Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 466 posts

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#61

Post by komali2 »

OnionBlender wrote: post #57
Zambyte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why your attention is so insanely valuable. Everyone thinks they're immune to advertising, yet people keep paying billions and billions of dollars to show something on your screen for a few seconds... because like it or not, it works.

I've been using ad blockers and not watching TV for so long that I have very little ad resistance. Whenever I use someone else's computer that doesn't an ad blocker, it makes me wonder how people live like this. I'm so bad at handling distractions that I have to turn the radio or music off to make a left hand turn.

I often wonder how friends back home in Texas can believe the things they do, say the things they say... and then when I visit and we sit around to watch a game and I see how many ads many people are exposed to every day, I start to get it.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#63

Post by Terr_ »

Zambyte wrote: post #22
kromem wrote: post #15

I actually realized recently that this is probably the underlying phenomenon behind "how is my phone listening to my conversations to show me ads/articles?" The other day I was thinking about LLM aggregation and in my internal dialogue used the example of "aliens built the pyramids" as a fringe theory that would be picked up on if tuning for other associated fringe positions by LLMs at places like Gab. Later in the d…

This is why your attention is so insanely valuable. Everyone thinks they're immune to advertising, yet people keep paying billions and billions of dollars to show something on your screen for a few seconds... because like it or not, it works.

"Sure, we're trying to hack your brain to enrich ourselves at your expense, but it's traditional."

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#64

Post by kevindamm »

komali2 wrote: post #59
sublinear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

You have free will, but isn't there still such a thing as an information hazard? For example, you may have free will, but you still just lost The Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

https://xkcd.com/391/

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#65

Post by mudo »

al_borland wrote: post #47
Zambyte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still encourage you to write though. Writing has seriously transformed the way that I think. I refer to my notes very often too.

I still write a fair amount, I just don’t write book reports. The environment I find comfortable for reading isn’t conducive to taking notes that would be needed for writing later. If there is a particular passages that really stands out I will note it down. I have a little collection of those (and other quotes) I sometimes read through.

[dead]

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#66

Post by mrkstu »

mysecretaccount wrote: post #53
sublinear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

> You still have your free will. Highly debatable.

If we don't what's the point of debating it?

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#67

Post by 0xDEADFED5 »

komali2 wrote: post #62
Boogie_Man wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're illiterate, which is a tragedy.

Unless they grew up in a culture of oral history, in which case they may know a great many things.

i don't mean to alarm you, but i think you're failing the literacy test

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#69

Post by nyokodo »

NERD_ALERT wrote: post #54
sublinear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.

> Free will hasn’t been proven.

Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#70

Post by sitkack »

sublinear wrote: post #39
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

You only have free will in so much as what environments you put yourself in the long term. Our immediate actions are outside of our consciousness.
Post reply on HN