Why do people really need to be told this? This is fundamentally obvious at the most extreme basic of levels. It's as obvious as a red cube being red.
Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
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Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#42What if our primary feed is HN?
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#43The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think : https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to i…
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work. It's also inten…
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Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#44Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits. Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet". For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party. Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I d…
There is a book for this, aptly titled “You Should Quit Reddit”. It got me to quit, highly recommend it.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#45Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true. With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this: We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasonin…
> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book. For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
Just because before people had a concern and were wrong, doesn't mean if we have the same concern now we'll be wrong again.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#46I’m surprised there is never more acknowledgement of this. Just look around at the other people you see in public. If they aren’t actively walking, the phone is out, sometimes even while walking. You can’t really think deeply about your life and situation if every waking second is spent looking at brainrot social media. Even people with a nose buried in a book are trading precious time in their own mind developing th…
So while there is plenty of viral brainrot media out there, reading substantive material that promotes understanding or introspection looks almost the same. And it's more profound than what I'd be thinking about in the dentist waiting room or long hardware store line.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#47Cut the cord but for infinite-scroll addiction.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work. It's also inten…
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Hey, that's not fair. We all engage with other people's ideas all the time, no one is really a unique thinker. The best model I have for intellectual activity is that it's a multiple-millennia-long conversation between people over generations.
The main thing is that it's important to acknowledge who it is that you're replying to and to be very clear about to what degree you're synthesizing their thoughts versus contributing your own. But we're all derivative thinkers in the end, even those of us who get famous for original thinking.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#49I suggested a few years ago an alternative business model for platforms[1]. Rather than selling ads, sell people the ability to filter. Buy some in-platform filtration either from a provider or from another user of the platform. It had been a particularly frustrating day.
Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
#50Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator. There’s this concept of “babble and prune” ( https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune ) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is w…
This reminds me of the 90s trend for applications to boast about their customizable user interfaces, which meant you could drag panels around or choose what should appear on which menu ... but none of them provided a good user interface. Saying "you can make it any way you want it!" excused the devs from putting in any design effort.