Comment by nathanallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanallen | Hacker News Reader

I think we can add a few more genres to our list...

Popularizations

  - The Paradox of Choice
  - The Long Tail
  - The Shallows
  - Freakonomics
  - Where Good Ideas Come From

Podcasts

  - This American Life
  - Freakonomics Radio
  - 99 Percent Invisible
  - Stuff You Should Know

Aggregators

  - Hacker News

I'm being tongue in cheek: I grant you there's excellent content, above, but I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the following: WHO consumes this kind of content, and WHY do we/they/I find it quote-un-quote "interesting"? I distinctly remember a car trip I had recently in which I realized, after about 10 minutes of talking to the passengers, that we were all regurgitating podcasts! It felt genuine, but we weren't adding anything much of our own in the mix. Is it a class thing, a source of social cachet? What are we trying to signal to each other when we share it?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the smarter we get, the more gullible we are. That the world can be "counter intuitive" and that we feel good about ourselves and our intellects when we recognize this superficial fact, seems all very strange. Like a slight of hand. Come to think of it, there's a great TED talk about a pick-pocket...

Reminds me a bit of this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JLWQEuz2gA ("Did You Read It?")

I've started noticing more and more that a shockingly large amount of conversations are little more than continuous references to things both me and my conversational partner have read, seen or heard. With my brothers it's Reddit. With my fellow coders it's HN. With my college friends it's a grab-bag of New Yorker, NYTimes, Instapaper / Longreads articles, and our national 'top publications'. Whichever one has recently published a particularly thoughtful (or really, viral) article.

Sometimes I find myself in a conversation like this with multiple, and it makes me feel like I'm in a Family Guy episode (even weirder: referring to a family guy joke that is itself only funny because it's a reference).

I've started avoiding these conversations, because it's just too easy to get stuck in a 'small-talk loop' that just goes on and on. I think that says something about the subject matter, because I noticed that when discussing, say, a book we've read or a lengthy documentary, we inevitably end up in a fascinating conversation about the subject matter.

(another solution, I've found, is to pretend that I didn't also read/watch x, and get someone to explain and reason about it.)

I remember the exact moment when I decided to stop listening to Freakonomics Radio. It was when I looked down at my phone and saw the next podcast in my feed was titled "Are Gay Men Really Rich?".

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