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How I regained concentration and focus

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261–270 of 429 posts

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#261
post #174

"Trivial inconveniences" are a big hurdle when trying to build a habit, but are a great tool for breaking bad ones. Anything you can do to break the dopamine loop helps, however small it may be. I've had success with: - setting long passwords to social media that aren't autofilled (saved in bitwarden) and logging out after each session - nerfing addicting parts of webapps (plugins which block the facebook news feed b…

I never archive my passwords on social sites and the idea to reset every time is a real burden. This helps too.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#262
post #227

Aaron Swartz wrote a blog post about the news[1] and just how terrible it is for the brain. Reading his post had a major impact on me—since then I have always thought differently about the time I spend online. It’s interesting how people, including myself, try to justify various addictions. How am I supposed to stay informed about important topics without the news? How do I know how to help people in need without kno…

Man, I don't get it. News is bad for you so become deliberately ignorant? Don't get distracted by the world so you can work more? It's like saying traffic lights distract you from driving.

I can't square it either. Lets say that you live in a world where rich people want to control the narrative by making entertaining news shows to distract the populace from what is important, but needed a way to trick the people that sought to dig deeper from more authoritative sources that are less TV-entertainy... then I think it would make sense to tell the people that are digging deeper that it is bad for them and they should stop paying attention to the news for their own mental health and productivity.

I recognized that I was over consuming the news during the Trump presidency and needed a reset, and decided to not spend any more time reading the news than the short summaries that Axios posts and ignore all other forms (including John Oliver, although I do still watch Closer Look).

It appears that my actions and aspirations don't seem to be making the world a better place, but it is too depressing a thought to think that the best thing for me to do is be ignorant to the bad things in the world.

I plan on trying out subscribing to Delayed Gratification to see if that is a better path. https://www.slow-journalism.com/

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#263
post #174

"Trivial inconveniences" are a big hurdle when trying to build a habit, but are a great tool for breaking bad ones. Anything you can do to break the dopamine loop helps, however small it may be. I've had success with: - setting long passwords to social media that aren't autofilled (saved in bitwarden) and logging out after each session - nerfing addicting parts of webapps (plugins which block the facebook news feed b…

My method is using private browsing to open addicting websites. This way their address will not be saved in history and I'll have to type it which sometimes stop me from doing that in mid-way. Also helps with automatically logging out.

I've done this with YouTube and it's been extraordinarily effective for me. Without the history associated with my account, the recommendation engine just shows me the default junk, preventing me from falling down rabbit holes when I just want to watch some video. For keeping in touch with channels that I still want to follow, I've subscribed to them via RSS.

If you need an extra push to enforce that you only use private browsing, you can install any browser extension that blocks sites and then tell your browser to not permit that extension to run in private windows.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#264
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to do anything about the war in eastern Europe? If the news causes no change in your actions, you might as well have put a small pebble in front of the phone and had it, instead of your eyes, absorb the photons emitted by the screen.

You suggest I do what? I could talk to people about two decades of NATO encroachment on (shall not be spoken) R. Or discuss with people how in the weeks prior to conflict, VP Harris was in Munich and said Ukraine should join NATO. Or discuss how comedian and Vogue model Zelinsky said Ukraine should re-acquire nuclear weapons. While true, none of those fit the rythmn of the mainstream narrative.

Well, joining NATO at this point seems like a wise decision, don't you agree? If you want to call it "NATO encroachment on Russia", why doesn't Russia attack NATO then?

Why the hell would Ukraine join NATO? I thought Russia was their brother? Any idea why they would want to join NATO? Ah! Maybe it's because they don't want to be invaded by the brother neighbour that likes to invade little countries around them.

NATO expansion is Russia's fault, don't be stupid and claim otherwise. Look at how this war already quickly expanded NATO.

Keep listening to your Russian propaganda.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#265
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't count because i am "learning something", even though i can't recall a single thing I read today

My parents use the same argument about social media. “Facebook doesn’t count because I only use it to keep track of what people I know are doing.” That has to be right up there with the number of times I have heard “I don’t use Facebook, I only use Instagram”.

No post body was provided.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#266

I try to keep my productivity improvements secret, because any time I announce one -- especially if I also explain why it happened -- I immediately falsify whatever I just said by losing all focus and producing nothing of interest for a while.

This resonates deeply. It has to feel like a secret to me.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#267
I disabled chrome and youtube for most of the time. Unless I am looking for something specific, I keep them disabled. This alone reduced by HN scrolling and YouTube binging by factor of 2-3 hrs/day!

Finally I have free time to relax and do nothing!

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#268
post #227

Aaron Swartz wrote a blog post about the news[1] and just how terrible it is for the brain. Reading his post had a major impact on me—since then I have always thought differently about the time I spend online. It’s interesting how people, including myself, try to justify various addictions. How am I supposed to stay informed about important topics without the news? How do I know how to help people in need without kno…

Man, I don't get it. News is bad for you so become deliberately ignorant? Don't get distracted by the world so you can work more? It's like saying traffic lights distract you from driving.

Rhetoric is a dangerous sword - its sharpest edge is the pommel. You seem to think you've pointed out a logical inconsistency in Aaron's argument structure. What you actually did was propose that news does not exist; actually, that information itself doesn't exist.

In the actual argument they claimed that news wasn't the best information source in an argmax over sources on the basis that other mediums have selective pressures which more strongly correlate with utility generation - partly because of medium influences and partly because things which aren't new are subject to selective pressures for longer and thus the filtering mechanism of that selective pressure is more discriminating.

You aren't engaging with that argument, but you act like you are. So when you claim that no information is the alternative proposition you've actually made a mathematical claim: that the count(set{news, **other_sources}) == 0. This is clearly nonsensical because the minimum size of the argmax over information sources necessarily included news and so was obviously at least one, but often more. So your basically asking people who would agree with you on the basis of your argument to take on the claim that 0=N. Yet if it does then it follows that news doesn't exist in the set where you only get to choose news. So they have to not only believe that you are right, but also that news is not a source that they can choose, but this contradicts your premise.

Some questions to ponder to help you get it:

1. Why aren't you trying to refute the existence of evolution and natural selection?

2. Why aren't you trying to disprove that approximation accuracy is a function of the computation that goes into the approximation?

If you really thought you were right you would be trying to tear down the works of Charles Darwin and would be laughing at Donald Knuth for the stupidity of classifying things by computational complexity. Yet you aren't.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#269
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to do anything about the war in eastern Europe? If the news causes no change in your actions, you might as well have put a small pebble in front of the phone and had it, instead of your eyes, absorb the photons emitted by the screen.

You suggest I do what? I could talk to people about two decades of NATO encroachment on (shall not be spoken) R. Or discuss with people how in the weeks prior to conflict, VP Harris was in Munich and said Ukraine should join NATO. Or discuss how comedian and Vogue model Zelinsky said Ukraine should re-acquire nuclear weapons. While true, none of those fit the rythmn of the mainstream narrative.

I'm not sure what you're getting at aside from asserting Russian propaganda. Ukraine has every right join NATO and if Russia thinks that's a provocation then they should take a look in the mirror. NATO isn't a mutual defense association, not an anti-Russia club. The only reason they think so is because they keep invading countries.

Re: How I regained concentration and focus

#270
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also funny how all these posts are so “western” in style: ‘Hey look at me, I did something a bit difficult for 3 days, now I am a guru!’ Not trying to knock the author but the time window is simply too small and this approach is simply too common online. Let’s see if the author can actually change lifestyle for more than 5 years and then we can discuss about “lessons learned”.

What does that have to do with being “western”?

the self-help and productivity genre does have a uniquely American bent (more so than Western I'd say), these blog posts always read like some form of digital Protestantism, they do love their busywork. Immediately jumping to thinking you're procrastinating, rather than say contemplating when you're not churning out one book per year is an attitude you won't find everywhere.
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