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.
Our mind is built on that “malware”. I think it’s more accurate to compare brain + knowledge to our immune system: the more samples you have, the better you are armed against mal-information.
But that leaves out the psychological effects of long-term exposure to ideas. If you know for a fact that the earth is round, and for the next 50 years all the media you consume keeps telling you that the earth is flat, you will at some point start believing that (or at least become unsure).
Every piece of information you receive has some tiny effect on you.
This sounds like the theories that were more prevalent before germ theory. Surgeons or obstetricians would argue that washing hands was a disservice to the organisms they get into.
Immune systems still get sick and can be overwhelmed. There is a mental hygiene that needs to exist.
