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The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#161

Post by paxys »

altmanaltman wrote: post #68
Biologist123 wrote: post #24

> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model. I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously. I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind…

Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days

Opium

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#162

Post by stillpointlab »

hypfer wrote: post #129
stillpointlab wrote: post #31

One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind…

I (self-servingly) don't think that cynicism is bad, nor that it would be a good idea to pathologize what is simply a healthy defense to a hostile reality. It depends on how you wield it. Cynicism shouldn't cloud your judgement. That's the actually correct point you wanted to make, I think.

I try not to think in black/white, good/evil kinds of terms. I think of forces and dynamic systems.

There appears to be some force that promotes one particular way of thinking, perhaps the inevitable consequence of accumulated experiences. In the case of cynicism, the balance tends to shift towards one side of a scale over time.

Without a countervailing force on the other side it can tip a normally balanced system out of stable equilibrium.

My point is explicitly: the world provides the force in one direction, and the individual must provide the force in the other.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#163

Post by inigyou »

dweekly wrote: post #147
stillpointlab wrote: post #31

One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind…

The last thing my father said to me before he passed was to keep people looking forward to the future. It's easy to romanticize the past and it can seem intellectually sophisticated to despair about the future, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that things have gotten much much better for nearly everyone on just about any objective axis you can pick.

Except they haven't.

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#164

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

chrisjj wrote: post #122
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. "High confidence." I confirmed it myself: > https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor. > "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobod…

Grift poorly defined? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grift

But this guy's talking about drop-shippers, life coaches, cryptocurrency, online "influencing" in general, and other things. Very few of those fit your own definition, as there's nothing illicit involved.

In some cases, e.g. if you compare cryptocurrency to drop-shipping, there's not even much common ground, except "markets things through social media."

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#165

Post by maqp »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #139

Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto. I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one: > The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective…

Same. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#166

Post by s1artibartfast »

hypfer wrote: post #157
s1artibartfast wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynicism is a negatively biased view of the world. People should strive for accuracy. Sometimes accurate is also harsh, but that is different. Maybe this is the same thing you intended by saying it shouldn't Cloud your judgment.

Yeah, probably. It doesn't help that the clinical meaning and the colloquial meaning of the word are different, with the latter being used by people to hit you over the head with, pretending that it would be the former.

What are the two?

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#167

Post by queenkjuul »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #150
stillpointlab wrote: post #31

One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind…

Good luck nurturing a garden, when every day someone tears down a tree inside or robs you of the fruits.

Or the summers get so hot it all burns down

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#169

Post by efdee »

queenkjuul wrote: post #132
efdee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement. It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school. Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.

I was staying up till 3 am listening to my iPod and reading books without internet then going to school at 7 I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers

You kids and your iPods. ;-)

Re: The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

#170

Post by hypfer »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #166
hypfer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, probably. It doesn't help that the clinical meaning and the colloquial meaning of the word are different, with the latter being used by people to hit you over the head with, pretending that it would be the former.

What are the two?

> Cynicism is a negatively biased view of the world

Is what you said. The clinical thing.

> You're just being cynical

Is cognitive dissonance forcing its way out of the mouths of people to shoot the messenger.

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