In a personal demonstration of the power of posting this week, I ventured into r/neoliberal and left a half-thought-out reply about Chapo that got voted to +100 and then a slightly more thought out reply about Larry Summers' career that made a mod so angry they permabanned me.
"We’ve not even begun to figure out what the ramifications of all this are. I can’t pretend to have the final answer on why exactly we’re so addicted to posting, or what the consequences will be for our culture and our politics. And it’s too large a topic to neatly summarize in a conclusion paragraph. But it’s what I want to explore with the launch of Infinite Scroll, and if you’re as interested in this as I am I hope you’ll subscribe."
I agree with you on not knowing the ramifications of the internet and posting culture will be. I think a lot about something I once heard Sam Harris (other issues aside) say, which was that we are trying to run 21st century software on Stone Age hardware, in terms of our brains not knowing how to cope with the internet.
When I think about the current and future AI adnvancements, I worry about the destruction of humanity and all that, but mostly I get kind of worried about how, like, confusing and disorienting it might be. We already do a shit job at sorting fact from fiction, and that's with current levels of distraction. I was on TikTok for one calendar month before I forced myself off the app because I could feel it eating my attention span alive.
I'm definitely interested in the feeling of 'My attention span is gone' - I feel this sometimes as well, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame it on tech. Probably worth a deeper dive.
Checkout the books Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first has lots of science the second adds some social commentary (albeit a bit partisan). Together they give lots of food for thought
Consider how the information surface of, say, a town has changed from the invention of radio to the full rollout of the internet. Prior to mass media, information was trapped in linearly scaling flows, traveling over roads and rivers to enter a location. Now it travels more or less freely in the 2.5D space we live in, resulting in a multiplicative stepup in the rate at which information crosses more or less any boundary.
That's the difference, I think - we've moved from a context of information scarcity to one of information saturation, and we don't quite know how to handle it or what a reasonable perspective looks like. I actually think the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics you've brought up a couple of times is a sort of half-formed attempt at dealing with this: it is flatly impossible to deal with every moral crisis in the world. Accepting this, we try to stop blaming people for failing to solve problems they are distant from. But without more refinement, we still end up blaming people for accidentally finding themselves in proximity to a problem and not having a perfect solution ready to go.
In a personal demonstration of the power of posting this week, I ventured into r/neoliberal and left a half-thought-out reply about Chapo that got voted to +100 and then a slightly more thought out reply about Larry Summers' career that made a mod so angry they permabanned me.
The moral here may be to use more alts.
haha this completely tracks
I landed here from your Balaji’s post https://open.substack.com/pub/infinitescroll/p/how-to-post-your-way-to-a-million?r=2x1rp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post . Both great. Subscribed 🙋♂️
"We’ve not even begun to figure out what the ramifications of all this are. I can’t pretend to have the final answer on why exactly we’re so addicted to posting, or what the consequences will be for our culture and our politics. And it’s too large a topic to neatly summarize in a conclusion paragraph. But it’s what I want to explore with the launch of Infinite Scroll, and if you’re as interested in this as I am I hope you’ll subscribe."
I agree with you on not knowing the ramifications of the internet and posting culture will be. I think a lot about something I once heard Sam Harris (other issues aside) say, which was that we are trying to run 21st century software on Stone Age hardware, in terms of our brains not knowing how to cope with the internet.
When I think about the current and future AI adnvancements, I worry about the destruction of humanity and all that, but mostly I get kind of worried about how, like, confusing and disorienting it might be. We already do a shit job at sorting fact from fiction, and that's with current levels of distraction. I was on TikTok for one calendar month before I forced myself off the app because I could feel it eating my attention span alive.
I'm definitely interested in the feeling of 'My attention span is gone' - I feel this sometimes as well, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame it on tech. Probably worth a deeper dive.
Checkout the books Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first has lots of science the second adds some social commentary (albeit a bit partisan). Together they give lots of food for thought
Thanks for the suggestions, will check these out!
Consider how the information surface of, say, a town has changed from the invention of radio to the full rollout of the internet. Prior to mass media, information was trapped in linearly scaling flows, traveling over roads and rivers to enter a location. Now it travels more or less freely in the 2.5D space we live in, resulting in a multiplicative stepup in the rate at which information crosses more or less any boundary.
That's the difference, I think - we've moved from a context of information scarcity to one of information saturation, and we don't quite know how to handle it or what a reasonable perspective looks like. I actually think the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics you've brought up a couple of times is a sort of half-formed attempt at dealing with this: it is flatly impossible to deal with every moral crisis in the world. Accepting this, we try to stop blaming people for failing to solve problems they are distant from. But without more refinement, we still end up blaming people for accidentally finding themselves in proximity to a problem and not having a perfect solution ready to go.
I do think this is key - the scale of modern social media makes normal social pressures turbocharged, for both better or worse.