401–410 of 527 posts
Didn't matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.
I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I still have to be careful about.
It's feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release which affects motivation.
Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.…
That era of Twitter where you could toss out a random thought and instantly end up in a rabbit hole with strangers who knew stuff...
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I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a curious minority, and they liked to congratulate themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the bloodlust, I can only conclude that…
I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all. And then when they heard this, your cou…
I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself:
I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before.
Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing.
My operating definition of "racism" is:
"The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin."
You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely.
Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.
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> actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.
Friend circles can be just as bad at excluding or ostracising others in the group for the pettiest of reasons. There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.
They tend to have some form of serious mental illness and/or a major substance problem they're not interested in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So not exactly great people to have around anyway.
Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having no friends is better than having fake friends who undermine you.
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…
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Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote. Emotional stress significantly reduced.
The number of replies I cut & paste to my notes archive far exceeds the amount of posts I actually make. I still find it valuable to work through my own thoughts to better prepare myself to have the same conversations in more impactful circumstances, but there are some things I just don't care enough about persuading the other person - or believe the other person is actually going to consider the words as carefully a…
I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train. But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joinin…
I feel your point but I don't think WhatsApp counts as social media. It's a group messaging app, same as Facebook Messenger, Signal, etc. Those messaging apps don't have the typical social media downsides -- you don't need to maintain a profile, there's no doom scrolling, etc.
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Correct. The term for these type of unreliable sources in support of an ideology is propaganda.
That's a good definition of propaganda. The way it's usually taught in schools is that propaganda is all lies, but propaganda is any communication intended to promote a cause or agenda and opportunistically uses both truth and lies, choosing whichever align with the agenda. Unreliable captured this neatly.
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On what scale? What do 'points' on the scale mean? Without knowing those things, we can't say what 6 or 60 points mean.
On the contrary, reporting changes relative to the standard deviation of a control group frees you from scales and their meanings, because it relates the observed change to the normal spread of scores before the intervention. In this way, you don't need to know the scale and its meaning to know if a change is big or small, and from a statistical perspective, that's (almost) all you need to find if a change is signifi…
Secondly, the impact of the difference isn't known - you don't know the curve representing the relationship of score to impact. In some contexts a little change is meaningless - the curve is flat; in others the curve is steep and it can be transformational. And impacts only sometimes scale linearly with performance or score, of course.
Without that knowledge, standard deviation means nothing beyond how unusual, in the given population, the subject's performance is.