Stop spending so much time being trolled by billionaire corps
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But I never thought of traditional news media media as being a push model. It makes so much intuitive sense when you say it: the reason I read newspapers is, at least in part, I want and trust them to tell me what's happening that's important. That's different than my programming blog subscriptions: I follow them because I've decided what they write is important to me.
It's a subtle difference but very impact-full, and seems correct.
[0] not sure of they actually have rss feeds but my rss reader supports them
This makes a lot of sense for blogs and sources that are specifically focused on one subject (e.g. programming).
But I'm not convinced it's as big of a difference for something like the Joe Rogan podcast (the author specifically recommends this at the end of the article). On a site like Twitter the users are still collecting a broad range of content from a broad range of people they choose. With something like the Joe Rogan podcast they're listening to shaped opinions from people that the host chooses, influenced by the topics the host allows to be discussed. Rogan is particularly famous for spreading anti-vaccine messaging right now and downplaying any pro-vaccine arguments from actual experts in the field. This seems like the epitome of biased "push" information sources.
Anyway, my point is that "Push" is the natural state of being. One has to work very hard to do otherwise. Someone who doesn't push, or who comes close to this, stands out above the crowd. I can think of very few hosts who do this. Joe Rogan goes out of his way to do this - to get all sorts of guests on with all sorts of perspectives - then he just shuts up and listens and asks questions. Yes he has started pushing his opinions a little, but he is better than most everyone else that I can think of.
Hard disagree. That may have been the case when he started the podcast but it's famously not the case now.
Even the Joe Rogan fans are upset about Rogan talking over experts and forcing his own biased opinions over the evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/pg3edl/im_not_gon...
For a more recent example, apparently he mistook an obviously satirical video as actual government media and criticized the Australian government for it, before somebody pointed out that it's [obviously] a satire video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVvyYXzgrD2/
This stuff isn't "just asking questions". Viewpoints are being heavily pushed, but Rogan does a good job of pretending he's "just asking questions".
> Not only has Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian, police-state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilized world
Ohh - is he where that insane-seeming take comes from, that I've read more than a few times in HN comments over the last few months?! They sure are projecting something, apart from intense anger/rage. I couldn't begin to understand it until I read that. Or where did he get it? (Sydney here.)
Trying to guess what that apparent US hysteria about Australia is based on — maybe it's because we had longer lockdowns/restrictions than most places, I think because there was hardly any covid cases here until the last few months (although Melbourne had an outburst a while ago), so not many people bothered about getting vaccinated. In the last few months a lot of people have gotten vaccinated, the large majority of Australians I think, so restrictions are being phased out. Personally, I've not heard anyone here objecting to the restrictions/lockdowns, but rather to what seem unfair exceptions or people acting irresponsibly, like live music venues being closed while some large sporting events are allowed, or people gathering in large parties when they know it's a bad idea. I don't think there's much of a story, and overseas stories presenting the situation/covid response in Australia as outrageous! unbelievable! inconceivable! etc seem totally detached from reality.
(The most outrageous true Australian story I've heard this year was that Australia is soon going to get nuclear-powered submarines because the US wants us to, I guess because of their current posturing against China, although for 50 years we've had a strong policy of not having nuclear-powered ships, or nuclear-powered anything. Everyone I mentioned it to thought it was totally outrageous too. I guess not many people in the US are worked up about that.)
edit: I looked up some figures. In June, 2% of Australians were fully vaccinated, now 64%, and at least one dose 75%, and increasing fast. 20% of Australians became fully vaccinated in the last month alone. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=AUS
I was referring to one very large beach party I heard about, a year ago or so. I wouldn't say outrage, just mild frustration, enough to mention it once then forget about it. I haven't seen any covid-related rage or even anger in real life. Not sure where is this rage you're talking about. Everyone I've seen—friends, acquaintances, strangers in the street—seems extremely relaxed and patient about the situation.
I'm not sure what you're insinuating—that there's a conspiracy to manipulate people into accepting a lockdown when they shouldn't? Or something.
But the bait-and-switch of things into him now just kind of fully descending into normalizing misinformation and crazy stuff is what helps others buy into it and pushes the discourse even more toxic.
This sad crash-dive into insanity that we’re on is the equivalent of a snowball starting an avalanche. It started a lot further up the mountain, and a lot smaller, but people keep getting swept up in it and it’s hard to know where the bottom is going to be since we’re still in the middle of it.
Nitter makes Twitter tolerable, and helpfully adds RSS links that should work with any reader.
For example, https://nitter.net/eff has this link at the top: https://nitter.net/eff/rss
People think they can regain control. The majority wont.
Their brains have been trained for decades now to chase clicks/upvotes/views/likes and followers as if these rules are Newtons Laws or something. Different parts of the brain now are totally fubar, as in once you have been writing with your right hand for 15 years, the brain cant just, over night, rewire large chunks of the network to use your left hand. Its takes lot of discipline and most people dont have it.
Probably have to write off a generation or two before things change. Look at netflix, now that they are hitting the upper bounds of attention capture using video, they predictably move to games and shorter vid formats like tiktok to keep capturing more attention.
They have fucked up a whole generation with an endless supply of rewards and to keep people glued. And given the billions being raked in every hour they have won.
Not really. Facebook pushes stuff to you via its Timeline. Twitter has a feed. Reddit and HN has front pages.
Social media does plenty of pushing. It’s just instead of a biased human editor with common sense and perhaps a conscience filtering your news, it’s an algorithm with none of the aforementioned attributes.
The point is that now it is getting more and more "pushy", but previously it was very "pull" based when compared to traditional education.
Lately I've been wondering if maybe people evolved to be sensitive to the who to make it easier for us to be controlled. Said control can be useful at times.
I'll be the first to say I was like this until only a few years ago. Once you realize that a significant chunk of mainstream media and social networks are heavily curated to influence your thinking, you never see the world the same again. There's a reason they call it being "red-pilled".
Most people seem to prefer the latter.
Truth becomes less about reality and more about power, then. Power is a big deal for most people. Look at popular movies for a clear illustration of that.
Pretty sure we evolved to be both. A society cannot function without a lot of people who mostly just follow a leader, but any society which doesn't constantly question its beliefs and ideals is guaranteed to fall sooner or later so we also need a lot of contrarians who do ask all those questions.
Those in power are well aware of this. You will notice that all the propaganda on TV is designed to make people believe that "everyone believes what I believe, I am in the majority". And when election time comes and hard facts seem to prove the propaganda wrong, they very quickly pivot to "Ok sure, but those other people don't count, they are 'uneducate', 'poor', 'evil'... they have no power"
It is not possible to be an expert on everything.
The best personal outcome doesn't come from making your own assessment of everything from toothpaste to nuclear power. It's when you learn to recognise the difference between someone's reasoned expertise and, well, just about everyone else pushing their viewpoint.
The top current tip for removing noise from signal certainly is, don't consume social media, as in the OP. In a similar vein, ignore parochial/domestic television broadcasting; obtain current events from international reporting sources, and informed opinion from long-form writers.
That's a cynical take, and it illuminates the importance of good education, so that "hubris" as you put it is minimized and right judgment is maximized.
Even more important when most children's education is more and more geared away from critical thinking, and instead towards the One True History.
The left-hand side of the bell curve will be a challenge in that regard. (Average IQ is 100.)
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” — George Carlin
To look at a thing, to think about what you see (or not). That's one way.
To consume words, interpret them, to create a metaphorical story. That's another.
That's a big difference. Fire vs fireflies.
It isn't a matter of truthiness but of substance.
The difference between menu and lunch. If the question is what to order, what course of action to take, maybe it doesn't matter so much. But for understanding it matters a whole bunch.
A hyperconsumer of information can handle somewhere in the range of 300--1,000 messages per day. The ultimate limit is simply time --- at 1,000 messages, and an 8-hour workday, you're dedicating 30 seconds per message, maximum. If you dedicate all your waking hours to that, you can double that. If you give up on sleep (I don't recommend this), triple.
There are hard limits.
30 seconds, or 60, or 90, is not enough time for a hard debunk.
And the alternative is simply to ... consume far fewer messages. Meaning that most of what flies by (much of it bogus) is ... unvetted. Dendritic information filters function by distributing the bullshit-filtering task across numerous nodes. In mass-media contexts of publishing or broadcast, that role was filled (with, very admittedly, problems) by reporters and editors. (See Noam Chomsky for what could possibly go worgn. It's still ... reasonably good, particularly with multiple press channels, say, those which include Noam Chomskys or George Seldes or I.F. Stoneses.)
In an environment with an overabundance of information what is required are fast, cheap, minimally-biased, no-regrets discarding mechanisms. Reputation and trust mechanisms afford much of this, which means that yes, the vast majority of people do trust others, either experts or collectively, at making useful partitions of the total information stream.
This is alway why known amplifiers or creators of bullshit <coff>joe<coff>rogan<coff> deserve to be dropped without any regrets.
(There are of course numerous others. That happens to be a channel specifically recommended in TFA, a fact which seriously degrades TFA's own credibility --- trust is not perfectly commutative, but it has transitive aspects.)
Incidentally, an advantage of choosing specific sources or channels is that those themselves can be examined and rated on their own performance. What's most critical is that sources afford cheap, fast, minimally-biased, and no-regrets performance. If a channel is tedious, if it is biased (and here, "bias" is based not on ideology but ground truth to the extent that that can be determined), if it produces regrets (choices are continuously second-guessed), then it is a poor option. Decisions aren't based on an ideal, but against alternatives.
Sources should own up to their own failings. I had a discussion a couple of months back on what such practices should, and do, look like (with someone apparently incapable of grasping the concepts, but that's another occupational hazard):
We don't have time to verify everything. Once you've rediscovered fire and are finishing up on reinventing the wheel, you come a point where you've got to delegate some tasks to others, perhaps trust them. And if you trust them, you probably impart some of the trust in their character to the opinion they utter. Nothing wrong in that.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40528587/why-your-brain-clings-t...
I see tiktok as more of flipping through the channel on TV but finding something good randomly, usually but I don't spend much time on it.
Examples: https://kingcharles.one/wtftwitter.png
Unfortunately even when you don't follow 200 people on Twitter, you're still subject to the same design principles.
I am building https://linklonk.com to explore a middle ground - you upvote/downvote content as a way to tell a transparent algorithm who you want to get more/less content from.
When you upvote a post/link, LinkLonk connects you stronger to other users that upvoted it and prioritizes other content they upvoted for you.
When you downvote something - your connections to those who upvoted that become weaker, and their other upvotes don't have much weight for you.
This makes it much more scalable - the algorithm keeps track of your connections to everyone else. You could be connected to hundreds of users and RSS feeds on LinkLonk, without having to explicitly subscribe to them. But you still have control - you express it every time when you decide whether to upvote or downvote the content you just read (or do nothing).
You end up connected the strongest to sources that have the highest signal-to-noise ratio for you. You see content from those who have proven to be good curators of content, which I think is a good feedback loop.
All content should only be surfaced via search, or lists that are the same for every user.
And autoplay next content should default to off.
I work in computers btw
Crawlers would have to execute JS and do additional requests, which is not feasible at all.
Content shouldn't be optimized for the most brittle consuming users and infinite scroll should be an anti-pattern of the most severe degree. I don't know which boneheaded webdevs recommend it to customers, since it is a most effective mechanism to kill discoverability.
... then proceeds to post an amazon link to a book
I grew up in USSR where TV was for the most part quite pathetic but I did not really dwell on it. There were always books that I was reading in insane amounts and all those long talks with the friends along with some vodka ;)
I am in Canada now. Still do not have TV, still read a lot of books but also do heavy "pulling" from online sources. No so called "social media" though unless HN counts as one.
Yeah, sometimes I miss flow TV, just lean back and relax.
In a Dungeons and Dragons character, knowing to vet one's sources would be an example of "Wisdom". And I think that's probably the right word for it in conventional speech as well.
Obviously, measured intelligence is not "real intelligence" ("g", whatever that is) — but at the same time, people increasingly use the term "intelligent" to refer to someone who has high measured intelligence (IQ), whether or not they have high "real intelligence." So the definitions sort of collapse into one-another over time. "The measure becomes the target", but for language.
What? "Intelligence" is not a psychology jargon term; it's just a word, defined by the way lay-people put the term to use in conversation. Language is used to communicate; we define words (jargon excluded) as what the majority of people understand them to mean.
When jargon and regular words collide, the lay-definition wins, and the jargon definition gets lost. (See e.g. "begging the question", which has become a lay-term for "something that has an obvious corollary or unstated flaw" rather than its meaning as a jargon term in logic.)
That's why academics invent terms like "g" — to make sure that the jargon term has no lay-term it's colliding with.
The concept of a lingua franca is that there is an optimal encoding for information conveyance, if you're recording that knowledge without knowing the target audience in advance; and that that encoding is the one that uses the language, the dialect, the terms, the idioms, the mode of speech, etc. that — at least measured by current world trends — will confound the understanding of the fewest such potential audiences.
Or, to put that another way: if the people you want to communicate already think like you... do you really need to say anything at all? They can probably independently come up with the same thought you want to convey. Communication exists to bridge gaps in understanding, to create mappings between non-isomorphic mental models where those mappings aren't already implicitly embedded in the models' shared structure. Communication is work done upon other people's mental model to converge them closer to you own.
That work does not consist just waving at others from over where your own mental model sits, and demanding that they bridge the understanding gap with you from their end, so that your words will make sense to them. Why would they bother? If you want to communicate something, you're the one struck with a motivation to optimize toward a world where other people know the thing you know; the other people who you'd be sharing that information with, have no such motive.
This is why tools like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children exist: the work of moving someone's mental model closer to your own, of bridging that gap, cannot be accomplished in a single leap; you must often take a circuitous path around (what you consider) the truth, to create a sturdy bridge that will reliably bring people's mental models in line with your own.
Refusal to do this painful-but-O(1) work—presumably under the expectation that the N parties that consume your communication will instead do their own painful mental labor to understand you, for an O(N) aggregate workload—is a disengagement from the entire concept of communication.
https://www.mediaite.com/podcasts/joe-rogan-goes-after-pete-...
Or speaks to someone like this:
(It's also important to note that the last clip is entirely out of context, with no information at all on when it happened or where it came from. I'm not saying I know it's false, but this should be triggering your "unreliable source" alarm. If the clip were from 20 years ago, or misleadingly edited, or just entirely fabricated... would we know?)
https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/kv5nv5/joe_yells_...
That’s how we talk.
I'm guilty of using it myself, and this makes it clear I should stop. Not least because it's not effective.
A quick search says he has 3 daughters of his own, so either he’s an idiot or he’s creating controversy for the sake of controversy or to pander to other idiots.
There was no her around to recover, just two men pretending to be in a hospital bed.
At best I think he might be useful to discover interviewees that actually have interesting things to say and go from there.
What I am shocked by (and I suspect this is the shock people mostly have) is how some people are like, Joe Rogan fans. Like the article author here. To the point he's the one guy he mentions in the article. He just not that interesting!
Why does this shock you? It’s pretty clear from what you wrote that you’re much smarter than the rest of us. It shouldn’t be shocking that us dumb ppl are fans of a dumb person?
If you want interesting science podcasts, at least do Lex Fridman!
He does like 3-5 episodes a week, and they're each 2-4 hours. So there's a shitload of content, much more than I could ever sit through. When I was commuting ~3 total hours each day, podcasts were my medium of choice, I would generally listen to maybe one of his podcasts per week and skipped the other 2-4 after listening long enough to know that I didn't give a shit about the guest, whether it's because they were a quack, some random boring comedian, or some meathead MMA person.
He is (rightly) criticized for having lots of shitty guests on, and that criticism is fair. But the fact that the podcast is often bad doesn't mean that it's always bad. When the podcast is at its best, it is very, very good.
On the website the episodes are broken down by category, so if you want science content you just click "scientists". Unfortunately Joe is too dumb to tell the difference between the real scientists and the fake ones, so most of the quacks are lumped in there too.
What made his interviews interesting is that he, apart from the mentioned standard hitching points, was inquisitive and unafraid to ask 'stupid' questions. Those often gave the guest room to delve into his or her subject of expertise, enlightening the listener and Rogan at the same time. Only a few of the guests were scientists, most were comedians, MMA fighters, ex-servicemen and such. Things might have changed since then but I can not imagine him ever labelling anything he does as 'science'.
[1] this period ended when he sold out to Spotify
if anything he just brings on people who are experts and asks them a bunch of questions.
why the hard-on from twitterinas that want to shit on the show because he interviews people accused of "wrongthink"?
There are also some theories that his sudden giant increase in wealth may have contributed to his shift from the mainstream to the fringe
I don’t know when you considered him mainstream but he’s the same.
It's easy to shit on the show for being a bro-science quackery discussion, not worthy of smart people listening to it or being guests on it. And as we all notice just how popular the show is, anything bad about it (it has plenty of that) becomes a good reason to want it _shut_ _down_
But that's a pretty sure fire way to gain credibility by association, even if you try your hardest to undermine it by bringing on holocaust deniers and obvious peddlers of bunk conspiracy theories.
He's a comedian chatting with people and sharing the discussion that you can choose to watch or not. The controversy around him is largely manufactured by a dying corporate media and ruling class threatened by unsanctioned voices. Speaking of being trolled by billionaires...
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jun/30/what-know-abo...
> In addition to mentioning ivermectin, the podcaster, who has previously stated that the young and healthy should not "worry" about being vaccinated against COVID, said he had also taken monoclonal antibodies and prednisone to treat the disease.
> Thus far, three anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibody products have been granted Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) by the FDA for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID in high-risk sufferers, though this is different from full FDA approval.
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-covid-drugs-ivermectin-mo...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Effectiveness against infections declined from 88% (95% CI 86–89) during the first month after full vaccination to 47% (43–51) after 5 months. Among sequenced infections, vaccine effectiveness against infections of the delta variant was high during the first month after full vaccination (93% [95% CI 85–97]) but declined to 53% [39–65] after 4 months.
if your immune system is still attacking the virus you don't want to weaken your immune system.
once your immune system is just attacking itself then you want to throw immunosuppressants at it in order to weaken the response.
Does this mean it works? No. But it does mean that your characterization of it as "snake oil" is completely incorrect. The real question is what kind of manipulation has taken place that could lead people to such a conclusion and who was behind this manipulation?
So much so that I find myself wondering if the entire post is actually a Spotify/Joe Rogan promotion (or maybe gaslighting).
Want a strong, open, diverse podcast community free from bullshit, unskippable, targeted advertisements for razors and stamps.com? Stay far, far away from Spotify.
Supporting a kook conspiracy peddler sort of kills his whole argument.
What's a state television? Was Canada occupied by North Korea in some other timeline?