Garbage in, garbage out
The art of drinking from a firehose
Well, after last post, I think I am now a Maria Popova superfan. Her intellectual curiosity and focus on wellbeing had such an impact on me that I’ve spent the last few days wondering how it’s possible. Firstly, how could I not have known about her work? But also, how can a few videos and articles be such a potent source of inspiration?
I've noticed an undeniable link between the media I consume, the topics I ponder, the conversations I have, the things I write and the way I feel. I suppose media is what makes up much of my "information diet", the total set of influences on my thinking and day-to-day operation1.
Beyond the medium of transmission, or even the author, each piece of media we engage with leaves a specific lasting impact on us. Not just in the moment but echoing through our days, weeks and lives. I think this is actually very obvious, of course we are influenced by media, but it’s easy to forget that this applies to everything we encounter.
I started today lazily watching Max Cooper, Anderson Paak and Nathaniel Drew videos. Seeing the creative talent, passion and curiosity of these artists reliably fosters the same feeling within me. None of this is what you’d traditionally call “educational” or “productive” content, but it plays a critical role in my thinking process. I imagine other people would respond quite differently and I believe that, much like actual diet and nutrition, the nutritional classification of media2 goes far beyond “good” vs “bad”.
Nutrition science is a field known for disagreement, and yet, we still know far more about the effects of food on our bodies than information on our minds. In fairness, this is difficult terrain for science to traverse. Statistical studies rely on isolating and controlling variables to understand specific relationships, but both food and information are highly context sensitive in nature3. Is fat bad? Well, what’ve you eaten today? This week? This month? What kind of fat? Do you exercise? We often need more context than we can practically afford to get. Then there’s the added complication of self-control (or the lack of it). Humans are extremely crafty when it comes to eating junk food, or consuming any other superstimulus4.
In the “difficult to use responsibly” tier list I would put media right up there with sugar and cigarettes. I seems it’s only getting more difficult to consume a balanced information diet as the recommendation systems powering social media and entertainment platforms continue to improve. When there’s nothing but crap on the menu it’s easy to conclude that “what I need right now is definitely more crap!” While it seems there is some resistance with more than 30% of people using an adblocker, the recently added “Play Something” button on Netflix shows the macro trend.
Sadly this nuance, along with any nuance, is absent from media discourse. The discussion quickly devolves into entire websites or formats being "garbage" and condescending judgements about those who use them. There is boundless fascinating content on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and even 4chan5... There's just a lot of other stuff too. We have access to exponentially more information than every human that lived before us but a growing proportion of it is derivative and incoherent noise.
Drinking from the internet firehose is messy but I’ve learned so much that it seems well-worth it. Nothing beats the rush of arriving in a corner of the internet that only a (comparatively) few people have seen. These are precious flecks of gold in the stream, offering alternative insights that lowest-common-denominator content just can’t. I’ve been seeking out niche content for as long as I’ve been using the internet and it’s far more difficult today than 5 or 10 years ago. Despite training YouTube’s recommendation algorithm on hundreds of exercise videos I still get my tips from chance conversations at the gym.
This honestly saddens me, these nuggets of information accrue over a lifetime and are so easy to miss out on. As I see it algorithmic recommendations are at the centre of the issue, making it near-impossible to escape from the junk-media Sarlacc pit once you fall in. These systems have learned to maximise engagement by preying on our base desires in radically effective ways. It’s not that defending against psychological manipulation is a new problem for humans but that the tools employed today are on pace to overpower us, if they haven’t already.
As a supposed “technologist” I can’t help but feel that we should be using technology to, oh I don’t know, help us? That seems better than spending billions of dollars and CPU cycles on novel methods to manipulate each other. I firmly believe that our tools should serve our wellbeing and while it could be argued that we act against our own wellbeing often, our tools should still fall in line to support our better nature.
In his latest podcast episode Cal Newport notes the significance of YouTube as the second most common source of online news for American adults (globally it has over 2.6 billion daily users). I would argue, without evidence, that this extends beyond news and into information more broadly. This is a staggering powerful resource and I feel we might be… Squandering it?
Personally I have an endless appetite for information6. Articles, books, podcasts, memes, tweets, academic papers, artworks - I will naturally follow my curiosity wherever it takes me. And yet, I often find myself stuck. I know what topic I'd like to learn about but have no idea where I can find a trustworthy jumping off point.
I routinely force my YouTube recommendations to recalibrate by breaking my patterns. I've reset my entire watch history multiple times and I have multiple accounts I juggle. Still, with time, it settles back into a local junk-media minima. I'm particularly frustrated by this because my thinking process relies on drawing from radically disparate sources to find new ideas. When my information diet lacks variety I feel as if I slip into a zombified state, subsisting on what scraps the ML models throw me.
Despite the proliferation of algorithmic recommendations across social media we are still in the infancy of actually solving the discovery problem. Worse, financial incentives select against solving this problem so long as engagement remains the holy metric of the internet7. Perhaps that will change, but surely there is a way to move beyond today’s recommendation systems without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Funnily enough this line of thought extends back to my 2015 university thesis project on using recommendation systems to structure online education. I think I have a few more ideas to try today than I did back then…
Until next time,
✌️ Ben
Stuff I’ve been thinking about
🎥 Jack Kornfield with Tim Ferris
🎥 Lex Fridman is Dangerous by Styrofoam Bonfire
📄 Entitlement issues… by Neil Gaiman
📄 The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity by Maria Popova
🎶 Stuck In The Middle by Greentea Peng
🎤 The Light of the Mind, David Chalmers with Sam Harris
I believe this is a very Chomsky-inspired idea, but I’ve never read anything by him
What's the keto equivalent of an information diet? 100% Joe Rogan clips I guess
This is why recommendations of books, articles etc. can be so hit and miss, a single fact can be the missing link for one person but be obvious to another
TV, music, podcasts, audiobooks, drugs (including alcohol and caffeine), extreme sports, shopping, videogames…
I know this seems hard to believe, but there’s anthropological value in studying the discourse, surely?
And argument, as any of my close friends will tell you
Which will be true unless we can move past our current implementation of advertising and monetisation