The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
gurwinder.blog
gurwinder.blog
This doesn't jive with me, what kind of information different people are attracted to is very different. I'd argue that the difference comes from the brain trying to classify what information is useful and then rewarding you for engaging with that useful information.
So for example, at least for me TikTok isn't useful and thus doesn't engage me at all, its just irritating to try to get into it. But for many other people their brains obviously identifies TikTok differently than mine, likely seeing it as useful so rewards them for it.
So the problem is information that most people misclassify as useful even when it isn't. It is like sweeteners, they don't give you calories but your taste buds still rewards you as if you did get a lot of calories. I'd say that isn't an obesity crisis though, people sit and eat those artificial sweetener information all day and thus starve out on real useful information since they don't get any of it.
If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok.
Yeah, most of the content is unproductive attention bait, but that's true of any medium. Yeah, some information compresses poorly and really does require irreducible minutes or pages. However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok.
What has grown is irrelevant information. We don't need compressed communication (which loose nuance and is dangerous, because it leads to erroneous understanding) or high bandwidth one (which doesn't lead to reflection and internalization).
What we need is better filtering. Be conscious and mindful of what you're spending your time on. Instead of watching 500 hundreds video of making cakes, just buy a cookbook and go make cakes.
> However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok.
Short Training Videos existed before tiktok (I had a VHS tape for learning Windows and it was mostly a collection of these). But that's mostly like watching someone play a song on the piano and believing you can do it too. If you have a good memory, you can probably replay the same song, but you still can't play the piano. Some fields don't have that depth of theory. But books are still the best at transmitting it (watching an expert is best at understanding it).
Better filtering values compression. There are other concerns -- I mentioned them myself -- but compression is orthogonal and significant and TikTok progresses considerably on that front and if you don't see the value in it you're missing out in a big way.
Better filtering, while useful, is a fools errand. What we really need is to remove the incentives to produce junk content. I have no idea how but I am pretty sure it is related to digital ~~cancer~~ advertising.
1:1 interactive training from an expert is far better than reading a book, it just doesn't scale.
Regarding first one I think one of the main challenges will be finding which general explanations are true or not. This can be anything from cultural things like gender discussions to conspiracy theories to scientific theories. If there are generalized models that explain a lot of phenomena, the brain likes those, but at the same time they can also take the place for when empirical evidence should have been gathered (that doesn't fit with the general model), and so in that sense they can be hazardous. And models that already have stood up to a lot of empirical data are especially hazardous because they have already proven themselves to some extent which means there's even less incentive to gather empirical data. Or at least that's my current (maybe hazardous) general view.
I also don't think we should give up on generalized models because they are so powerful and useful, but it's definitely a challenge in todays climate because they get so many clicks and they are very satisfying to know.
What makes it worse is literally _every_ other social media network baking the a TikTok clone into their existing apps; Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, the list goes on and on.
So even though I've avoided TikTok, I can't stop this garbage dopamine-slop content from being shoved in my face.
Especially egregious is SnapChat, which immediately moves you to their version of TikTok and autoplays videos after you finish checking your friends stories, with no warning.
I always feel like utter garbage after falling down these rabbitholes; That's time I can never get back, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it.
Thankfully more and more people are seeing the issues caused by these social networks, so going full cold-turkey and uninstalling the worst offenders isn't unheard of and isn't as much of a blow to one's social circle as it once was.
The real kind of underlying question is about how to be most effective.
I recently read someplace that only 54% of Americans read at least one full book last year, and that includes audiobooks. It doesn't seem to me like a world full of infovores.
On one hand, chess is pretty well regarded. On the other, it's pretty memorization heavy - not just openings, but end game strategies and patterns in general. It takes up brain space.
I've been trying to frame it in terms of enjoyment. I see a lot of people strive for higher ELOs, but I sometimes miss the silliness of low triple digit ELO blitz.
being adequate, even good, at rowing didn't get me anything but sunburn. had a good time, mind you -- love being on the water -- but I probably could have spent that time learning Ham Radio, carpentry, ceramics, or vollyball -- or some combination of those. might never have been good at rowing, or ceramics, etc., but it's one of those Opportunity-Cost things
It is a strange modern metaphor to think of our brains as hard drives that fill up.
The precious resource is your time and attention invested (another odd metaphor), not the "capacity" of your brain.
I go through some home page videos, close each tab after the video is done, and then only load more of the home page if I truly want to watch more videos. No getting sucked into endless rabbitholes by accident.
I’m already using Sponsorblock and added DeArrow for my YouTube watching experience, and am hoping the latter will cut down on my behavior.
I tried cats.youtube.com also, but it's just like my IRL cat.
I've been using "Clickbait Remover for Youtube"[1] that replaces thumbnails with auto-generated ones, and changes capitalization of titles to de-emphisize clickbait, but I think a sponsorblock-like crowdsourcing approach is an amazing idea for an extension like this.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...
People call his videos educational, but really, what is the actual education being imparted? Its superficial, and you will never know how rich the topic actually is, and what the nuances are who the critics are and what they say, etc, etc. I'd put those videos in the entertainment section.
(FWIW I watch those videos too)
Arguably that's better than being apathic and frustrated all day long with no escape. In particular you seem to handle it responsibly, it all sounds pretty nice as you put it.
Then actually being apathic while engaged looks a lot like a zen like state, which would be fine in most people's book.
You can feel wonderful watching the video on time dilation but there is a zero chance a single viewer of that video actually understands any of the presented equations (or understands the various counter arguments/theories and nuances). You will leave with a shallow understanding of the topic. If you talk to an expert, they will have to work hard to not embarrass you.
You're not going to learn every topic you hear about, but you might learn some.
Take school as an example. You don't need a math teacher to learn math. Everything you learn in that class is in the textbook. The textbook will even teach you math in a more formal way than a teacher will (at least mine did). But very few people end up learning math from the textbook. It's not because the teacher has better expert knowledge than the book, but because the teacher keeps you engaged in the learning process. A book won't do that.
I think a sufficient amount of motivation can overcome a lack of expert guidance and lack of formal training. It might not get you to the exact same result as somebody that did receive all that, but for a lot of things I think it can get you close.
I do agree with you on monetary resources. That will kill motivation and limit your ability to get guidance.
On the other hand, you'll also find lectures from professors and other content made by professionals. I bookmark them and probably never look at them ever again. It's valuable, interesting, but it's too much.
I don’t see a similar feedback look with information. If anything it is like being an information gym fanatic that always skips leg day—my brain is strong I think (well, I hope at least), but no cardio.
I didn’t love his specific examples.
> A typical example on social media would be a photo of a freshly cooked burger, captioned with “Look what I just made!” but posted without a recipe so you can't even recreate it.
> e.g. “feeling tired, might go to sleep, lol”
These are sort of very obvious trivialities. I don’t think they scratch the itch for anybody. They aren’t dangerous, IMO.
Politics and tech stuff seem more dangerous to me. They are legitimately important and useful. But, for politics, you can only read so many stories before your mind is made up. There’s important stuff going on, but reading a dozen stories about one thing and then listening to the podcast just amps up the anxiety.
Tech stuff, I could waste ages reading about stacks and algorithms I’ll never use…
The overwhelming majority of political content is useless. Did you do anything? Did anything actually happen? You could spend a week in late October doing whatever reading you need to inform your vote, and nothing more, and it would still more than is ultimately useful if you’re not going to do anything about it.
You’d be surprised how little falls into the “useful or relevant” bucket a year out. And if a year has passed without any change or action on your part, how useful could it possibly be?
You got better things to do. I don’t know you or what you’re up to, but you have better things to do than that.
Do your civic duty and leave the rest alone. It’s the most toxic form of entertainment available.
I often open Hacker News, scan the titles, and open all interesting threads in separate tabs for later reading (I opened this thread the same way). Each thread usually contains insightful discussions and useful references on topics I enjoy, like music, programming, and recently, LLMs. Unlike Reddit, I often read the original articles instead of just shit-posting on clickbait titles.
Most of the discussions and articles are information-dense, requiring a significant amount of time and mental effort to read through them all (and close all the tabs). It's not uncommon for these dozens of open tabs to drain my willpower just by being there all day long.
I feel like I'm driven by FOMO rather than sheer curiosity. Maybe some information diet helps?
I can say what does not help much: I mostly open just one HN tab and mostly proceed sequentially inside of it. If there's a rabbit hole, all of it happens in that single tab (a lot of back button).
Still, the consumption mode itself makes it harder to switch back to work mode or to creative mode.
This also is probably good advice to use with any site. Sometimes I'll open up 3 tabs of interesting-looking youtube videos from my home page. It would probably be best (and would make me watch less youtube) to restrict it to only 1 tab per site.
For Youtube I will only queue up (by way of new tabs) interesting videos on a single row and only after finishing or discarding those will I go back to the YT tab to find another time burner. Essentially that sets my VIP (Videos in progress) limit to 4.
For me, what's missing is intent. Most of the time I feel I could be doing better, I stop and think: wait, this is my resting time. Or, wait, this is my hobby. I feel even though I fall in one end of the balance, many times this articles fall in the other.
If I tried to deep dive and study as much as is suggested, I'd have no energy for other things that I value more right now. Reading author articles it seems to me others have different energy or their effort is focused differently, but I'm always cautious because burning out it's not something I want to ever repeat
The primary reason to engage with social media is not to consume useless content. If that's all it was, I wouldn't use it. No, the primary reasons are: to improve your professional standing, attract an audience that can be monetized, and learn useful information in your field (which can also be monetized). Or to make it even simpler: money, and power.
That changes the perspective on what has value and what is worth saying & doing.
For example, "low effort content" obviously has value if that's your goal, since you can spend 10 minutes crafting some tweet about your profession with low reach, or 10s photographing your food for a similar result. If you can type out something low effort than you can squeeze it in during work hours, for example - and building an audience is one example of how that could pay off.
Second, if money and power are your goal, then getting very familiar with marketing content is useful also. You have to learn what engages people and what gets people to sign up for stuff, even if its tedious or slightly cheesy. And hanging out on social media is how you do that.
Finally, if there are useful professional jewels amid all the chaff, then it may be okay that 95% of it is junk, if 5% of it is good. I will say that there are times when I've sworn off social media, then dipped back and noticed, actually, I do learn useful stuff here. If you want to use social media in a practical way, you can.
Certainly not for most people. Everyone I know shares images and watches reels on Instagram, nothing else.
I thought he was going to address the academic problem of too many bad papers. Or worse, press releases from university PR departments. There are far too many "we got this modest lab result, trillion dollar world changing industry by next year" articles. Published journals are no longer real sources of authority. Academic link-farming is a thing.
It takes so much effort to push back. Remember the uBeam ultrasonic charging scheme? That scam kept going for over a decade. Finally went bust.[1]
[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/54800-92#overview
At best, it's a useful reminder that doomscrolling happens not only on Instagram and YouTube, but also on "respectable" sites like the NYT, Hacker News, and Wikipedia, and that does resonate with me. But I don't see anything else that the author is really adding to the large corpus of discussion on doomscrolling and Internet addiciton.
>"Common types of junk info include gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble. But in fact, any information that you can't use is junk info. A typical example on social media would be a photo of a freshly cooked burger, captioned with “Look what I just made!” but posted without a recipe so you can't even recreate it"
There's huge gap between "info that you can use" and the examples given of "junk info". I enjoy reading Wikipedia entries on scientific topics, but I can rarely "use" that info in any practical sense
This is true and I am thankful to read this article about how the author has coined a new phrase
Great article but sadly unlikely to change any outcome so you wonder if the article itself qualifies as junk info or digital defeatism
Case in point, TikTok is still alive and well: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-wea...
The writer never said that TikTok would self-destroy; he said that it’s “a time-bomb that’ll wreck a whole generation”.
I like a good laugh. If something is boring or dumb I swipe past pretty fast. TikTok catches on quick and treats me pretty good.
Seems to me that huge percentages of almost all cultures have indulged full-time in these endeavors long before media came along.
I miss tabloids at the grocery checkout with aliens and Bigfoot on the cover.
I miss Mad Magazine.
Some of that old junk was good!
For more than a couple decades now people around the world are using a chemical laboratory technique I developed single-handedly and never published since it gave my employer at the time an unfair advantage. Once it escaped the lab, it crossed borders like wildfire.
Billions of dollars in chemicals are involved.
That's not just bits on a ledger.
Also wanted to work for the National Enquirer (home town gossip rag) when I graduated and turned 17, didn't get far even though I had been studying their texts for years ;)
You dont just put this in a random post and NOT give details.
Spill.
Edit: After reading a bunch of the above posters HN comments it's the first time in forever I wanted to see a FOLLOW button on here...
The technology was very well set to emerge on its own. Nothing that wouldn't have been done without me eventually, and by about 10 years later most operations had progressed in that direction, in many analytical fields besides chemicals, without any relationship to my particular early effort. But I've probably still run more experiments in this field than anybody else who didn't start that early.
With the employee turnover of a measurement bureau having an inherently outdated approach to staff, alternative international testing labs were eager to pick up our people who knew how to do this. Bigger companies knew I was up to something the whole time but I was not trying to hide anything, just not giving away the details.
When it comes to alcohols, at the beginning all the PhD's who were established chided me that it couldn't be done the way I had in mind. Little did they know I had already validated it for a year, so they didn't actually turn out to be wrong in the end. They were all wrong from the beginning and I knew it as I went along.
And that's just the apparatus, which is all over the world now, plus for alcohols well-standardized internationally. Even though the standard allows for lower performance and uses lesser math than I had implemented originally.
Now that I have officially retired from my last employer, I still consult and earlier this week the manager called me about a specialty chemical on the way that nobody knows how to do and there are no publications. We'll see if this ship comes in.
It's really just a non-toxic hiatus for me, I grew up in a retirement community, so unspoiled resort life has already been accomplished and well behind me for decades.
Still deciding whether it's best to present the advanced math at a conference this year or next. That I will be able to take full credit for if I want to, and it could be quite popular now that people have the corresponding apparatus already.
Regardless, the way we do it is slides and lecture only, no publication will necessarily be forthcoming.
That reminds me, I don't disclose much but last time it was 2021, maybe a week after Windows 11 was released. Here's how I did it, being the only one seen with W11 (even up to this year w10 outnumbers it 10:1). Two laptops, neither one fully meeting the stiffest software requirements, one with HDMI, the other much further out-of-date with VGA. Each alternatively multibootable to XP on demand (just in case) with the same Powerpoint, projectable from either OS on either laptop. All slides at the native resolution of the projector supplied by the AV service. HDMI it was, no need for XP arose but it turned out the HDMI cable that was supplied by AV was a worn out POS which would have been a show-stopper except I pulled out a long HDMI cord brand new in the package, manager hooked it up and we kept on going.
I love this bit. It's why I love computing! You can go build something, verify it and have people tell you "that wont work". I have never been the one to say "I told you so" or have smug satisfaction, there is a special kind of warmth that comes when you already have and someone tells you its impossible!
> Now that I have officially retired from my last employer, I still consult and earlier this week
When I was the new kid in my very early 20's I had the joy of working with the sea of Cobol programers who were back from retirement to save the world from Y2k. Most of them were older then, than I am now, and their stories and advice stuck to me like glue! For as much as things have changed, their lessons in the joys of early mainframes (and the books from conferences they let me read) taught me lessons that apply more now today than they should. The more things change...
> Still deciding whether it's best to present the advanced math at a conference this year or next. That I will be able to take full credit for if I want to, and it could be quite popular now that people have the corresponding apparatus already.
You're a gem of a human. Please present your paper!!!
The desire to know is an appetite, like the desire for food, sex, etc. And like any appetite, it must be moderated, ordered, and tempered by restraint and reason, which is to say the good. Otherwise, it becomes a vice, a bad and destructive thing. It doesn't lead to wisdom and understanding. It doesn't contribute to your station in life or your life's ultimate end. It can become the basis for arrogance, and pride may be the motive.
The ancients and medievals used to call this unrestrained appetite for knowledge the vice of curiosity, which they opposed to the virtue of studiousness. It is an idle or vain interest in things.
As long as you're going to spend 8 hours per day relaxing, why not learn something new along the way? If you're going to have fun while learning -- if it's not something you have to force yourself to do -- that's even better right?
Sure, this learning will come in the form of lots of little bits and pieces. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine going super deep into a single subject, then eventually realizing that subject isn't even useful.
Plus, I've found that if I try to do intensive single-subject learning, it begins to feel like work anyways. Learning little bits and pieces seems less taxing for my brain, and is arguably better from a spaced-repetition point of view too.
The piece seems to mainly rest on a single study which is here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3501899 Based on a quick skim, that study didn't actually measure retention of info from social media. Even if it did, the right way to measure retention would not be to ask "Do you remember what you read this past week?" That's not a useful way for your brain to index information. It'd be better to ask someone about the topic of something they read, and see if they had any recollections related to it.
I think many people do use social media in an unhealthy way. Staying up late to follow an online controversy isn't usually smart. But the picture presented in the OP feels oversimplified.
I've tried many times to pull away from social media, but I keep coming back. It's actually kind of hard to find something that's: more relaxing, more edifying, more fun, and doesn't get old after 8 hours. I'm open to suggestions!
Learning is not relaxing. Not every hour of the day must be productive.
Do you sometimes learn stuff when you read HN?
No.
> Do you sometimes learn stuff when you read HN?
Yes.
“Eventually, the addiction to useless info leads to what I call “intellectual obesity.” Just as gorging on junk food bloats your body, so gorging on junk info bloats your mind, filling it with a cacophony of half-remembered gibberish that sidetracks your attention and confuses your senses. Unable to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, you become concerned by trivialities and outraged by falsehoods. These concerns and outrages push you to consume even more, and all the time that you're consuming, you're prevented from doing anything else: learning, focusing, even thinking”
I think a lot of people (myself included) have fallen for this pernicious trap at some point.
Likewise, my generation is dealing with an explosion of easy to consume streams of information and entertainment and we are kind of blindsided by that I have to conscientious of spending too much time consuming online information with Reddit being my biggest vice.
I've never been sure why I did this, but it makes sense: I'm capable of devouring so much new information that I get sick, because I crave it and go after it like an addict, at the cost of my own well-being. That makes very good sense to me as I'm in recovery and don't drink or do drugs, and it's a real familiar sensation even though it's been some time since I used.
I expected this to be a post about being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of good information that one can find online. Being stressed by too much information is an actual concern of mine. Instead I get lowkey propaganda vibes.
It’s definitely growing faster than I can review. There is just so much high-quality stuff out there.
I’m not even on social media. Fundamentally interesting stuff will find it’s way off those islands and into the open web. It’s an useful filter for me.
> The downside of tuning a site to attract certain people is that, to those people, it can be too attractive. I'm all too aware how addictive Hacker News can be.
It's always much easier to be a critic than to actually do the work - and in this article all the person does is be a critic
Learning disability? What do you mean?
The Buddha pointed out that avijjā, the choice to ignore uncomfortable truths, is the root cause of all suffering. The Buddha called such rage bait, the first arrow. The first arrow is, in reality, a notification of sensory motor misprediction. We experience this notification of misprediction as pain because this alerts the brain to the existence of an error in our sensory motor predictive model. In order to restore equanimity as we move through this domain of sensory experience, the brain should respond by striving to correct the error in the model so that sensory experience is predicted correctly. With the error corrected, we can now move through that domain of sensory experience without anxiety; confident that our model will guide us to make good decisions. Most of the time, we do this. However, sometimes, a bias we have prevents us from doing so. The Buddha called such biases, āsava. The path to liberating the mind involves the total destruction of the āsava.
The suffering we experience in response to rage bait then is an inner conflict between 2 strategies to satiate our craving for the restoration of the certainty of an accurate predictive model of sensory experience. 1: The more intelligent strategy of seeking to find and correct the error in the predictive model so that we can "see the world the way it actually is" and 2: The less intelligent strategy of clinging to bias and demanding that sensory experience bend to our will now.
i.e. between 1: mature delayed gratification and 2: immature immediate gratification
ALL suffering we have ever experienced, are experiencing and will ever experience is an inner conflict between these 2 parts of us pulling in different directions. ALL suffering we have ever experienced, are experiencing and will ever experience is resolved by extinguishing the craving for things to be different than they actually are now in favor of seeing the world the way it actually is.
We don't see it as such when we are doing it, but suffering is clearly a learning disability. Were we to free our mind of all such learning disabilities, rage bait would have no effect on us whatsoever. In this regard, rage bait everywhere should be seen as a wonderful opportunity to free our minds of a learning disability that is preventing us from contributing to our full potential. Both as individuals and as a species.
What might billions of minds liberated from bias in this fashion be capable of producing? For this reason, "rage-bait" should be embraced as a wonderful opportunity.
Ironically vapid.
> You're drowning in low-quality, pointless content designed to hijack your attention. It's making you distracted, confused, and unable to think straight.
> Be mindful of what you consume. Spend more time creating, less mindlessly scrolling.
> Your mind deserves better than the junk clogging your feed. Cut it out before it rots your brain.
That's literally it. I guess the piece is trying to be ironic by using the same style of junk information that it's telling us to watch out for?
Just in the first couple of paragraphs alone:
- The author discusses the "why" by pointing to research on how new information triggers dopamine pathways. Maybe this is obvious to you but it's not necessarily obvious to everyone.
- The author points out that this would have historically been an evolutionary advantage (at least that's my interpretation), but access to modern high-volume, low-nutrient information has made this an addictive unhealthy habit.
- For those already familiar with how modern access to high-calorie, low-nutrient food (that triggers the dopamine response), the author is showing that the same mechanisms are at play with information.
I think it's actually your comment that contains the tweet-able one liners (as "key points") that are likely to result in head nods and smug self assurances but aren't doing anything to encourage deeper thought.
My point for this post: Each time I hear (paraphrased): "It is different this time.", I try to imagine the world 25 years ago. Then think: Is this really that different? Most of time, I think, "No, it isn't that different." (I use the same mental exercise when I hear people say that "this generation is so different than the last for reason A, B, or C.")
a) None of these were, first algorithmically, and then using machine learning, optimized to constantly grab attention and maximize interaction time on an individual basis.
b) None of them had the interactive effects where peoples interactions with one another are guided and used, to draw them into echo chambers which are, again, designed to maximize interaction time.
> Then think: Is this really that different?
Yes. It is. Simple example: How do politically motivated troll armies influence an election in a reality where people don't use social media as their primary news source? Answer: They don't. They can (and likely have) bought some space in some low-quality tabloid through strawmen, but that has nowhere near the range and impact of one guy in some government office pretending to be 100000 "Average Joes" halfway across the globe.
By having one super rich troll run for president and buy hour long slots of evening broadcasting. See Ross Perot.
This is the whole reason people talk about middle-class modern humans of various recent eras "living like kings" in comparison to humans of less recent eras. The thing (Maybe that's "having people from across the world entertain you in your living room", maybe it's "Eating elaborately prepared deserts made out of refined sugar") was possible for some before, but not nearly as many. This is the kind of thing technology tends to change most often. Not best-case capability, but access and scale
Like some of those things are mass-produced superstimulus facsimiles and not good in the same way they were for the ultrawealthy of old, but even those genuinely are changes in how the world effectively works
I like to use the mnemonic "One S for sand, two S's for tasty shit."
The warlords gathering with deserts in their eyes may never get their just deserts even if their habit of eating just desserts leaves them obese
For while we may get told every other day we live like kings, I am more of a mind to suffer no kings at all in the first place
To what degree do they "influence" an election in our "reality"? (And, how many people can even genuinely and substantially wonder what the truth of the matter is after growing up in countries subject to Western "influence"?)
- https://www.npr.org/2019/04/24/716374421/fact-check-russian-...
- https://www.axios.com/2021/07/09/facebook-book-russia-zucker...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/18/how-russi...
- https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN25S5UA/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/technology/facebook-russi...
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/21/facebook-...
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russias-2024-ele...
Not limited to the US either:
- https://time.com/4955503/germany-elections-2017-far-right-ru...
- https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-botnet-promotes-far-...
- https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-influence-hackers-soc...
- https://www.euractiv.com/section/elections/news/germany-unco...
Sorry for ruining a good story (did you even notice you didn't answer the question, but instead posted a bunch of stories...how do you think these things work), but the topic and specific nature of the accusations (misinformation) demands it.
In relation to percentages, lots of the articles had numbers, you could also do the work of deriving percentages from the numbers if you were so inclined.
>did you even notice you didn't answer the question,
the way English and Internet communication work if you quote a question and then give a bunch of links it is reasonable to assume that is the way they are answering the question - in short they believe that the links they provide are a good faith explanation of 'what degree "they" "influence" an election in our "reality"'.
>and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such.
You seem to want them to do an awful lot of work to answer your short one paragraph question!
My question was whether the poster realized propaganda/misinformation ran on stories, since that (and only that) is what he was posting (with no accompanying assertion, a genuinely impressive technique, if intentional (no accusation, just sayin')).
> In relation to percentages, lots of the articles had numbers, you could also do the work of deriving percentages from the numbers if you were so inclined.
You could also get some percentages with a random number generator. Are you asserting that reasonably accurate quantitative (percentage) truth can be derived from these articles? If so, I'd like to see you explain how, and also how you would determine your theory is correct in fact.
> the way English and Internet communication work if you quote a question and then give a bunch of links it is reasonable to assume....
Oh, I am aware. Heck, the "quote a question and then give a bunch of links" isn't even required, since what "is reasonable" varies widely depending on the topic.
> ...that is the way they are answering the question...
But they didn't even try to answer the question that was asked. This is the beauty of just posting links: no claim of them being an answer is made, readers can assume for themselves that they have answers the question, and confirmed the meme.
> ...in short they believe that the links they provide are a good faith explanation of 'what degree "they" "influence" an election in our "reality"'.
People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but I am under the impression that what is being discussed here is at least an attempt at the truth. Could I be mistaken?
I will ask you point blank: do you care what the truth of the matter is here?
Ok there's a lot to unpack in what you said here but let's try .-
>Are you asserting that reasonably accurate quantitative (percentage) truth can be derived from these articles?
why would I? I didn't post the articles but anyway I think we are once again back to something you seem to like to do which is to demand quite a lot more work from other people than you seem to be willing to put in.
You made a short one paragraph statement that there was no proof of these things, the post then followed with a lot of links that I suppose the person who made the post had to gather in some way (perhaps they had it in their bookmarks tagged "election-manipulation" or something so it was relatively easy.
Then you claimed that was not good enough and that they didn't answer the question and then demanded they post things "In percentage terms please, and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such." which is a lot more work than you put into that demand.
Then when you say >If so, I'd like to see you explain how
Again it seems that you want me to read through all of that posters stories, provide you with statistics pulled from the stories (which will involve doing the actual work of putting the numbers in various stories into a stastical format) and an argument as to how they apply.
That is quite a lot of work to answer someone who posted a couple sentences, my advice is, if you want to disprove this person's assertions - do your own work.
>and also how you would determine your theory is correct in fact.
Well I probably wouldn't have any particular way of determining if my theory is correct because it would take time and time is a limited thing therefore you are probably required in life to accept some information you take in as true until such a time as you need to confirm, I don't have much to do with the Russia, or American Elections or any of that so I would probably just take in things that seemed reasonably argued as being truthful.
This means I might accept as true things that are false, and vice versa, because time is limited and I cannot fact check everything.
That said one way I might check if my theory was true is if people I disagreed with on the internet provided rebuttal arguments in the way of other links with numbers in them, because that would seem to me to be a good way of making an argument.
>People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but I am under the impression that what is being discussed here is at least an attempt at the truth.
Frankly it does not seem to me that you are making an attempt at telling the truth, it seems you are making an attempt at saying that something is false without providing any data as to why it is false. Maybe because gathering data is time intensive.
>do you care what the truth of the matter is here
Not really, I care that argumentation is clear enough that people can perhaps approximate the truth of whatever is being discussed through following that argumentation.
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
Also, a lot of stories on Russia are or were plain old western misinformation, long predating Ukraine:
https://blog.plan99.net/правда-6e24757a67ba
So it's very important to be careful when making claims about "influencing elections" because there's such a long history of false claims from western sources, amplified by western media, of which the outlets you've cited are prime offenders unfortunately.
To put an even finer point in it, they're asking us to believe their blog posts over numerous large media outlets, and even above (presumably) peer reviewed research.
Anyone capable of understanding the issue of misinformation should see why that's a terrible idea, and why we shouldn't be encouraging that kind of behavior.
Perhaps it would have been better if the blog writer had approached the researchers and said, “Hey I read your paper. I have insider knowledge and I’d like to help you refine your model.”
Specifically, what gets me worried is not the subset that is related to making Westerners averse to supporting Ukraine but many subtle and not so subtle attempts at sowing discord using the divisions already present in our society. This really works extremely well and we're super-weak when faced with these.
One can find numerous examples of right leaning Americans repeating the claim that Ukrainians are Nazis. These same people are intellectually immune to applying the same reasoning when confronted by similar evidence of Russian Nazism.
How do you figure all of this stuff out anyways, do you have a massive spreadsheet or model of some kind? But then, those can inventory stories, but they typically don't help much with whether the stories are true, assuming that matters.
I only focus on fragments of reality I'm familiar with. E.g. I have a few friends in Russia and Ukraine and it's interesting to compare what's reported in the media with first-hand accounts (which can also be biased BTW). As for the rest, I'm humble enough to admit I don't know and may never know the complete truth.
> The cited evidence is two men who joined the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, an organisation with a stable membership of around 10,000 people (0.3% of the population). ... The article presents no data or other evidence to suggest behavioural changes in the Lithuanian population: the anecdote of two people is generalised to the entire country.
So I checked the article and it says:
> "We are growing dramatically in numbers. Three years ago we had 50 people in Vilnius - now we have 3,000."
and then:
> Some 4,000 troops are being shipped out to the region - with 1,000 German soldiers allocated to Lithuania.
So while I believe your engagement in bot detection is genuine and you can offer some useful insights into how some bot detection platform are broken, as for the field reporting, forgive me but I still trust more traditional journalists than you, in spite of living on this Earth long enough to realize everything is imperfect.
> I still trust more traditional journalists than you
By all means, trust who you want! But bear in mind you could easily check these examples because there are links and sources for everything, something journalists often don't provide. For example, the Reuters story in the parent post about "Peace Data" doesn't seem to have any links at all.
Just be careful not to base your conclusion on anecdata. There are legitimate differences amongst generations in addition to the many commonly held misconceptions, e.g. Millennials are poorer than Boomers were at the same age.
I'd you're interested, check out Jean Twenge's book "Generations" for a look at the differences backed by the best available data.
The piece discusses the neurobiological background, social effects, shows examples, and closes with a recommendation on what to try if you are a victim of doomscrolling.
In fact, this writing does have a feel of 10-15y ago blog posts (where you can say, it's too short compared to books written 100-150y ago on a certain topic). I wish some people read this today instead of spending that 8minutes mindlessly scrolling TikTok
> I wish some people read this today instead of spending that 8minutes mindlessly scrolling TikTok
The point is, you were being exposed to novel content at a much slower rate than you are when you scroll through your short-video social media feeds. It already wasn't a great situation to begin with, as far as attention spans are concerned, but this new age of short video social media apps has undoubtedly exacerbated the issue.
TV shows are longer. And I don't mean double the length, but literally 100xtimes longer. There is a chance you accidentally find a channel with a program that really triggers your curiosity, and then you stop scrolling. On TikTok, this is not possible, after a couple seconds the mildly interesting content is gone. Good luck finding it again, or even remembering what you found interesting in the morning sitting on the toilet swearing "you'll check out this topic later"
Another aspect is the quality of the content, which, chances are, higher. Not all of the programmes, obviously, but, again, you might find a documentary, an art piece (aka movie), etc. On TikTok/instagram/yt/Facebook reels anyone can post any rubbish, without any curation, and it's up to some algorithm to decide if it's shown to you.
Not to mention the regimen you create, the ritual if you like, of sitting down in front of the TV at the time your beloved programme is aired.
I used to think a lot about the "it's the same as TV / newspaper / books used to be" argument, and I definitely believe it's not. Especially since I dated the "book reader" and the "insta story addict" persons and tried to have conversations with them about topics. Day and night.
In fact, I started going back to TV. Not the smartphone-controlled / streaming kind, but using the remote. And scrolling through the handful of channels I added to favorites. I do sometimes stop at a random program (yesterday I just learned that there are venomous beetles in Switzerland!). Sometimes I won't and switch the TV off, and just stare out on the windows.
TV doomscrolling is bad (news channels to the front). A bit less worse than "social media" (scrolling addiction). I kinda think the suggested meta observation (10-10-10) is worth to try.
Piggy backing to comment on:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40559854
How can tech people misunderstand social media ML algorithms so badly....gee, I wonder what could cause that.
Did you learn what is happening inside my mind, in fact, by reading a book, or via some more esoteric approach?
But both are terrible ways to spend your time and bad for your brain.
— Aleister Crowley
The less people take time to educate themselves on the political situation, the less they can participate in democracy, until they opt to vote for a lunatic, pathologically lying convict, because he tells them an age-old hero trope.
The only Defense against manipulation like that is having read different view points on complex societal concerns, shaping your own opinion. I don’t see how that would be possible without reading the news, and I seriously doubt a 19th century occultist is the best bearer of advice on the subject.
I see this meme repeated all the time, but I have my doubts. First of all, approximately no one does it anyway - one would have to take effort finding out sources from opposite ends of political spectrum (vs. "opposite" but really just the same), and then force themselves to read all of them (vs. just the most enjoyable one or two). It's possible as a form of study It's definitely not what's happening when you see people reading the news with their coffee or on the bus.
Secondly, opinions aren't like waves that cancel out. You read a thing in source A and then the opposite of it in source B, it's not like you're left with enlightened lack of opinion. You just expended twice the energy to read twice the amount of lies. Lies which will stay with you and pop into your consciousness when thinking or talking about the topic they pertain to. Human mind has no problem remembering mutually exclusive thoughts, or believing them individually.
This recommendation feels like saying, you need to consume a balanced variety of poisoned foods, so the poisons cancel each other out. How about not touching any of that in the first place?
It's enough to just read a proper newspaper regularly. There will be content written by a variety of people, so you'll automatically be exposed to different opinions, It doesn't need to be the full spectrum, even.
> You just expended twice the energy to read twice the amount of lies
Are you claiming that all news sources publish lies exclusively here…?
Other than that, opinions don't need to cancel each other out. You just need to be aware of a different view on things to even consider that some other viewpoint might resonate with you more. If you only ever heard, say, abortion opponents, their arguments may seem reasonable and sound to you, so much that you don't question their claim to be right; but the moment you get exposed to critical voices, you're in the position to even decide which side's arguments convince you.
If, instead, you opt to just blindfold yourself, you stop participating in democratic processes—which is a civic duty—and let other people decide for you. Every human has beliefs, compassion, morals, a sense of what's right and wrong. If we don't fight (intellectually) for those, we can equally well just drop them altogether.
Even if you bothered to use a spelling corrector, what you wrote is still absolute garbage nonsense writing, just as bad as anything Aleister Crowley ever wrote. But at least he can spell and proofread, though.
PS: Roger Stone is 71 years old, not a teenage boy. And teenage boys can be racist, too. Stop acting like one.
When you remove this element, you get technical reports and scientific papers. If you further do this you lose information.
Otherwise you can summarize everything down to a single sentence.
So what if someone spends a ton of time consuming information you don’t think is useful? It doesn’t affect you. Get off your intellectual high horse and go for a walk.
You have to be delusional to think otherwise. Modern web absolutely makes us more stupid on average. I’m looking forward to studies in 10 years about long term exposure effects of junk platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts.
> So what if someone spends a ton of time consuming information you don’t think is useful?
Because we don’t live in a vacuum? I don’t want to be around erratic, constantly outraged and disinformation fed people. And before you say “well, you don’t have to”, keep in mind that those people hold as much voting power as you, possibly more, because hordes of fanatic will eat whatever shit their influencer overlords will tell them.
> Get off your intellectual high horse and go for a walk.
What exactly makes you so outraged about the article?
I would not rebut with “well, you don’t have to.” I know that we have to. But what is being complained about here is not a new problem enabled by the internet. Disinformation has been around as long as humanity has (see religion). This attitude that “those people” have as much voting power as I do is the kind of thinking that disenfranchised women and non white men. (As an aside, it’s funny that you think voting actually matters and that the populace has a say in anything that goes on in the halls of power).
This type of intellectual exercise is nothing more than mental masturbation: it serves only to make the writer feel good about himself. You can’t force others to value what you value. And you certainly can’t shame them into it by calling them intellectually obese.
> What exactly makes you so outraged about the article?
Don’t worry about me. I don’t feel called out by this article. I’m careful about what information I consume, don’t spend my time on socials or YouTube, and I’m comfortable with my choices. What irks me about this article is that it serves no purpose but to cut other people down for their choices that don’t harm others.
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-wea...
Depends how you use it too. I have trained mine to only show me standup comedy skits. There is no live standup shows in my neck of the woods, but once or twice a month I do get entertainment value out of it that I would not get from other media.