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Comment by pavelromashkin | Hacker News Reader

I agree with him that social media could be very distracting, especially in the family settings, but, I get a ton of useful information and stay up-to-date with the latest research through Twitter, Reddit and HN. Cutting those out would mean putting an iron curtain on the latest insight and recent developments, and, essentially, quitting the front line.

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But at what cost? Having read "deep work" recently, I've started thinking much more about all of this, and for me, the cost mostly outweighs the benefits. By cutting back drastically on my use (phone typically lasts 3-4 days instead of 1 now), I'm getting a lot more done, in less time, feel better and am much more present than I have been in over a decade. I hadn't realised the creeping effect of it all, and I don't feel I've missed out in the way that attention technology was making me feel that I would be.

I realise that the balance of this particular equation is different for everyone, but I also think many people are convinced they will be missing out when in reality they won't be.

Loved the book and highly recommend, especially to hn crowd.

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...

That's the problem I faced as well, and I ultimately decided to quit a line of work that required being constantly connected to the latest developments. I realized I wanted to pursue a line of work with a bit more permanence and, for lack of a better word, timelessness.

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

— Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)

(You might wanna remove the <> they screw up the link.)

Email seems to be an analogy for communication or perceiving information, or at least a predecessor of more fast-paced forms of that.

Could it be these new forms are so efficient and fast-paced, they overload our brain? Before the TV (which had limitations at start as well), there was telephone and radio. Both were limited. Telephone was expensive (monopoly yada yada), and radio informative (before the ~60s).

What Knuth did is enforce snail mail. This creates an artificial barrier, increasing signal to noise ratio.

"Bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people"

-- Joseph Wood Krutch

as evanlivingston mentioned above, Knuth is in the position to cut off people from his email; trying to run a digital company without an email is kind of like trying to be a lumberjack without an axe

You became a Fortran programer who works on mainframes?

Woodworker

I can't really remember where I read it, but the concept of an "infinity pool" is what really gets me. I can listen to the news, read a magazine, or watch a show and it's done. But HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc are ever replenishing pools of distraction. That's where it's damaging for me, I know I can always go back for more.

Not only the new stuff that replenishes the pool, but often times when I find a new resource/subreddit that I don't know much about but find interesting, there's often a huge amount of info already there. So even depleting the pool of past information becomes a huge distraction, all while more stuff is piling on top.

New hobbies and interests are the death of me. I am the personification of the "hacker" as defined in George Leonard's book Mastery.

You don't need those sites. Find professors in your chosen field, click on their personal pages and there should be a list of all their PhD student's personal pages. Follow those and any related academic journals, throw in Stack Overflow/Exchange, Google Scholar, and occasional HN and you'll be far more informed than anybody wading through countless junk posts on reddit or twitter.

For example if you're a user interface designer or wearables programmer, then you'd benefit from the recent papers from these PhD students more than you'd benefit from spending hours trying to find meaningful content on reddit or twitter https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/people/phd-students

Even that's not enough. I spent the last year or so switching over to consuming news through RSS, moving myself and close friends out of Facebook, and downloading textbooks. I've been teaching myself advanced mathematics that I didn't get a strong hold of in graduate school.

I found myself in the middle of a category theory exercise stuck. I wasn't getting anywhere, and couldn't figure something out. Break time, so I opened my RSS reader. Even if my RSS reader has curated content, it's easy to read. An article about urban planning here, optimizing latency there, and before I know it, an hour has passed. I spent none of that time focusing on my problem, and I'm just as stuck as ever.

I think, at least for me, I need to stem this constant flow of information. I need to take time to step aside of it, live without it, then get back.

You may be interested in these slides from a lecture (yet more information to consume) on how to find answers to grad level math like using oeis.org to identify sequences, where to post on stack exchange/mathoverflow to get answers, using the inverse symbolic calculator ect http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15751/2016-lecture1.pdf

That lecture drastically reduced the time I spend now finding answers which usually I found myself drifting into the attention economy while I stopped working to search for things.

I think I am observing it being destructive in a family setting. I fear for what this will bring in 20 years.

this is what they said about TVm rock and roll, comic books computer games etcetera etcetera going back to the dawn of time.

As Socrates's says “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

Not mention the shocking depravity of shaving and painting statues blue

Oh, that old chestnut. I bet that was also dragging that out when someone suggested x-ray machines in shoe shops might not be a great idea.

After Marie Curie dying and the radium girls cases that actually had some good science behind it

"Research".

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