Doomscrolling ourselves to death (edwest.co.uk)

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10339588/

For someone nitpicking on details surely you noticed that nobody said that. This is a strawman you created to drag the parent poster's point off-topic.

> "The equivalence is obviously false"

And Opium is obviously not an "algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain", so clearly the poster who "sees no difference" does actually see differences, just not in the point they are making.

But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker.

Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)

Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.

> This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.

Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?

a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.

I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.

The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).

Thank you for the statement!

If the algorithm simply says "sort by most recent", then it is pretty good.

It is the profit driven algorithms that are doing the damage.

I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin.

Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists.

After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those.

My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading.

I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen.

You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.

And then, even if you did achieve a truly personalized feed, there will be accusations you're limiting your worldview to a filter bubble**. And sure, you are. Still beats algorithmic rage-baiting. It's up to you to figure out how much you wish to engage IMO, not some tech company or virtue signaling concern troll influencer.

*An LLM is an algorithm too, duh.

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.

If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.

Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.

I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.

It was marketed precisely on this point; it being a "nerve stimulant", "brain tonic", cure all for hysteria, melancholy, and more. There's a great article on it here. [1] Coke also got defensive on this point because not only was it referred to as "dope" and other such drug implicit terms, but people also began pointing out the issues with coke and cocaine.

Nobody knows exactly how much cocaine was in the original concoctions, but it is known that they began rapidly reducing the amount once the issue started being discussed. Of course I can also see that being argued as evidence of them having a bunch (oyyy, shut it down!), or indeed having a negligible amount (bahh, let's nip this nonsense in the bud). Either way it had a very non-zero amount, and people were consuming it in absurd quantities. If you believe Coke's response, 90% of all businessmen were "constant patrons."

[1] - https://clickamericana.com/topics/food-drink/cocaine-laced-c...

In general most that an edutainment can give you is awareness that something exists and a bit of motivation to get you going and there is some value in that. Whether on the whole it’s a positive thing is a bit harder to say.

Yeah, there's lot of junk on YouTube. You might even say 90% of it. But there's tons of useful content too if you go searching for it.

Edutainment is a spectrum, while you are correct that everyone should understand they can't "learn quantum theory" in a way that can be applied meaningfully by watching videos, sparking intellectual curiosity and learning new topics/areas of interest is a good thing in general. And most edutainment that isn't so flawed/simplistic as to be wrong is better than watching an influencer whose dayjob is churning out weekly content with some alluring hook to grab viewers and mostly just inane lowest common denominator filler around it.

PBS NOVA Documentary > PBS Spacetime on YT >> YT "Fun" Science Content > TikTok "Fun" Science Content >> YT Influencer Content > TikTok Influencer Content >> YT Ragebait/AI Slop > TikTok Ragebait/AI Slop

Sesame Street isn't nearly as harmful for young kids as 2 minute TikTok AI videos that next play into God knows what. It has interesting inoffensive characters teaching useful language and social skills.

(I can't honestly say that I go and start doing chemistry after listening to NileRed...)

Also you cannot anonymously scroll on mobile browser for long, prompts to install the app.

No more getting anxious and worked up about small things and picking fights with my partner.

When you are trying to have none, it's suddenly everywhere and in your face without realising it.

And sometimes it’s just affirming to read an author describe a character thinking the same thoughts one has or the same situation one finds oneself in.

  2 episodes left before next season!

I will also say that to me there is a massive difference between how much effort it takes to read one type of fiction versus another. I was reading Master and Margarita and I stopped because they simply kept introducing new characters and doing jumps for no reason. I'm sure I will get a bunch of well-read people telling me it's because I'm a poor reader or whatever, but I think that's bad writing.

Maybe this was just the writing style at the time. 200 pages of storytelling, world building, details and plot development and then 20 pages to resolve and finish up. Frequently it doesn't even feel rushed, it is just less clear cut ending than newer books.

Most recent example I came across is Kramer vs Kramer. It's a short book overall, but the main plot is no more than 10% of the book and the resolution is two or three pages and then it just stops.

Start with some topic that people are posting about, a book you are reading, or even just something you overhear. Pick a claim that's being made, and ask your self: where does this claim come from? is this true? how do they know this? Don't stop until you find a solid answer or the trail goes cold.

Amazingly often, the trail goes cold, and you find no one has written anything definitive on the question you've been asking. This bubble we've created has disturbingly thin walls, and only our herd mentality is holding us back from popping our heads out.

Most language is invented by children and most of what they invent dies pretty quickly. You transition from not noticing it's new because you weren't alive before to keeping up to falling behind to getting annoyed.

rizz no cap sus swag YOLO such wow pwned that's what she said fo shizzle crunk bling talk to the hand as if homeskillet not! take a chill pill grody gag me with a spoon

Thank you for attending my TED Talk.

(Even if it's a typo you should probably claim it as a sub-conscious coinage, since it's quite clever.)

Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best.

> Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?

Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?

As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.

Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?

But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.

And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.

Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.

The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.

If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.

If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.

America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.

In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)

Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.

> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

Read "Amusing ourselves to death" for exemple; written as a criticism of TV-media in the 80s but even more applicable on the short-form content of today.

Put Toqueville in a time-machine. Would he really regard the current state of society as something that should be aspired to?

Watch a televised primary or presidential debate from mid 20th century and you will be astounded at the quality of argument and focus of the discussion.

I think most people severely underestimate how far public discourse has fallen.