"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier."
- Jefferson letter to John Adams, 1812.
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
231–240 of 340 posts
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 30 year old sister in law throws disregulated tantrums somewhat similar to a 3 year old. She failed out of college before completing the first semester, went to a bougie AA retreat in Hawaii for many months, made her entire identity AA, until online outrage became mainstream. She might literally have never read a single book cover to cover in her life, and yet has the strongest polarizing opinion you could imagine…
Right but what reason do you have to point at the bogeyman of today for all of her failings?
Because she’s glued to her phone and surrounded by friends with similar brain rot
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#233On 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…
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized. I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible. There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
old.reddit is no longer available (to no account me) as of a week ago. a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.
Yeah, I don't mind using an account, but when/if they take away old.reddit entirely, I'm done replying.
I'll keep checking my city page every now and then as long as my self-hosted eddrit instance keeps working.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#235On 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…
For those who would minimize the effects of social media on teens, I would highly recommend looking at this report of Meta's own research on the matter, published after it was revealed in discovery by States AGs.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6069268
Or listen to just a few minutes of Patrick Boyle talking about them.
https://youtu.be/IUMUJgjDvU0?list=TLPQMDYwOTIwMjbX3y5H-uRecw...
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#236I 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?
David Foster Wallace talks about reading as being an activity that requires you to sit quietly alone in a room and engage with a piece of writing. I think the act of doing this is quite different to reading the postgres manual, despite both of these tasks requiring ingestion of text.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#237"It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy."
That's the most significant line in the article. That was the peak of union power, and unions routinely had meetings and votes which mattered. What organization do you belong to today where the members can fire the leadership by a vote? When did you last go to a meeting run under Roberts Rules of Order, as almost all union meetings are?
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#238Earlier 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’m sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they’ll be heavily involved and the system set up to rely on them. I’m not so sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they substantially improve the process compared to today.
Consider computers in education. Education has been trying to cram “technology” into the process for decades. Every student in my kid’s elementary school has a laptop. It’s critical to education today. But is it actually improving education? I don’t see any indication of that. As far as I can see, everyone decided that computers were important to have in education, so they made it happen, without ever checking to see if it actually helped.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
> My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
Thank you for the statement!
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.
My biggest problem with fiction books is that it is hard to build suspense when I can clearly see I have another 100 pages to go or if I know that it's a series. After I realized that in my late teens fiction was very difficult to keep at consistently.
Sounds like you don't actually care about anything going on in the book, you're just trying to get to the end.