I recently tried to change some of my habits, and the greatest success was to stop reading Hacker News (and Reddit). Hacker News has this ironic impact on my life, that it gives me pointers to many interesting and potentially useful things, but also consumes all free time I would need to actually use and of those things.
Generally, seems that any system that pushes information to you is harmful. The right way to use resources is on-demand. (With very few exceptions; like if there is another pandemic coming, I want to know.)
The question is how to improve accessing the information on-demand. How to make “intelligent” queries that would not only give me “N latest articles” or “N most upvoted articles” or “N articles containing given keyword”, but some proper combination of “approved by crowd + relevant to my interests”, with a bit of exploration (if something is exceptionally strongly approved by the crowd, and not on my blacklist, show it to me, too).
Switching from consuming Hacker News during the week to exclusively during the weekend has helped me a lot, I now spend substantially less time there and even when I do check it on the weekend, I still somehow keep it reasonably short and it doesn’t take too much time out of my day, plus the urge to check it very often has waned. Once a week seems to be a nice novelty hit and exploration time for consuming Hacker News, so I’ll keep to this restriction on it since it lets me use it better as a tool for finding new and interesting things without that tool causing negative impacts on my life.
I find that knowledge of historical enough significance will be pushed in my direction (e.g. the pandemic) without me seeking it out or reading the news or signing up for newsletter updates, and that’s good enough for me regarding staying informed unless I am specifically following some particular thing closely. But yes, I agree that push systems probably have a net negative impact on individuals and instead of being useful tools to get information from, aren’t. The only exception I think would be push notifications from messaging apps when dealing with time sensitive things e.g. meeting up with a friend and figuring out where to go, meeting a deliveryperson outside to sign for a package, emergency work meeting or issue, etc. On demand is a much better use of resources, because then you can be deliberate about using such tools that allow for accessing whatever resources you want to access. Taking deliberate action is better than not, usually.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you may find Gwern’s Internet Search Tips helpful. I suspect search like you want is still a bit of a hard problem which is why (to choose one example in particular) Google makes so much money from advertising and search. Prediction markets for the efficacy of information provided by X sources could be interesting though.
I recently tried to change some of my habits, and the greatest success was to stop reading Hacker News (and Reddit). Hacker News has this ironic impact on my life, that it gives me pointers to many interesting and potentially useful things, but also consumes all free time I would need to actually use and of those things.
Generally, seems that any system that pushes information to you is harmful. The right way to use resources is on-demand. (With very few exceptions; like if there is another pandemic coming, I want to know.)
The question is how to improve accessing the information on-demand. How to make “intelligent” queries that would not only give me “N latest articles” or “N most upvoted articles” or “N articles containing given keyword”, but some proper combination of “approved by crowd + relevant to my interests”, with a bit of exploration (if something is exceptionally strongly approved by the crowd, and not on my blacklist, show it to me, too).
Switching from consuming Hacker News during the week to exclusively during the weekend has helped me a lot, I now spend substantially less time there and even when I do check it on the weekend, I still somehow keep it reasonably short and it doesn’t take too much time out of my day, plus the urge to check it very often has waned. Once a week seems to be a nice novelty hit and exploration time for consuming Hacker News, so I’ll keep to this restriction on it since it lets me use it better as a tool for finding new and interesting things without that tool causing negative impacts on my life.
I find that knowledge of historical enough significance will be pushed in my direction (e.g. the pandemic) without me seeking it out or reading the news or signing up for newsletter updates, and that’s good enough for me regarding staying informed unless I am specifically following some particular thing closely. But yes, I agree that push systems probably have a net negative impact on individuals and instead of being useful tools to get information from, aren’t. The only exception I think would be push notifications from messaging apps when dealing with time sensitive things e.g. meeting up with a friend and figuring out where to go, meeting a deliveryperson outside to sign for a package, emergency work meeting or issue, etc. On demand is a much better use of resources, because then you can be deliberate about using such tools that allow for accessing whatever resources you want to access. Taking deliberate action is better than not, usually.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you may find Gwern’s Internet Search Tips helpful. I suspect search like you want is still a bit of a hard problem which is why (to choose one example in particular) Google makes so much money from advertising and search. Prediction markets for the efficacy of information provided by X sources could be interesting though.