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Comment by sz | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about exactly this yesterday - so much of "media matter" is like junk food for the mind. I wondered if we could start an organic movement but for the content industry.

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You might check out this novel:

http://www.amazon.com/Davids-Sling-Marc-Stiegler/dp/06716536...

Among other things, Stiegler posits a "Zetetic Institute" that teaches people how to think better -- effectively, an "organic foods" industry for the mind.

Interesting. Stiegler's book is copyrighted 1988, but "Zetetic" references were also briefly popular in the mid-1970s as well. If I recall correctly P.J. Plauger had a Zetetic Institute in one of his SF stories back then, for example. The term refers to a form of Pyrrhonism -- basically skepticism without the dogmatic certainty that can be just as blinding as affirmative certainty.

Isn't that basically what the Singularity Institute and http://lesswrong.com/ guys are trying to do?

I added this from David's Sling to the December Rationality Quotes thread on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...):

In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling

Isn't that what "Hacker News" is supposed to provide?

HN isn't so much a movement in the content industry, but a very specialized aggregator. It certainly is one of the ways I try to provide myself with good reading material so it does help.

One of the good things about twitter is if you follow content sharing people with similar interests it acts as a filter. A human filter you are exploiting, but still a pretty good filter. I'm sure somehow content aggregators can move away from a board based format and into a more heavily human filtered format. Trawling through a board is time-consuming and not nearly as well filtered as it could be.

A programmer I know told me once about his method of using Twitter. He doesn't read any normal news sites, use RSS, etc. but just follows on Twitter people who write things that he finds interesting (mostly game development). When someone stops tweeting high-value things (links to interesting articles, etc.) he just stops following him and finds someone with more interesting tweets.

I think it's disappointing your friend doesn't (presumably) have a Twitter List. Many of us on HN love game programming, even if we don't live it because game programming is an art.

Actually, I just found something which looks like a good solution for developers: http://tagmask.com/ . It allows developers to share not just posts, but code snippets as well. Filtered by tags. A social-news board-community for programmers. Found it via Twitter, Guido shared it. I do indeed use twitter for news and resources.

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