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Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

amirsharif.com

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Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#71

Post by jredwards »

padolsey wrote: post #23

> 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 It has not been peer-reviewed.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…

Same for the reference to developers taking longer to complete tasks with AI. That's absolutely not the finding of that study.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#72

Post by RandomBacon »

normie3000 wrote: post #67
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monzo (UK) lets you set a limit on withdrawals when you are away from home.

Does it also let you unset the limit?

That reminds me of the effectiveness of texting codes as MFA, when the password can also be reset by texting a code...

Those services just have SFA (Single Factor Authentication): the cell phone number (which can be stolen remotely by social engineering).

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#73

Post by AndrewSwift »

jampa wrote: post #11

> 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…

I have always assumed that this was done to drive app usage. Companies hope that if you use an app regularly you'll keep it on the home screen of your phone, and it becomes a foothold into your most intimate device.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#74

Post by bsimpson »

androng wrote: post #5

I invested in META stock because I have an addiction to instagram and the tracking is so good that the ads are actually tailored to me and my desires so my CTR is i think 7% on average. contrast with YouTube and Google and Twitter where I block all the ads because the CTR is 0.00% because they are all garbage. Instagram keeps showing me ads for expensive stuff I don't need but I do want, like meal kits and fancy clot…

When Facebook first came out, you could run an ad for $5 and the ads are often things I happily clicked on.

Granted, it was by and for college students, so there was an inherent selection bias. Still, Zuckerberg built his whole empire on getting enough data about people to show ads that are so targeted they feel relevant.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#75

Post by viccis »

padolsey wrote: post #23

> 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…

Looks like another ChatGPT victim here folks.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#76

Post by medstrom »

p0sixlang wrote: post #55
joules77 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use apps. The only apps on my phone are for communication. Nothing else. It's quite possible to live with websites.

How are you delineating websites and apps, and can you elaborate what exactly your hypothesis is here?

I presume they mean it's a website when you type it into an URL bar.

And that you don't ever add website bookmarks to the homescreen, because that makes them similar to apps.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#78

Post by wzdd »

The "surprising results" are a bit factoid-ey and if taken at face value are far more shocking than they turned out to be (I very much appreciate the references so I could check this):

"You can reverse up to 10 years of age-related cognitive decline simply by blocking mobile data on your phone for 2 weeks": the linked study says that it's attention span that is improved equivalent to being 10 years younger, as measured immediately after the study ends (only)

"Using ChatGPT on cognitive tasks can reduce your brain connectivity by up to 50%": this is measured using an EEG, so is measuring involvement of multiple brain regions while doing a task. Basically your brain doesn't have to work as hard at the task if you're using an LLM. It's not, you know, your connectome atrophying.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#79

Post by kortilla »

padolsey wrote: post #23

> 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…

Sure, but “computer does all of the logical inference by hand and it turns out your brain isn’t needed” is awfully a big confirmation bias in favor of people who have left LLMs work in their favor.

Re: Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival

#80

Post by mortsnort »

spaqin wrote: post #68
mortsnort wrote: post #61

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?

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?

Where is popular science videos coming from? Blogs, Wikipedia, research papers, Substacks, newspapers, magazines, ChatGPT, etc.
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