Shields Up
seths.blog
seths.blog
Rather than inspiring, I find this content draining and anxiety-inducing. Instead of materially improving my life, it makes me feel inadequate compared to more successful people.
I'm becoming better at blocking and ignoring this content but there is still a long way to go.
The problem is, with property taxes of any kind, you have to have a "day job".
:/
I just want a farm, a family, and to be left alone.
1. https://protecttheharvest.com/news/2021-usda-report-finds-98...
“Likewise, the share of the value of production on small family farms declined from 26% to 20%.”
This and other resources keep pointing out that large scale family farms which are corporations at that point are nearly half. Then non family farms are another fraction like 20%-ish. Then not all of the “families” owning the farms even farm their own land. That’s only 51% of farmers doing that full time.
So 40%+ are landlords. Adam Smith the father of capitalism and Karl Marx and Engels all believed landlords are unethical and antithetical to capitalism or any economic system.
Even if the OP was wrong, your response is similar. Can we get some specifics of the actual finances?
Otherwise this is all propaganda for the US seeming more fair and equitable than it really is. Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave.
It comes across as a conclusion in search of evidence. What's happening is goal shifting.
I strongly believe that when a commenter makes an inaccurate claim, the bare minimum is pointing out the factual error. I'm under no obligation to speculate what the commenter really meant. I took them at face value - a completely fair approach. If they wish to clarify, or make a better argument, that's on them.
It’s possible I’m too autistic to understand why you are behaving the way you are. Your behavior and defensive mechanism baffles me if it’s in good faith. When I got into politics I spent a long time looking over all sides and never ever thought things like what you wrote. I always thought looking for the truth is the best thing.
For me it doesn’t make sense in my world view to be pedantic the way you are behaving. It’s a rather traditional autistic behavior though. I know i spend a lot of time masking to seem more normal and not be so pedantic).
In my eyes class is the only thing that matters. Do you not believe in material dialectics? Your views sound very libertarian from my reading on those politics. I don’t believe in private property so we will have to disagree on caring about ownership.
Cabin in the woods, though...
With, or without a flesh eating virus?
Check out the open source field robot project by Twisted Fields: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...
Making assumptions is fine, just be wary that you could be completely wrong.
In the meantime, expanding my backyard garden is a decent alternative. I used to spend most of my free time browsing the internet or tooling around with code. Now I hardly touch my computer on weekends.
I’d totally be living in a backwater doing far less work if not for needing $20K / year for health insurance for my family (and $10K on in reserve for my “out of pocket maximum”).
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
I remember glancing at the medicaid qualifications for a friend and being stunned that you only qualify if you have less than $2k in assets, so I don't think that's a sustainable method for off-grid living assuming you have a house/cash reserve/whatever.
Perhaps an Indian tribe will adopt us. Or Mennonites? I know I'm careening wildly into politically incorrect space but I think you get my (joking) point.
Being serious though, surely managing the farm to any degree will yield profits that will offset the property taxes.
If you could sum up marketing in four words.
I feel like I'm struggling to be able to retire comfortably by retirement age despite feeling that I'm well ahead of a number of my peers.
Same here. I don't know how most people will be able to support themselves at retirement age. I feel like there will be a massive collapse of the system.
The outcomes are also increasingly weird. People are quickly realizing that, no, retiring by 30 (or 35, or 40) isn’t going to happen for most people without extreme reduction of expenses. So then it becomes a weird game of minimizing expenses to an extreme degree to make their FIRE spreadsheets look better. What they don’t realize is that while it’s easy to go 1 or 2 years without buying new clothes or 5-10 years without buying a new car or computer, you can’t use those short sampling periods to estimate your expenses for the rest of your life.
I stopped reading FIRE blogs after seeing several stories from people who thought they had FIRE retired at a young age, only to discover years later that it wasn’t what they wanted or that their expenses were higher than expected, setting them on a path to failure. One particularly sad story involved a guy who FIREd with his girlfriend (or maybe wife?), but later she decided that she didn’t want to live an austere, childless lifestyle forever. They split up, and without combining housing and expenses he couldn’t afford to be retired any more. Now he had to rejoin the workforce having spent years doing nothing and letting his skills fall behind. It was a particularly sad story despite having done everything “right”.
> later she decided that she didn’t want to live an austere, childless lifestyle forever. They split up, and without combining housing and expenses he couldn’t afford to be retired any more.
My partner and I are both DINKs working in tech. I did the math and said "hey we could retire by 30 if we cut our expenses and changed our habits" (or other extreme age). The response I got was "I like the nice things we buy and do and thats worth working longer. When I'm sick of working, we can do this math again".
I think everyone should do the math, and understand how their finances interplay with future planning, because you may discover you can retire at 30 with changes, but you also may discover that you can't retire ever without changes.
If you are able to save nothing for retirement, you can never retire. You'll never build up any savings.
If you are able to put away literally everything you earn, you already can retire - your expenses are already covered.
In between those is not a linear scale (as it goes from 0 to infinity). As you setup a life where you are able to save more of your income you do two things:
1. You are able to save more and you get to your target figure faster
2. You need to save less because your lifestyle requires less money
Those combine very powerfully. This can be impacted heavily if you earn well when you're younger because as you invest compound interest makes a big difference over time. Investing in boring index funds (I mentally categorise this as a broad bet on capitalism) and continuing until you have about 25-35x your annual expenses (depends on your risk, there's loads on this) is the overall picture.
To save me redoing the maths, assuming 5% return after inflation and 25x your expenses, saving 10% of your income means working for 51 years, 25% of your income means working for 32 years, 50% means 17 years, and 75% just 7 years. [0]
Before I get the usual responses "but I like nice things" - the point is being deliberate about your spending and your goals. I am in a very fortunate position with my income (as many of us techies are on this site) and could spend a lot more. I would get significantly diminishing returns for spending more however, and it would come at a cost of working more and spending less time with my loved ones.
"ah but you can die any time why live a life of cold beans from the can" - the idea that I can die earlier strongly suggests to me I want to be in a position where I don't need my job earlier - to have more time retired rather than dying at my desk. Also the point is to build a life around things I actually value, not avoiding spending altogether.
"I like my job" - great! Unless you'd work for free, there is something else you'd rather do. Before you're FI you also gain huge security. FI is just "I could walk away from this job and be fine forever" but before then you hit "I would be fine for a month" then a year, then 10 years, 20, etc. Having a decade of runway makes shaky job markets significantly less scary.
Build the life you want to live, and save for it. Spend deliberately on things that you value. If that's cars, find the best way of spending your money to have the most fun with them (a cheaper daily driver and regular track days might be more fun and cheaper than a car a few models up).
I'd check out the subreddits and the sidebars for the standard advice in the personalfinance and financial independence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
The UK specific one has the almighty flowchart https://ukpersonal.finance/flowchart/
The FI subreddit has good advice https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ again check the sidebar for the must reads and key things there. Lots of the advice, particularly for someone your age, should be very generic.
[0] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
At a super high level, retirement is just living off savings until you die or the pool of money dies. The goal is for the money to outlive your spending. Realistically, you'll probably invest that money (401k, etc) so it should be "growing" even as you draw it down. The goal most people aspire to is to have the same "income" in retirement as you did working, by having so much savings that the rate you withdraw is equal to your old salary. Thats hard to do, and when you retire you may need less money, but it's a useful goal. There are a ton of "retirement calculators" [0] that you can plug in your financial situation into and it'll output useful info... eg. if a 23yo makes 100k a year, and save 1K a month, you'll have 3.7M at age 67, but you need ~4M to "make" 100k a year for the rest of your life. I've found each calculator online makes different assumptions about stock market returns, inflation, etc, so play with a few or do some math manually. I think these calculators area great sanity check and first stop for any long-term financial plan. More concretely, you'll hear about the 4% rule - you'll be unlikely to run out of money if you only withdraw 4% a year from a pool of invested money. So if you want to retire early with an $X/yr salary, you'll need to save 25X that amount. If you're comfortable dying broke (you can't take it with you!) then you can retire with less money, but you should when it would theoretically run out.
This should give you a basic idea of your savings rate for retirement. It's just a start, but you're young so you can improve it with age as you understand your lifestyle and career, and your financials change. Oh and my advice is get as close to maxing out a 401k as possible. Its tax-advantaged, so you'll have more money than if you paid taxes on it, and since there is a yearly limit, in later years you'll wish you put more in earlier.
Beyond retirement, you'll have other expenses in life (new cars, houses, kids, weddings, etc). You should vaguely understand those costs even if you don't know which ones you'll incur and when. Weddings are expensive if you ever wish to marry (avg wedding in the US is $20k). Children are expensive too - even getting a child can be expensive if you're not able to do it "naturally" - IVF can be $25k+. At 23 you may not know if you'll want a kid or if you'll have medical trouble, but the scale of these costs would have blown away 23yo me. Then there's all the obvious childcare costs... The point is there are a lot of life milestones that a 23yo may not be thinking about but a 33yo or 43yo may wish the 23yo started planning for, so you'll want to consider saving for more than just retirement. Oh, and on top of this save for a bad day, whether thats getting laid off, or a car accident, or a sudden death, or whatever.
Thats basically it for a high-level planning - understand what your vague costs are across your life, and do the math to understand how long it'll take to save for them. You can do further optimizations for taxes, and consider the distribution of funds, or optimize the account costs structures or a million other things. First, learn the big-picture income/saving/spending trends in your life... premature optimization and all that. Personally, I think of everything in terms of the 4% rule - what can my net worth get me in terms of income via the 4% rule - eg. every 25k saved is 1k a year in forever-income.
[0] First result on google - https://www.nerdwallet.com/investing/retirement-calculator
> Weddings are expensive if you ever wish to marry (avg wedding in the US is $20k).
Weddings are usually much less expensive. Average cost is misleading; median is more representative and much lower. Average 2020 wedding cost was 19k - 27k, while median cost was 11k. This reflects a few couples spending drastically more than average, and most couples spending less [1].
Also, wedding costs can be adjusted a lot. Unlike childcare costs, which are fairly inelastic, weddings can be much more easily tailored to lower cost. Fewer guests, outside venue, etc. -- these factors can be adjusted without life changes.
My wedding cost 5k in 2014. We had 15 guests -- parents, grandparent, siblings, and significant others. Ceremony was in a nice park, reception was dinner and drinks in a reserved section of a high-end restaurant in a metropolitan downtown.
> Children are expensive too
To clarify for the young: children are _much_ more expensive than weddings. It's like an expensive wedding every year. In my opinion, minimizing this cost while still having children is a very worthwhile effort in life planning for a 23 year old.
Consider a common scenario: childcare in or near a major city that would allow a dual-income household to work 9 AM - 5 PM with commute times factored in. In my experience, that's $15k - $30k per year, _per child_ [2]. Nanny care substantially minimizes marginal per-child cost for > 1 child, but still costs 25k - 40k per year.
Children are worth it! But do plan. Living near parents that are willing and able to help with childcare can greatly reduce costs. Choosing employers or careers that offer flexible or non-9-5 hours can also be a big help.
[1] https://silkstemcollective.com/median-and-average-wedding-co...
[2] https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states is the best estimator I've found, but still seems low for 9-5, 5 day per week childcare in or near a big city.
This is true, but some times when I talk to young people about children they imagine these costs extending forever. Childcare is an expensive, albeit temporary, expense.
It helps to map out which expenses would be incurred in which years in a spreadsheet. For many, childcare might come down to effectively consuming most or all of one spouse’s after-tax income for a few years, but maintaining career continuity can be worth it.
As I get older, I’m also seeing more of my friends decide that one of them will become a stay at home parent - and ending up happier because of it. I never would have guessed I’d see some of these people voluntarily choose to give up their lucrative careers to stay home with the kids, but then I look and see that they’re happier and less stressed than I am
It's $15-40k per year for 5-6 years, often per child. Consider 2 children born 3 years apart with no non-nuclear family childcare help, which means 8-9 years of 9 AM - 5 PM childcare needed for at least 1 child.
With a nanny in or near a big city at $25-40k per year, that's $200-400k total. With a childcare center in same scenario, it's likely similar in total cost, albeit with (to your later point) spreadsheet-worthy complexity.
It should most likely not be taken to extreme like retire at 30.
But for me it is answering question if I can quit job on the spot and don’t worry. Other question if I can afford health care in case of family tragedy that will require years of rehabilitation.
If having nice things is taking away my freedom and would put me in high stress situation - I don’t want nice things.
Having FIRE kind of money in bank makes life easier even if you still want to work.
"If having nice things is taking away my freedom and would put me in high stress situation - I don’t want nice things."
The problem for many people is, your spouse needs to feel the same way.
I've met a few such people and unsurprisingly none of them did it by following such advice.
It was always a combination of talent, circumstances and willingness to take huge risks. Not everyone has that and not everyone actually achieves this goal even when they do.
In the USA, they keep raising the social security age, doing it so only effects future people who reach it -- currently I believe it is 67. They (republican-backed proposals in congress) are currently talking about pushing it to 70. And will only give you enough to live very precariously and thriftily anyway. (They're also talking about pushing back medicare eligibility age).
The USA is really not a great place to live unless you are very wealthy. But HN definitely has a higher percentage of very wealthy people than the population at large.
Don't get sucked into other people's vanity, greed, and envy cycle.
Why would you want to be like them? Life isn't a video game. We don't "win" by having the highest score tallied in dollar signs.
I have never met anyone with a meaningful job who wants to retire, let alone retire early.
All the surgeons, social workers, artists I know want to keep working till the day they die.
- 55% showing symptoms of burn out
- more than 50% looking to reduce hours, 25% looking to leave medicine altogether
- 1 in 3 felt their work schedule allowed time for a personal/family life
And so on.
It's also not COVID. The reason I looked this up was personal anecdata from long before COVID. I have family in medicine and so was casually acquainted with a number of doctors, literally all of whom were less than enthusiastic about their jobs. You get paid a lot, but the hours are absolutely brutal, you spend an ungodly amount of time just filling out regulations related paperwork, and it's just generally a really painful career.
Part of being a good doctor is hiding all of this from the patient, and making it look like every day is a joy to be there doing what you love. In med school you literally study good bedside manner.
[1] - https://www.massmed.org/Publications/Research,-Studies,-and-...
https://www.mdlinx.com/article/these-doctor-specialties-are-...
You realize none of this is "real" right? I mean, a 31-year-old retired guy has got nothing better to do than send you spam? And if he's asking for money, then (surprise!) he's not retired. Almost all of these emails are self-evident - ask yourself "if this were true, why does need my money?" Ask yourself "if I were retired, would I waste my time sending out mails like this?"
>> Rather than inspiring,
They are not meant to be _inspiring_ - they're meant to be _profitable_. Seriously mate, it's a bottom-feeding hustle. It's not meant to inspire you. It's meant to separate you from some $. This is not success.
>> it makes me feel inadequate compared to more successful people.
Firstly, you are inadequate. You are insignificant. If you disappeared few people would notice, and after a week pretty much everyone won't care. In other words you're _just like everyone else_. You're not special. You're not special good, you're not special bad. You're just you. _Just like everyone else_. (I say this not to be a dick, but simply to state the obvious. Once you understand this, contentment is easier.) [2]
So some guy is more successful than you, richer than you, more famous than you. So what? I mean out of 8 billion or so, 8 billion-1 are "not the richest" - not the most successful - not the most famous? If you get anxious because there's someone ahead of you in the queue, well, good luck on that.
What about the length of the queue behind you? Ever notice them? You got food today? Shelter tonight? Income tomorrow? Man you don't know how good you got it - what da'ya want? A rocket into space?
Give yourself a break. You're doing fine. Live a life of gratitude and generosity. Give more money away [1]. And for goodness sake, don't measure your life by Spam. Seriously.
[1] - Giving money away is the best way to reduce the hold money has on your life. It might be $1. It might be $10. It might be whatever. Giving it away reminds you, you are in control of the money, not the other way around. And reminds you that whatever you have, there are folk out there with less.
[2] Z makes a real breakthough... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIv-FUarVWU
I think he may be on to something.
It's sad but society is truly diseased.
When I was a tragically optimistic 22 year old in the 80's my plan was to be retired by 55, but that boat has long since sailed :)
In 2014 or so, I forked it and expanded the replacement list to include some celebrity names. Turns out that keeping that updated and "complete" was more effort than I wanted to put into it.
But, for a while, "President Butt" was a common phrase in my browser, and it still makes me giggle.
It made me smile so many times. I should revive it - dumb fun is a lot of fun.
It may have been Tumblr rotting my brain all throughout high school and college; but this reads as so incredibly poetic and I'm extremely happy to have made a decision to stumble in this thread to read it.
It's so nice to make a silly little app and have it surprise you in the best ways.
Someone with the Cloud to Butt extension edited the page to update their teams details, not realizing they were also changing every Cloud product in the process.
The paper is the Denver Post. The Post is a paper thin shell of itself, gutted by the machinations of hedge funds too greedy to realize that sub-prime newspapers are even worse investments than world class ones. The Post even ran a picture of the wrong stadium for Opening Day for a few years, I think. Most of the Post's good staff had left years ago for the 'greener' pastures of purely online journalism.
Pat had further filled out their entire profile for commenting and said that they were a proud resident of Des Moines, Iowa. Seeing as they spent nearly all day commenting on the Denver Post, I had questions. So, I made a profile, got a free 30 day subscription and ability to comment, and then asked Pat the questions. Namely, are you a real person, are you really living in Iowa, and why are you spending all your days on this earth railing against a zombie newspaper in it's comments sections?
Pat confirmed that they were real, and that they lived in Des Moines. Further, and I'll not forget this, Pat said that the reason they spent all their days attacking the Post was "I just really fucking hate the Post, Rocky Mountain News was better and should come back" Rocky Mountain news had been truly dead for a decade at this point and was never coming back.
I could ask them more questions, and try to dive into their strange psychology, but lets be real, Pat is crazy. I have since returned to my policy of never reading the comments section. Thar be the weirdos.
It all got too much for me during Covid times however, and I did a huge detox and cleanse of my online content. I left LinkedIn which was my main source of my angst, blocked the news sites at the router and unfollowed thousands of accounts. I also installed a bunch of adblockers.
The habits have stuck for the most part, and life online feels so much lighter.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
Honestly, it works pretty great. I find mainstream social media to be a cesspool of irrelevant junk, so I don't use them. Technically, I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but I rarely browse anything on either of those apps.
The Wikipedia current events portal looks like a fantastic replacement for BBC World News though: slightly more in-depth content than just headlines. I'll give it a try.
When it's not enough I switch to text browsing via rss and gopher/gemini.
Wikipedia Current Events is very important to make sure that I'm not cutting myself completely off from the world, and after years of using it it's good enough when complemented with the local news from the people around me.
Another thing that would be great is to use that to identify the news that really matter and mute the rest.
I could imagine a prompt containing something like "As a person that likes A, B, C, D, and F, does the following has a potential to be interesting to me: ..."
Reddit's the worst source, but that's not really Reddit's fault. I want more information, more stimulation, as a fix to sitting here bored.
What I _could_ be doing, like finally finishing the top half to that hutch in my garage, or working on the manuscript for a book I'm writing, often falls by the wayside because I just couldn't find the energy to change course.
But those things would be much more fulfilling than doomscrolling r/all.
I _know_ this. The trick is in figuring out how to overcome inertia.
Art and nature are my go-to activities. Hiking, biking, playing music, and doodling in blender are all pretty rewarding.
The problem is breaking away from what I'm already doing to go and do those other things.
If anyone wants to build this as a freelance project, email me (email in profile), I'll hire you to make it.
Some things I'd like with it:
1) Rewrite everything on a webpage in a peaceful and neutral tone
2) Rewrite everything on a webpage to be assertive/direct, instead of passive aggressive (e.g. lots of negative comments could be replaced with simply "I don't like this" or "I want other people to know I dislike this and agree with me")
3) Add emojis inline in text so that pages are easier to skim
4) Add topic based filters/flags/emojis so I can highlight things that I care more and less about
All of them would be toggleable, of course.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/
Right now it filters out entire posts on reddit/comments on youtube/sidebar items on Twitter. But I've been meaning to:
1. Expand the sites where it filters, and possibly have it automatically determine which HTML elements to remove instead of me defining it on a per-site basis
2. Make the filter list user-customizable, and change it from static words and phrases to sentiment analysis
3. User-created list of opinions you don't want to read (e.g. any arguments that are anti-nuclear energy/pro-nuclear energy, depending on your perspective). This one is especially important to me because I find contrarian opinions on certain subjects to be both exhausting and boring, and I find myself engaging with them far too often in a "someone is wrong on the internet" sort of way.
I see the value of your request, too. Sometimes it makes sense to see what a consensus is on something, but the language used to dissent can be sort of toxic.
With the current LLM advancements, a smart filter for the info noise could be built. Sure, it would a bubble just like recommendation systems, but at least it's tweaked by you, and not created by someone else. (in theory, in practice it will be a black box SaaS)
No pop up ads, no auto play videos, no cookies, no tracking of any kind.
Few if any conspiracy theories appear in the major national dailies. Sure you can definitely quibble with the Post, NYT or WSJ on many issues but on average and outside of the editorial pages they are very good.
But yeah, reading MSM news without looking at social media discussions of those news can address at least 80% of the problems described by the author. The information explosion is irreversible and the Internet allowed higher parallelism and lower latency in consuming information compared to TV/Radio/Newspapers. Some degree of exhaustion is inevitable unless one trains themself to properly detach and disconnect on the regular.
You can get it through PressReader[1] and if you're in the UK it's very likely that your local library card will give you free access to it.
It made me realize how basically no "breaking news" is important to my personal life. Reading high-quality reports a few hours once a week is enough to stay more informed than constantly discussing breaking news on Twitter and is far better for my well being.
Current Affairs has a recent-ish article about this fact of media culture[1], but you don't need a long article to understand that poor people who do not pay for information are the product not the customer, and further that poor people have weaker literacy skills. Not a healthy combo.
1. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalle...
Didn't one of the "good guys" intentionally unleash the content-farming/bullshit-generating AI onto the net? I can't remember if it was the protagonist or not, but I couldn't get around to thinking it was a good idea on any world, but here we are with ChatGPT
What if there are existing ways to avoid all the garbage but they are not a junkblocker button.^1
It always seems like people commenting on the obnoxiousness of the web/mobile, often "tech" journalists, here a blogger, demand solutions that maintain the status quo (which is required for them to make money), but require no change in user behaviour, allegedly "fixing" the problem nonetheless.
"I want a no burn button for when I deliberately put my hand on a hot stove."
1. I have created these for myself, they work well, and I am not a developer. That suggests solutions are not difficult. IMO, it is only artificial constraints promulgated by web investors and developers that make these problems seem insurmountable.
Today I actually just consume a lot less news and media, and much less direct from the news sites. Community aggregation like HN, Lobsters, and a few subreddits lets me stay appraised without being intentionally distracted
This is the norm for me, and I think is likely to be the norm for those who consciously consume news as opposed to zombie consumptification of whatever happens to be on-screen.
gnus even lets you use scoring to essentialy make your own recommendation algorithm and increase signal to noise, either manually or with adaptive scoring that does things like "if you read this, words in the subject have the score increased for future rss items".
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Sco...
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Ada...
In my opinion, the above, plus being reasonably selective about your main news sources, will always beat any hypothetical AI, in terms of achieving a signal-to-noise ratio that's optimum for you, as an educated, informed, and reasoning human.
Taboola chumboxes being allowed to bypass Adblock Plus via Acceptable Ads was my main reason for giving up on the Acceptable Ads concept.
Nee!
Er zit een knop op je TV
Die helpt je zo uit de puree
Druk 'em in en ga maar mee
De bloemen buiten zetten
No!
There's a button on your TV
It will soon relieve you of your misery
Push it and come along
Let's go have fun (literally: put the flowers outside)
[click...]
+++NO CARRIER+++
It's clear by now we need some kind of collective action against socially and individually bad services like addictive games and social networks. I'm not sure if that's just information campaign or even improving incentive structures to help prioritize user wellbeing along with profit for companies. Why don't shareholder track the social good a given company is doing? And the environmental good as well?
Sadly, we'd need societal change rather than just a mega content blocker to really effect change.
I'm not a big doomer, but I've never witnessed the country so irrevocably divided.
Ehh, it takes some thick rose-tinted glasses to actually believe this. Every mainstream social medium – whether TV, radio, newspapers, your USPS mailbox or even a literal town square – has been full of this kind of manipulation since the second it came into existence. There was never a reason to believe that the internet would be any different.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
I know people are working on mathematically assessing truthfulness of a statement for the next generation of GPTs. Imagine if we'd have such a formula! We wouldn't need the GPTs, we could instead assess truthfulness in something like an adblocker - if the scanned text block is below a truthfulness cut-off, block it.
No way I'm gonna trust a corporate-controlled AI to block "untrue" content, no matter how advanced the technology is.
For example, when it comes to improving personality/body language, there are lot of tools in theater/acting that can be useful. Mainstream media never talks about these opportunities. I came to know about these very late, accidentally.
There are people spending billions of dollars to get your attention. You can't win this game on their terms. Treat the internet as the dangerous medium it is, and protect yourself.
I'm not even being all that facetious. Every interaction, every book, every news article is full of covering of the truth in some fashion or other. We carry the baggage of millennia coverings of what humanity actually is, so how could you hope to see past that to the truth of it.
Most of us have vices like Twitter and Reddit and TikTok and even HN, yet we do everything but quit them when we decide that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
In this case, instead of deciding on better ways to spend his attention, he imagines an increasingly complex technological solution so that he doesn't have to change his habits.
What's wrong with that, exactly? Technology should serve us, not the other way round. Nothing wrong with a technological solution, if it works.
So, like, whatever Taboola and such use to pick topics and serve? The inverse of that.
Personally I avoid all that stuff. But it’s not objectively junk. Being able to filter the stuff, and to develop your own filter preferences, would be wonderful.
Seeing YouTube views just makes me judge the content based on its popularity, rather than the content itself. Same with sub count.
Humans are not too bad at learning to tune out the noise, it takes some time to adapt.
I've seen quite a few young people who simply decided to not play the game, they stay out of Tiktok/insta, they read books, they don't care about their phones...
At some point I believe that Smartphones are going to not be much more exciting than TVs.
This has substantial epistemic issues, particularly if you include complex causality (since it is often not possible to accurately derive what "one's business" is, what "is" or is not verifiable in fact, or what is "likely"... All of that is driven by sub-perceptual, culturally conditioned heuristics).
Epistemology is extremely counterintuitive.
People seek entertainment, people seek hope, people seek emotion, not just facts.
Reality is hard for a lot of people at the moment, and mindless stuff can be a reprieve.
If I want to watch mindless entertainment, I wish to be the one to engage with it first.
Seth: Tear forming The one in my imagination is so much better though /s
Maybe a browser extension powered by AI? Or we can just crowdsource filters for uBlock Origin to block the junk.
Seth is a brilliant man, he should start a company and build exactly this.
For example, I found that downvoting every article on a topic wasn’t enough to give it the signal, “stop fucking showing me this topic.” (And this was true even when there were literally hundreds of articles on the same topic. I had to do this with Elon Musk-related news around the time he bought Twitter.) Then I learned you could block entire topics. That helped, except when it didn’t. Despite having downvoted hundreds of articles on a topic, and then actively blocking the topic, sometimes it would just show me news articles about the specific thing I asked it not to.
At this point I’ve lost any hope of finding a solution to getting the news I want without a ton of extra crap. I have ad blockers, but the news sites are so shitty to use. I wanted AppleNews to work, but there are too many ads and it doesn’t actually show you just the stuff you want. It’s constantly trying to push other stuff at you, the very thing I was paying to avoid. I give up. I’ve just stopped reading news altogether. This is what the industry has come to. It no longer contains enough value to even deal with.
And I will certainly pay for it.
It's just news. From journalists. No conspiracies, no misinformation, just news.
I'd love to hear thoughts/feedback from the HN group.
* Who is paying for it and why? Meaning, do you have a business model that can support fact-based reporting?
* Is unbiased journalism even possible? How do you avoid the collective biases of the Editorial Team?
One person's Ponzi-scheme or MLM is another person's crypto-revolution democratizing finance. One person's pump-and-dump is another person's GameStop. One person's irrelevant information is another's call to action.
I think a lot of people also aren't receptive to being told that they're wrong. Lots of people are posting about tech companies doing layoffs while having record profits, but then when I actually look at the profits, they're actually down. Is that misinformation? If I'm running a system (either a site where people post or a browser plugin that removes content), I would get roasted for taking that down. If I took down things meant to demean, degrade, or intentionally cause distress, I'd be taking down a lot of Republican content. They'd yell that they aren't demeaning a trans woman by calling her a man and that they're just stating a fact. Which one of us is correct in our judgment?
All that said, I do think there's a ton of value in Seth's idea and his presentation of it. I think he really hits on something important when he talks about things that might be true, but are irrelevant and things that are really just mean. I'd also add that there's a certain kind of post/article that's just meant to produce a visceral emotional reaction (usually anger) without anything really actionable or meaningful - I think that's what he's getting at in other terms. I think there's a lot of value in trying to get that junk out of one's life, but it's hard.
It's also hard for platforms who live and die by engagement. It's not just about the ad views. It's also about being the app/website that people instinctively open constantly. If you widdle down the content to the calm stuff, do you end up as an app that people forget about because the visceral emotional reactions aren't making them think about opening the app again? If they open it and there isn't new stuff, do they go somewhere else to fix their boredom?
All that controversy drives more content. Crazy tweets from Musk lead to lots of people who dislike Musk to quote-tweet him dunking on him. All those dunks drive engagement. A right wing person can say something and that will get so many people agreeing and disagreeing and fighting on a platform.
All that irrelevant stuff like celebrity gossip offers a constant stream of easy to consume bits for people. A good article requires thought, patience, attention, etc. A celebrity gossip pic works well for mindless doom-scrolling.
If a platform doesn't offer that, does it just become too small and end up losing the traffic to competitors who then have a war chest to fight off the "good" platform? To an extent, HN is a counter example. At the same time, would HN have survived if it weren't a bit of a passion project of YC? Competitors aren't looking to "kill" HN because it's clear HN isn't really looking to expand and become a big business. Likewise, HN doesn't have management looking to figure out how to maximize profitability or what the next big thing will be. It might be harder for more commercial platforms where they might start losing engineering talent to competitors whose engagement engines print money which they can use to lure engineers. We've seen many articles talking about tech giants hiring lots of people in part to prevent other companies from having talent.
I think there's lots of value in Seth's proposal. At the same time, I think it's tough.
Yes, let a big button to decide what are facts, what are opinions and what are conspiracy theories for us. Exactly what this society needs.
Maybe the AI can outproduce him, but as a waymarkerof sense, Seth has been deeply reliable over a long period. Your position that the words matter, that this sense making can be co-opted seems foolish to me. Navigating the context of the world, as Seth does, & highlighting core essentials, is not a task I think we'll see real meaningful output from AI on. It will be a cheap pastiche assemblage with no broader sense, for a long time. A vaguely choosey averaging.
I'd counter ask everyone & yourself to ask, what are you signaling?