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First, make me care

gwern.net

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Re: First, make me care

#221

Post by adolph »

horacemorace wrote: post #218
adolph wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vervaeke makes a claim of parasitism explicit in the Meaning Crisis series. We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using, complexify, to create complex systems and f…

There are malicious ads linked from that site. Do not recommend.

My apologies, I use an ad blocker and did not notice. The website is a transcript of the YouTube lecture series and can be found there if people wish to delve further. Unfortunately I no longer have an edit option on the comment.

Re: First, make me care

#222

Post by abustamam »

simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

I don't personally use tiktok but I have friends who will send me tiktok videos. I can't stand the dancing ones but the ones I usually end up watching through tend to be the ones that get right to the point. I wouldn't call it a hook, I'd just say it respects the viewer's time, which I like.

Re: First, make me care

#223

Post by arctic-true »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #47
tombert wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking…

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. No, I think you're right. I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been…

Now there’s an idea. You could get artists to pay for ads just like other advertisers, and instead of hearing an ad for a product that takes you completely out of music mode, you have to listen to a whole song (or the first minute, or whatever) that’s maybe a little outside your usual mix.

Re: First, make me care

#225

Post by naasking »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #152
komali2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.

My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on t…

> Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

I think this was kind of known for a long time, and pithily described in the well known phrase, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".

Re: First, make me care

#226

Post by tetromino_ »

mdnahas wrote: post #216
Jap2-0 wrote: post #41

Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question: - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply - Fish - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats (note: I read a few sources…

It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow. Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.

> Netherlands

Medieval Netherlands had a single easy-to-harvest resource: sea fish; a very valuable commodity for protein-starved medieval peasantry. They were very lucky to be able pivot from that to trade (the pivot required a war between merchants and nobles, which the merchants won) before the herring and cod started to run out.

Re: First, make me care

#227

Post by zamadatix »

firefoxd wrote: post #26

I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it. A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up! I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that yo…

> The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front.

For those who are really adverse to that kind of thing and have trouble with thinking "but it is is just making it sound like clickbait" in the comparison above: You don't have to go as far with it either. Just inserting inserting that one detail without changing the style or shortening it makes the reader's mind go from "maybe some person complaining about automated form requirements in benefits sign up or some first week onboarding program or something" bore to "fired by an automated HR!?" interest.

Re: First, make me care

#228

Post by InitialLastName »

arctic-true wrote: post #223
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. No, I think you're right. I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been…

Now there’s an idea. You could get artists to pay for ads just like other advertisers, and instead of hearing an ad for a product that takes you completely out of music mode, you have to listen to a whole song (or the first minute, or whatever) that’s maybe a little outside your usual mix.

Everything old is new again. This is called Payola and it's illegal in the radio industry.

Re: First, make me care

#229

Post by ofalkaed »

tolerance wrote: post #137
ofalkaed wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we need to credit him or reconcile anything, what he says is not wrong or hypocritical, it is just his view of what makes a good blog post. I disagree with him but the only consequence for him is that I won't read his blog unless I feel compelled to because I want to join in the discussion on somewhere like HN and don't want to be one of those people who interjects into a discussion on an article they d…

We seem to be of like mind on this matter then. I look forward to us reconvening the next time Gwern hits the front page and we each feel compelled to voice some kind of informed dissent on the subject. Dissent probably isn’t the right word here because I don’t think either of us actually disagree with what he’s saying. How fun is a conversation once it’s established that both parties are in agreement about something…

If your goal is communication, isn't being well received by the masses a very applicable measurement of good writing? David Foster Wallace's contribution to the world is primarily indirect, filtered down to the masses by "bad" writers who are more pragmatic about things and take into account that most people don't want to spend 1000 pages analyzing a topic, don't even want to spend 10 pages doing it, they want it boiled down to a simple choice so they can decide if it is of value to them, if it can improve their life and I can't blame or judge them for that. Wallace certainly did not blame them for it, just felt they should be conscious of why they came to a conclusion instead of blindly accepting it because it is their conclusion.

His general style is simple and direct, how we all learn to write essays in school. He writes his outline, diligently follows it while writing his draft, edits the draft and then publishes it. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about this, I just would rather read something which explores the idea instead of makes an assertion about it, but he is writing about what he looks for in his reading. I would not call it good writing but I also would not call it bad, it is just uninteresting to me.

Re: First, make me care

#230

Post by Nextgrid »

andai wrote: post #220
Nextgrid wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook". I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark i…

In my experience an LLM could probably handle this. And it's not so novel. They can make an image stitcher which is basically the same problem. It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.) You might be able to get away with…

Yeah my point was to download videos in bulk and scan them to then mark these segments in Sponsorblock.

LLMs failed to produce any kind of performant solution.

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