TikTok Pedagogy: Teaching Philosophy in 60 Seconds or Less
blog.apaonline.org
blog.apaonline.org
To learn ... in the author's specific environment. There are lot of imaginable ways or possible worlds where to learn doesn't mean to be obsessed with it and sometimes dangerously so, sometimes in ways that might border on compulsion, or even addiction.
This sounds very tik-tok-like in itself where extreme human behaviours bordering on pathological get frighteningly "normalized" and even encouraged, an impression from my occasional uses/observations and talks with young people who use tik-tok frequently.
I get it that often times lamenting about the hostile environment isn't productive either but taking "academic philosophy" into Tik-Tok imhv seems more like a desperate move in the context of how the OP's professional career went so far.
Some people tolerate and even flourish under stresses under which others would break down and be left utterly debilitated. If someone makes it "through" it is often times hard or impossible to distinguish (survival bias) whether it is because of exceptional prowess and some resistance to the outside stresses or just some base level of skill but highly adaptive to the stresses of the outside environment.
For example: the common thread in the Soviet-system in sports was that it physically and psychologically burned through vast majorities of pools of "talented" people and the ones who endured where not only gifted in regards to the respective disciplines but additionally above all else exceptionally good at coping with enormous stress factors not directly related to the sport itself.
I thought I had an idea of what Aristotle was about. I had STUDIED several courses on Philosophy.
Then I read him. The Nicomachean Ethics.
Man, did he blow my mind.
Same with Aquinas and Nietzsche.
You cannot tik-tok a book.
You cannot tik-tok the experience of watching a movie…
EDIT: you can maybe transmit the urgency (anxiousness, whatever) about the need to read them, but little more. That is the complicated aspect of humanities.
I would even go further and say, if you switch modern learning over to TT, say 6 hours a day TT'ing, then you get exactly what the author linked here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393543/
That's sort of ironic.
Learning is tough, and TT won't change the way our brain works. Or put another way: if it does, it is not in our best interest.
Tik-Tok is an endless stream of "feels good" that never sticks. If you don't like a piece of content for more than 1 second you can swipe and get a new piece. Tik-tok feels great, but never really will connect with you, never will leave you look up from the screen and thinking "wow, the world has changed for me".
Tik-Tok will, for this reason, never be a learn tool. Honestly even youtube struggle with this. Learning means feeling dumb and climbing your way out. Tik-Tok is about blasting you with fun facts and insights that make you feel smart. A controversial take, but this is my problem with 3blue1brown. 3b1b creates some incredible content, but my experience is it excels at making you feel like you're learning. But you aren't really learning, it doesn't stick the way that slow reading and deliberate practice do. The feeling of 'ah ha!' but with out the actual work that makes that 'ah ha!' real. Like taking a helicopter to the summit of the mountain and rejoicing with the people who climbed it.
You're taking the author at their word and criticizing this characterization of learning. But I think the author's claim is hyperbolic chest thumping and shouldn't be taken seriously. I doubt the author's thirst for knowledge genuinely borders on 'compulsion or even addiction'. That's ridiculous self-aggrandizement (which is normalized on TikTok, of course.)
I think there might be more to this than it seems at first glance. For many people, work is their addiction. Others, the acquisition of knowledge. Others still, Tik-Tok and social media. Less ideally, heroin and hard drugs.
I recently listened to an episode of Andrew Huberman's podcast focused on addiction [0]. He interviews Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction expert, and they explore aspects of addiction that aren't necessarily well understood by outsiders.
The thing that stood out to me was their acknowledgement that most of us are addicted to something, even if we don't look at that thing as an "addiction". Some of us are addicted to things that are accepted by society, and some of us have addictions that are maladaptive. The mechanisms behind those addictions are often similar, even if the outcomes are quite different.
I'm not making any comments about the TikTok format itself here, or his claims that one must be addicted to have the drive to follow through on learning. But the idea that the author himself is addicted, and that some people do experience information/learning in this way does not seem very far fetched.
The concern I have is with embracing the format. As we learn more and more about the addictiveness of social media and as our attention spans continue to shrink, I don't think embracing the format is a wise choice. But I totally believe someone can be addicted to it.
Maybe for a rare few, but generally, no. You might be highly work motivated, but rising to the level of addiction? That's hyperbole, or you don't really have a good understanding of what real addiction entails. Somebody who is addicted will compulsively engage in that behavior even in the face of debilitating injury to themselves and those around them. Maybe you can make an argument about working too long and spending too little time with your family, but that's really milquetoast compared to real addiction.
This tiktok philosopher isn't talking about real addiction, when they say 'addiction' they mean 'thing I like a lot.'
These are not my words, these are words from an addiction expert who works with "real" addiction closely. I'd ask that you consider the possibility that addiction is more complex, and not so easy to put in a clean "real addiction" box as may be popular to believe.
> Somebody who is addicted will compulsively engage in that behavior even in the face of debilitating injury to themselves and those around them.
This is surprisingly close to exactly what I see from so many people in tech. They'll put their health severely at risk by neglecting sleep for work. They'll allow work to invade and permeate almost every aspect of their lives, and will rationalize it because it looks like success. They'll continue to push past their own limits for years on end only to find themselves deeply burned out requiring months if not years of recovery.
I would be cautious about downplaying addiction to things we find acceptable just because we find those things acceptable. The results of acceptable addictions might not involve an overdose or some of the extremes of drug seeking behavior, but that does not make them any less addictive, nor does it change the fundamental mechanisms driving those addictions.
Before discarding this perspective outright, I'd recommend spending some time listening to Dr. Lembke. I know she changed my perspective on this, opened my eyes to some realities that I was not aware of. A lot of this boils down to a conversation about dopamine, and is pretty fascinating.
> This tiktok philosopher isn't talking about real addiction, when they say 'addiction' they mean 'thing I like a lot.'
What, to you, is "real" addiction? Just the ones that are maladaptive? Just the ones involving hard drugs? What happens when an adaptive addiction goes too far? During a time when scientists are having serious conversations about real addictions to things like...TikTok...why can we not consider that addiction is perhaps more than just the hard drugs that require rehab?
Pressumably the article works under the same premise like what the tile promises: (sometimes) less is more. But "sometimes" was redacted in spirit of the article. I'm notbsure if that's intentionally a form of sarcasm, which is the good kind of sarcasm if it doesn't need to be marked to be recognizable.
The philosophy content on tiktok is as shallow and self-important as this article.
inb4 they don't
they do