I think that people should at least try to switch from social media/entertainment media to reading high-impact fanfiction including projectlawful and the second reread of HPMOR (idk if a third reread is valuable, I only reread HPMOR once and with a 6 yer gap). Social media might push people closer to burnout while only providing the illusion of being relaxing, by using gradient descent to optimize for whatever combinations of posts keep people coming back. It’s plausibly better to think of your daily slack time as “I will satisfy the valuable parts of my brain” via HPMOR and projectlawful etc. than to think of daily slack time as “I will satisfy the less valuable parts of my brain” like social media, base entertainment, etc.
I find it fairly likely that social media’s algorithms, by optimizing for use-maximization (which is highly measurable, in hours per day) will also induce a state of mind like “what now?” when you stop, or other ways that your routine feels hopelessly doomed or ruined if you don’t fill it with social media. This kind of thing isn’t the devs fault, it’s just that gradient descent finds all kinds of combinations of posts and content that causes the result of keeping people coming back and spending more time on the social media platform, even if it triggers urges in large numbers of weird ways. The best solution is to try several days doing something other than social media, that builds the habit of doing something else and moves your mind OOD relative to what the social media systems are built around.
This seems like one of the biggest bottlenecks to getting more intelligence out of the AI safety community ASAP.
I think that people should at least try to switch from social media/entertainment media to reading high-impact fanfiction including projectlawful and the second reread of HPMOR (idk if a third reread is valuable, I only reread HPMOR once and with a 6 yer gap). Social media might push people closer to burnout while only providing the illusion of being relaxing, by using gradient descent to optimize for whatever combinations of posts keep people coming back. It’s plausibly better to think of your daily slack time as “I will satisfy the valuable parts of my brain” via HPMOR and projectlawful etc. than to think of daily slack time as “I will satisfy the less valuable parts of my brain” like social media, base entertainment, etc.
I find it fairly likely that social media’s algorithms, by optimizing for use-maximization (which is highly measurable, in hours per day) will also induce a state of mind like “what now?” when you stop, or other ways that your routine feels hopelessly doomed or ruined if you don’t fill it with social media. This kind of thing isn’t the devs fault, it’s just that gradient descent finds all kinds of combinations of posts and content that causes the result of keeping people coming back and spending more time on the social media platform, even if it triggers urges in large numbers of weird ways. The best solution is to try several days doing something other than social media, that builds the habit of doing something else and moves your mind OOD relative to what the social media systems are built around.
This seems like one of the biggest bottlenecks to getting more intelligence out of the AI safety community ASAP.