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Doomscrolling ourselves to death

edwest.co.uk

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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#171

Post by intended »

rpdillon wrote: post #160
intended wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with this take so strongly You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position. If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale. If you remember school, mos…

We've only just begun. It's a veritable certainty that LLMs will be critical to education in the coming decades. I'll check back in after a few years!

I have heard that sentiment many times already. It's a statement that is broad enough to capture any benefit and disavow any costs, for some later day when one can choose the nature of their measurement.

How would you estimate actual gains and losses to education for LLMs? What would good look like?

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#172

Post by lobofta »

teiferer wrote: post #150

Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest. At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too. But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is p…

I did.

The point can be made very quickly yes, but the background and context provided is what made this a good read to me. Sometimes we need to marinate in a topic for it to enter into deeper layers of the brain.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#173

Post by hirvi74 »

pjc50 wrote: post #117
somenameforme wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time, not that long ago, when cocaine was 100% normalized. It was a regular ingredient used in everything from basic OTC remedies to, most famously Coca Cola which was Cocaine + Kola nut. And Coca Cola itself was based on Vin Mariani, a wine mixed with cocaine that was drunk or endorsed by everybody from Popes to Thomas Edison and Ulysses S Grant. It was also regularly offered for free to laborers by empl…

You can actually see this phenomenon happening now with alcohol consumption, which is in a long decline .. replaced by social media addiction.

Don't forget vaping and nicotine pouch addiction too.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#174

Post by rpdillon »

intended wrote: post #171
rpdillon wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've only just begun. It's a veritable certainty that LLMs will be critical to education in the coming decades. I'll check back in after a few years!

I have heard that sentiment many times already. It's a statement that is broad enough to capture any benefit and disavow any costs, for some later day when one can choose the nature of their measurement. How would you estimate actual gains and losses to education for LLMs? What would good look like?

The actual gains will be very similar to the gains that I thought would come from projects like Khan Academy (which was also quite hotly contested among teachers when it first came out).

I don't agree with your rhetorical statement about the nature of my argument. I'm not trying to disavow any costs. I'm saying that AI represents a unique opportunity in the history of humanity to encapsulate knowledge and carry it through space and time in a highly scalable way.

We have an epidemic of schools doing poorly in educating our students with constantly dropping standards, and an unwillingness to raise teachers' salaries. Education is extraordinarily expensive and I anticipate LLMs can be incorporated into a larger automated course load that is not stuck in the rigorous, true/false analysis that other automated systems have been stuck with in the past.

LLMs are already excellent at critiquing humans' writing and providing feedback that a talented editor would typically have to be paid to provide.

So, to summarize, the gains will be in the average cost of a high school education, the availability of that education across the world, the reliability of the information presented in the course curriculum, and the consistency with which we can educate at scale.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#175

Post by Lagoon3384_SWE »

Aurornis wrote: post #99
Escapado wrote: post #69

On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…

> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instag…

Reddit on defaults is a crazy experience.

Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad.

Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses.

I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#176

Post by froh »

teiferer wrote: post #150

Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest. At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too. But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is p…

[dead]

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#177

Post by Seattle3503 »

Aurornis wrote: post #99
Escapado wrote: post #69

On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…

> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instag…

I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#178

Post by Insanity »

specproc wrote: post #164
Insanity wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be nit-picking but forum != social media (to me).

Aye, but it's also possible to waste an incredible amount of time on HN. I'd call it my main internet vice after lichess. Both are outwardly better than say, TikTok or Reddit, but if you're spending hours a day flitting unstructured between content, you're subject to both the fragmentation and time sink problems. Same as someone who spends the same amount of time caning TikTok. A little healthier (maybe not lichess)…

It’s my most used website according to Apple Screentime. So you’re probably right (daily average around 30 min).

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#179

Post by jiaosdjf »

This is why I still browse 4chan and of course HN - because the feed is entirely time based with zero recommendations and no infinite content.

I've also added userscripts to remove shorts and recs from YouTube as well as uninstalling absolutely all social apps and only using web

Ironically 4chan /pol/ now has higher quality debates and more diverse opinions than Reddit, and a faster website that doesn't constantly push nag screens or hang rendering.

What I'm getting at is the internet is too common and we need to retreat to extremely niche and selective platforms with limited content that you can't just binge for 2 hours.

Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death

#180

Post by tomjen3 »

doginasuit wrote: post #55

I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various inform…

What is a book? I mean, I spent some time over the last couple of days reading parts of the PostgreSQL manual — if you printed it it would be a gigantic book but it's online and linked. Does that make it not a book? Half a book? Still a book?

A blog post can be a few hundred words or a hundred thousand. It can even be a series of blog posts. Is that now a book?

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