as opposed to a realm in which you spend most of your day, only sometimes managing to wrench back enough concentration to live your actual life.
There's no use in waiting for human suffering to cease, for the war to miraculously end. Live your life, do the important things, but don’t shy away from struggling with how terrible war is. But you might find it useful to ration the flow of information so that it doesn’t become overwhelming.
It is necessary to bear witness to these horrors so that as many people as possible will know that war is indeed hell, tyranny must be stopped, and that the only genuine way to prosperity is through peace.
(Image courtesy of Igor Karimov on Unsplash)