Surprised nobody has linked PG's short piece on the same topic:
https://paulgraham.com/know.html
You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
241–250 of 466 posts
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.
Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its c…
> Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places.
I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could start creating a society that avoids such practices and would be a better place to live in.
Let's say you were addicted to social media and you never in your life have heard or read anything bad about it. No one has ever mentioned quitting social media to you. Do you think the thought to do so would come to your mind? Or is the "choice" to quit social media just a path carved into your brain by all the negative experiences you have had or heard about?
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#243Don'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…
> ..am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do..
There are plenty of books and other resources that speak to the power of "no". To the phrase I quote above, yes you need to have a good 'diet' of what you put in your mind. Some junkfood is ok, mostly junkfood is not.
A quote that has shaped me is: ""The less time one gives to the newspapers the better," he replied. "Do you like books on travels?"" by Hector Malot on his book En Femille (Nobody's Girl)(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27690/27690-h/27690-h.htm)
Btw, others write about ads. We can only (perhaps) avoid some on the internet (ad-blockers, NoRoot Firewall on Android devices and block certain IPs/URLs) but there are many ads we don't block, in movies (product placement), posters on bus stops, etc.
Fun fact: Apple doesn't allow its devices to be used by "baddies", so if you see an actor holding/using an iPhone, and you are not sure if they are Nice or Evil, chances are there will be a last-minute-twist and that actor will be/become Nice.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
No true Scotsman, eh? There's no reason to think these groups have had any contact with the outside world, beyond the fact that at some point they obviously diverged from whatever common ancestor we all share. Both are extremely small groups living in similarly extremely isolated locations - Sentinelese in an isolated island, Nukak deep in the Amazonian interior, far from rivers. And the Nukak's population has been d…
I am not a historian. Andaman and Nicobar (neighbor of Sentinelese) is occupied / use as naval base by outsiders for >1000 years. None of the Cholas, Europeans, Japan ever contacted/impacted them seems highly unlikely.
Contacts tended to be recorded. You can read ships logs now going back hundreds of years, often with illustrations. There's not a whole lot that happens in most ship voyages, so things like running into a weird group on an isolated island would absolutely have been recorded in immense detail. Of course I can't prove, beyond any question, that they weren't contacted, but there's 0 evidence to suggest they were, and immense evidence to suggest they were not. For the Nukak this is at least as true as well.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#245Don'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…
Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more. But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
If you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you will learn the things you never knew you never knew.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#246Don'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…
It's as if life was tokenized and fed to an LLM
I'm going to add "Can AIbros survive 5 seconds without mentioning LLMs in irrelevant conversations?" to my list of unanswered existential questions, alongside "Is time travel possible?" and "Why did Bodhidharma come to China?".
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this context, I often refer to the essay by Rolf Dobelli, titled Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet. It can be found on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117104220/http://dobelli.co...
Actually Dobelli was the one who got me thinking about this. I tend to agree with him, although eschewing all news is a bit too extreme to my taste. I tried scaling back my intake by switching from a daily paper to a weekly paper, but one has to have tremendous discipline to avoid the news of the day on the internet. Especially if the internet is your job, like it is for me.
I 100% concur, it's not easy.
I block / filter most of the news sites I might wander to mindlessly with uBlock, and even filter out DOM elements that have certain keywords.
I also found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events to be a good alternative for daily news without the nonsense.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to make a strong argument when it's also woefully incomplete. :P If all advertising were just abstract economic information that a service or product existed with certain features at a certain price-point, then we're left with a whole bunch of inexplicable mysteries , including-but-not-limited-to: * Why would there be some expensive messages that lack any of that economic information, such as those which sh…
You can answer all the questions with the same answer (quoted from my comment above): > Advertising exists (..) for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something. Your questions are just requiring more sophisticated answers that will all boil down to that. What you say is "unnecessary funny mascots or catchy music" is brand awareness which is still "letting other people know I exist and I ca…
I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed.
Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in evoking emotion; visual stimuli, carefully crafted music, decades of psychology research, etc. And while we've had a chance to evolve strategies against human to human manipulation (doors, perhaps, and various subtle triggers of distrust), the ad environment is a very recent development.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more. But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.
I just got into the habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything. It has taken me on some wild rides indeed, and I am richer in spirit for it. It forged the bond between my wife and me - “shall we do a road trip across Eurasia?”, she idly asked, expecting at the very most a “maybe” - instead I grasped that nettle and applied for visas that day. Six weeks of utterly madcap adventure ensued. Since, I’ve found myself i…
> It also has the added benefit of uplifting others - it transforms their idle thought into something that actually happens.
Hearty agreement, from the experience of both the receiving and offering ends of that gesture.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#250Not really buying it. I mostly liked the same type of books all my life. I read a lot out of my comfort zone and I never particularly enjoyed it, nor do I think they impacted me much. I read what I am, not the other way. Maybe others are more influenceable.
*open-minded