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I didn't take it like that at all and I feel you are over-reacting. To me it seems that the author (in his own tongue-in-cheek way) is awed by these clever solutions that natural selection has found.

I feel like these kinds of "X scientific phenomenon is incredible magical bullshit and here's why!" type deals are overdone and feel kinda forced.

But eh, I'm not the one who took their time to write this all out in a presentable way so whatever the author wants

These things can be a great entry point to dispel naive unexamined homunculus ideas and to dive into some philosophy and neuroscience.

Sure, may have been a bit overly pessimistic. But tbh you could still be super funny and not so “omg were dumb”.

The 2010s “lol look at this dumb shit” attitude reminds me of the 90s “edgy ironic” attitude. It’s lazy, just following the trend that further reduces our ability to continue and have a cool discussion. You can be funny without needing to hit every dopamine receptor. But hey, maybe that’s just what Twitter is for - letting off some steam.

I only felt sad because I saw discussions here the other day about humans being sphagetti code and this sort of absolutist/negative/ironic postmodern attitude just kind of sucks - it actually shuts down conversation (note you are literally just defending it instead of expanding into, say, some philosophy). You can be totally tongue in cheek, funny, and even self-deprecating without being just wrong and super absolutist at once, it’s just not as easy and probably wins a few less internet points.

If anything I’m advocating for a humor that complements truth.

The spaghetti code stuff may point to the right direction though, depending on one's current opinion/understanding. As I always remark, writing a comment or blog post can only point in a direction, as in "please shift your opinion following this arrow", but not a destination as in "please arrive at this target".

If one watches a lot of brain documentaries on pop sci TV channels, the thing they present looks like this magnificent beautiful 3D model with bluish and pinkish stuff and light pulses go around as in a hyperfuturistic awesome thing while the camera is circling around with beautiful intriguing music in the background. The reality is a squishy gobblegook of kludges that gets its job done remarkably well but through some remarkably strange ways. It is a lot of spaghetti, no clear modularity, lots of stuff performing multiple functions and doing things in a roundabout way.

I first read about this contrast in David Linden's really enjoyable "The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God".

But if you already think that everything is rotten and humans are crap and biased beyond imagination, nothing has any value etc. etc. then perhaps you'd benefit from the opposite direction idea, about how really well it works and how much extra stuff the mind does that is not strictly mundane and everyday tasks.

I think you probably should be pointed in the direction of your last statement, but hey, that’s just my direction.

I wondered after a few posts why it was even on Twitter, and if it had been an article/blog post there would definitely have been less motivation for the author to play to the gallery.

> how bullshit insane our brains are

> but OH NO

> this shit works

> your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS

> we're apparently computers programmed by batshit insane drunkards in Visual Basic 5

> your brain has EVEN MORE UGLY HACKS

Interminable shtick that just makes subject matter pointlessly longer and more of a chore to read.

I'm ambivalent; on the one hand this could be a long-form article but on the other I prefer a ten tweet summary to a new Yorker article where they'll start by discussing a neuroscientist's dog walk for 500 words before getting to the topic.

This comes up any time @foone’s content gets posted.

TLDR; that’s authors choice both for stylistic reasons and personal. When the choice is between “don’t blog at all” and “post on twitter” because that’s what fits his mind process, I would rather read about it on twitter than not at all.

Judging by the amount of discussion here, it seems like this was thought provoking for a number of people despite the format.

I find twitter threads frustrating to follow also, but you could always... skip clicking the link if you feel so strongly about it.

As an aside, criticizing the form of content rather than the substance is not of particular interest in general, to be honest. It comes off as “I didn’t really have anything to say about the subject, but at least I can comment on perceived flaws in the style of presentation”.

The critique is actually that this stupid YouTuber attention-desperate style leads to Reddit level discussion. Especially because he just frames the whole process as being dumb rather than... interesting. So no it’s not just a style critique, he’s just making wild unfounded claims while trying to frame them as obvious truths.

If you like that style, then fine, why don’t you just not reply to this valid sub-thread? I don’t see you adding any to the discussion. But the discussion of the degradation of our ability to communicate due to social media incentivizing stupid clickbait is super important.

Apropos of nothing, thanks for your work on Recoil, it’s awesome :)

I don’t think the discussion on this post here is reddit-level - for example, I found the top level comment on the role of dreams, and the link to the commenter’s paper on psyarxiv super interesting. As I said in my comment, I too find the twitter thread format a bit frustrating to read.

What I was trying to say is that the author (Foone) has previously posted about this - for them, the choice really is between “blog this way or not at all” due to the way their mind works.

Of course the fact that this topic comes up every time is indicative, but I think what it indicates is that Twitter UX is terrible, not that the author is a bad person for choosing to share in this format.

Thanks! I haven’t done much at all, not sure if you’re involved with it but if so thanks right back, I do love Recoil and its potential.

I definitely should aim my criticism at the incentives more than the people, that’s a good point. I specifically like HN because it seems to have figured out pretty nice incentives (of course the lack of scale is the key).

I didn't say anything even remotely like they should not blog at all. Someone posted their opinion, some people disagreed with it - and escaped your criticism of "I don't have anything to say about the subject" - and I agreed with it.

If this happens any time this author is posted there's obviously something to the criticism of the style.

As for your aside, "if you don't like it, don't read" is also not a particularly interesting contribution, to be honest.

I didn’t mean to imply that you said they should not blog at all. I should have been clearer - this is something the author themself said in the past (linked in a sibling reply). For them, due to the way their mind works, that is the choice - they have tried long-form blogging and found themselves incapable of ever completing a post. I can relate to that experience in some ways.

I am not saying Twitter is a great platform for this type of thing - clearly it’s not.

Fair enough, and thanks. If I'd known the criticism was old news I wouldn't have added to it, or at worst done so ironically. I just saw someone posting similar thoughts to my own and basically let them know they weren't alone.

I now know what to expect if I do read more in future, but regardless of my opinion of the style, I definitely rather people post/publish in any form rather than not post at all. Anything that can inform people about something they weren't previously aware of is a good thing.

I'd take a twitter thread over medium any day anyway.

Foone (the author) finds it impossible to write blog posts. So, they write Twitter threads instead in order to get something written. They’ve explained this in more detail here: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128

I don't understand your criticism. Foone (a rather famous user of Twitter with 62k followers who posts enormously interesting content in my opinion) is successfully engaging his audience in a casual style that they appreciate. How is this "really stupid"? Because it doesn't live up to your expectations for the form that such content should take?

They would get the same audience if they were an average-looking woman and decided to do porn for free.

Nassim Haramein - British leftist newager who claims to have invented a new theory of physics implying all particles are actually black holes and who’s quite popular in North London hippie circles has 350K followers on Facebook.

I think these are good baselines of what it takes to get 62k followers.

Here's a link to the "quack"'s paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302941651_Quantum_G...

Science establishment knows all, and is never wrong, especially once it excommunicates a heretic. Science heretics are always bad and wrong. Science establishment people are always right. Trust science establishment. Give science establishment money. Science good. Quack bad. Give money. No money to quack. All to science. Science good.

Did we mention science right and quack wrong?

Kardashians have many more followers and are successfully engaging their audiences. Their posts must be really smart.

It reads like an article written entirely with Buzzfeed headlines.

It's two sides of the same coin. Anything heavily-optimized for something other than simplicity ends up maddeningly complex. It doesn't make me sad that people prefer the more entertaining perspective on the same information.

> Sort of made me sad just thinking about that. Twitter really does encourage the worst forms of conversation - outrage, sarcasm, cheapness, drunk humor dominates.

I've never understood why, in the Eternal September, anyone would expect the average late-night conversation on the internet to be any different from the average late-night conversations at the local pub. Sure, you might find that rare table of PhD students/young engineers/residents/academics and teachers/etc. having a genuinely interesting conversation as they transition from work to relaxation after a long night at the lab/hospital/grading. But mostly it's drunk idiots relishing in base pleasures. And after the second drink or so those engaging conversations will devolve.

I don't think Twitter is encouraging anything in particular here. The same thing happened with IRC channels, forums, etc. No point in getting angry or sad about the Eternal September; it was always inevitable.

You don't think the nature of a tweet, the very limitation placed on the number of characters, encourages a certain type of communication/interaction?

The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.

> You don't think the nature of a tweet, the very limitation placed on the number of characters, encourages a certain type of communication/interaction?

Sure, but I don't think that type of communication/interaction causes bad conversations. The conversation was going to be a shit show regardless. Go join any Mome's or Political group on Facebook. The conversation isn't exactly elevated.

> The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.

Not really. "1/N"

The pub analogy or even the Facebook group isn't very good.

Tweeting involves getting your short thoughts evaluated and rated by strangers at scale! You're also regularly aware of the properties required to (potentially) go viral.

It is far more difficult, by design, to encourage better conversations there.

Right, and I think most conversations in real-time (like in a pub) involve a decent amount of back-and-forth; most don't consist of people trading long blog-post-length monologues. (Though I suppose there's a certain sort of person who pontificates while drunk.)

While I'm not a big fan of Twitter, "the character limit encourages a weird conversational style" is not on my list of grievances at all.

Few years ago I used to have great conversations on Twitter but now there are too many ppl and many do it full time like a job or something, conditioned by the reward mechanisms to get those Likes and build social media influence. That changes what kind of conversations are possible.

I see Twitter as mostly a broadcast medium where you go to get the latest info on some event.

Conversations the kind that feel natural and human dont have a weird distracting real time ticker above my head scoring every dumb thing that flits through my mind.

"many do it full time like a job or something, conditioned by the reward mechanisms to get those Likes and build social media influence."

Without going into the backstory, there was a period of time where I had to follow about 100 very specific people. I also happen to know how successful these people were financially.

Those who were the most successful financially tweeted the least and those who were the least successful financially tweeted the most. Then there was those who didn't tweet at all because they had no financial incentive to and their egos weren't contingent upon it.