Tik Tok is obvious brain rot, but what if one's time at the dopamine carnival is spent consuming "brain-growth" content? Phones essentially put all human knowledge at our fingertips, where is the line of diminishing or negative returns when trying to consume it?
Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
61–70 of 143 posts
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#62> Having your phone in the same room while doing cognitive work reliably drops your memory, attention, and overall cognitive performance. That is my biggest problem with most Multifactor authentication. I try to leave my phone in another room to focus, but needing the phone authenticator for something always happens within two hours. I still don't know why apps think a device I carry in the streets is safer than one…
Monzo (UK) lets you set a limit on withdrawals when you are away from home.
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Chrome had timers for specific websites on mobile. I hate the all-or-nothing Chrome timer, it's ridiculous and so counter intuitive.
I’d also like more control over chrome autocomplete. Most of the time that I get sucked into a website, it’s because autocomplete and muscle memory got me there without thinking. Every once in a while I’ll clean out my history cache and for a week or so I’ll find myself on the page of google search results for “re” or “fa”
You can hold-press over an autocompleted URL to delete it, which has much less friction than clearing your history.
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#64The idea of app timers seems like exactly the weird self-negotiation alcoholics do around booze where they think mimicking the habits of casual drinkers (on what is, to the casual, a bender) will make them not an alcoholic anymore. Yes, normies might have three margaritas on a Tuesday. Like, once a quarter. Not every single day, and also not followed by a whole lot more once you’re loosened up. Likewise, the reaction…
I wish Chrome had timers for specific websites on mobile. I hate the all-or-nothing Chrome timer, it's ridiculous and so counter intuitive.
Pixel phones (at least) have this.
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#65> Developers actually take up to 19% longer when coding with AI than without it, but self-report that they were able to complete tasks 20% faster.
IF TRUE and taken at face value, surely it could have nothing to do with AI coding being so new everyone just figuring how to best use a new tool at all once.
No no, best to right out the gate compare the new tool to the decades old process.
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep it's always a bit cute and funny, when you consider the absolute necessity of dopamine in basically every functionally relevant neural activation. Talk to a parkinson's patient about your 'dopamine=bad' fluff. Ugh. They may as well just have titled it "Protecting My Attention At The {Insert Arbitrary Hormone or Neurotransmission Chemical} Carnival"....
> They may as well just have titled it "Protecting My Attention At The {Insert Arbitrary Hormone or Neurotransmission Chemical} Carnival".... I disagree. I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of the readers here would have known in the context of that headline exactly what "The Dopamine Carnival" meant, without needing any specific positive or negative implications about dopamine in general or it's actual bi…
Ofc the title got its point across, but I'd argue to hold ourselves to higher standards of veracity. That's all.
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#67> Having your phone in the same room while doing cognitive work reliably drops your memory, attention, and overall cognitive performance. That is my biggest problem with most Multifactor authentication. I try to leave my phone in another room to focus, but needing the phone authenticator for something always happens within two hours. I still don't know why apps think a device I carry in the streets is safer than one…
Monzo (UK) lets you set a limit on withdrawals when you are away from home.
Does it also let you unset the limit?
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#68Tik Tok is obvious brain rot, but what if one's time at the dopamine carnival is spent consuming "brain-growth" content? Phones essentially put all human knowledge at our fingertips, where is the line of diminishing or negative returns when trying to consume it?
Popular science videos is still filler; I'd be inclined agree if you were scrolling MIT lectures (and watching them in their entirety), but how much of actual knowledge (and not random tidbits) do you retain from short form videos?
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#69If you work in a SCIF you don't have to worry about your phone being a distraction
Great point. So how do you do 2FA? Hardware tokens?
Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
#70> Using ChatGPT on cognitive tasks can reduce your brain connectivity by up to 50% and reduce your ability to recall information about the task by 8x. Argh people keep referencing this study as Gospel. It has not been peer-reviewed. Its methodology has a number of concerning confounders. It's a tiny sample with a narrow contrived task domain. And the very premise of the study is misframed. The implication that 'brain…
I agree that it's not a great study, but I also don't want to find out too late that it wasn't a good idea to outsource my thinking to ChatGPT.
The study wasn't great but don't outsource your thinking.
The study (if we assume it was good) told students the objective of their task was to generate a factual essay about topic X. The study then measured how much they learned about the topic at the end, but the students who used ChatGPT "learned" less and remembered their own essay less despite an equally passable essay. I want the alternative version of the study where the students are told the essay is practice, and their success will be graded on how much they've learned about the topic.
I imagine you could conduct a similar study challenging students to complete math tasks with and without a calculator and then ask them how much of their multiplication tables they've learned afterwards.
If you want to learn and grow as a person, along some dimension, you need to practice. Growing requires repetition and reflection and to experience the feedback loop of improvement. Outsource thinking for whatever task you don't want to do when the only result you care about is the only outcome. Don't outsource practice and learning if you want to improve. Only you can make the decision on when each situation applies in your day. Maybe you want to be better at some task at your job, but maybe you just need to get through the task and move on.