> the brain treats information as a reward in itself; it doesn't matter whether the info is accurate or useful, the brain will still crave it and feel satisfied after consuming it
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.
I agree and I think if there are any hazards to modern information landscape it's kind of 2 fold (that I can think of) 1) the brain likes simple generalized information/models more than specific information and 2) the brain likes information that confirms our existing beliefs more than staying in a gray area where it's not sure what information is true or not.
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.
I love conspiracy theories. Delectible little mixtures of fiction and non fiction with lots of individual parts to be analysed. Useless information but fun to think about... like a video game. My favourite is bigfoot being an interdimensional being that communicates via infrasonics.
I think the essay is really speaking to a particular type of person, one whom is described in Tyler Cowen's book The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. This sort of person is probably reasonably common on HN (and that help explain the upvotes for the essay) but not super common in the broader and larger population.
The real kind of underlying question is about how to be most effective.
I believe that's generally referred to as the "assumed similarity bias", and does appear to be what's going on here.
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.
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.
> If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like 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).
Nothing is stopping you from putting a 10-second webm in that instruction manual, and has the advantage that you're not selling your soul to a company that probably hates you.
I feel the same, especially since I've actively avoided TikTok after first trying it out shortly after the Musical.ly rebrand.
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.
Slightly tangential - there's this quote I've been thinking of: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
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 adaquate at programming and able to pick up IT stuff quickly got me a job, and eventually, a really good, well paid job. That put me in a new house.
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
There are some places online where I have to timebox and force myself to stop consuming information. Otherwise I end up mentally draining myself. YouTube is one of those places and it does a really good job with the video recommendations. I wouldn't even call the content low quality or inaccurate. There's just too much that gets me interested.
For me, what usually happens is that I try to look for music to get into the zone when writing code, but then see an interesting video on the homepage (they’re usually educational like stuff from Veritasium or Wendover) and get sucked into watching something that is useful in some sense, but that I don’t have time for.
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'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.
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.
Absolutely. The only place I get videos from is from my home page. I use an extension (Unhook) to remove the side recommendations and end cards, otherwise I'd never be able to finish.
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.
The trap is that the brain power required to consume the video is very low, due to the pressure to make content which the masses can consume.
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.
But I think that's where learning begins. The most-likely point of failure in learning is motivation. Getting somebody interested with bite-sized information can bait a person to go further without them using up much motivation.
You're not going to learn every topic you hear about, but you might learn some.
I mean, I understand that you can't usually get a deep understanding of a topic through a youtube video. Sometimes when I watch math videos I'm surprised by the density of the information. Things that I studied in college that took practice, exploration, and grappling will get a 30 second explanation.
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.
It sounds like you found a happy place where your mind can get infinitely engaged and you can get back to it whenever needed ?
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.
I sort of feel this. I’m not 100% sure on the analogy. Obesity is bad, of course because it makes your life more difficult, but also due to the negative feedback loop. It’s hard to start exercising if you are already in bad health.
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…
In the end if reading content, especially content that is emotionally evocative, does not initiate some sort of change in action or thinking, it is useless.
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.
The difference is that when you have a steady stream of political information you're more likely to pick up lies and misdirections. Politicians are pretty good at glossing over mistakes, especially if they happen over topics that aren't salacious. If you hadn't paid any attention to politics over the past 15 years and only looked at it now you wouldn't know about things like the Snowden leaks.
For me, it's not just social media but also Hacker News.
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?
FOMO and curiosity are just different sides of the same coin for me.
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.
I like this, this is probably a simple solution that could help with the problem that GP (and I) have with opening up many many tabs at once.
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.
Since I feel the same, and my habits are really similar to yours (I'm forcing myself to read more articles compared to when I used reddit), I want to comment something I felt lacked in the article analysis.
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
I think the article gets the incentives a little wrong.
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.
> 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.
Certainly not for most people. Everyone I know shares images and watches reels on Instagram, nothing else.
The author is just talking about the usual problems of social media.
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]
The answer is not to consider clickbait more deeply before devouring it, or take a future historical perspective on the nourishment value of every click you take. That's all priced in, and nostalgia won't help you. You need to break the cycle by training yourself to eschew all mystery, that is, be ready to change activities despite the titillating promise of information resolution to come. So watch half a good movie, read half an enticing article or status update and discard the rest on purpose, practice dragging yourself away at the most inopportune time to test your resolve - publishers can not derive benefit from you increasing your resolve without them.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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)
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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 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