Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
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Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
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Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#2TL;DR clickbait is addictive.
“And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful—what some may call idle curiosity.”
THAT is the point of the article. Crap information is addictive.
I knew there was some sort of angle to this.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#3For all but the last instant of our cultural evolution, humans have been information starved. In one generation we have become a culture that has instant access to unbounded quantities‡.
In the same way, over the last century or so, we became a species with ample access to calories‡. With foods containing the evolutionary markers of high calorific content (i.e. sugars, carbs and fats) being the cheapest.
It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we are similarly primed to overindulge in both. Nor that we lack the innate intuition to determine quality. I very much expect the nascent 'tech detox' movement to develop into a broader healthy thinking movement.
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‡ #NotAllHumans, obviously.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#4TL;DR clickbait is addictive. “And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful—what some may call idle curiosity.” THAT is the point of the article. Crap information is addictive. I knew there was some sort of angle to this.
Are you saying you think their angle was to reach a conclusion that sugary information is addictive? It sounded like that was the starting point. What's the issue?
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#5In terms of neural networks that doesn't seem so strange.
Neural networks can "overfit" and behave like a hash table instead of generalizing.
One method of "regularization" is putting in a score that represents network complexity, information content, etc. and then adding it against the reward function.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#6[deleted]
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#7This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#8In terms of neural networks that doesn't seem so strange. Neural networks can "overfit" and behave like a hash table instead of generalizing. One method of "regularization" is putting in a score that represents network complexity, information content, etc. and then adding it against the reward function.
So, what does that mean in terms of a user manual for human brains?
We should discount low information dense sources ? or sources that are a long way off in graph terms?
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#9The original study can be found here: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/10/1820145116
Abstract:
> Adaptive information seeking is critical for goal-directed behavior. Growing evidence suggests the importance of intrinsic motives such as curiosity or need for novelty, mediated through dopaminergic valuation systems, in driving information-seeking behavior. However, valuing information for its own sake can be highly suboptimal when agents need to evaluate instrumental benefit of information in a forward-looking manner. Here we show that information-seeking behavior in humans is driven by subjective value that is shaped by both instrumental and noninstrumental motives, and that this subjective value of information (SVOI) shares a common neural code with more basic reward value. Specifically, using a task where subjects could purchase information to reduce uncertainty about outcomes of a monetary lottery, we found information purchase decisions could be captured by a computational model of SVOI incorporating utility of anticipation, a form of noninstrumental motive for information seeking, in addition to instrumental benefits. Neurally, trial-by-trial variation in SVOI was correlated with activity in striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, cross-categorical decoding revealed that, within these regions, SVOI and expected utility of lotteries were represented using a common code. These findings provide support for the common currency hypothesis and shed insight on neurocognitive mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior.
Re: Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain
#10Interesting to see this today. Yesterday I was listening to Duncan Trussel on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was making this exact point. I imagine the information ‘food pyramid’ will evole over time as well.