matto

• matto 21 May 2021 14:20 UTC

  8 points

  on: Open and Wel­come Thread—May 2021

  Hello all!

  I’ve been lurking LW and SCC on and off since about 2013, when I stumbled upon the sequences. I got sucked back in and became a daily visitor since the pandemic began. I also started listening to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast and finally read HPMOR and realized that this (LW) is the crowd of people I’d love to hang out with.

  I’m in early 30′s and currently doing SRE work remotely. I like to think that wrangling software has infected me with an appreciation for systems thinking (or vice versa?) and the LW topics that grab my attention the most are those that talk about coordination like the one about the Swiss system or this one about negotiation and Schelling points. Kaj Sotala’s and others’ posts about the mind have been very influential for me as well. I’ll venture out into other topics like AI safety as well, but less often.

  Looking forward to exploring things together!

The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

• matto 22 May 2021 16:46 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

  I don’t disagree, but I don’t know what specifically to object to.

  Thanks for the feedback. Admittedly, and I probably should have included this in the text, I think of these as weak signals about getting closer to a boundary of what is acceptable. I’m not against advertising or people making money off entertainment, but I see the online ad industry as a race to the bottom that will only stop once a larger group of people realize that ads have gone too far.

  Maybe I do disagree with the implied dichotomy that “the web” can only be one thing, and if it’s more ad-supported-entertainment, it has to be less long-form idea exploration and thoughtful discussion.

  This is actually what I am worried about. Right now, the web can be many things. However, by baking advertising into the browser, this could shift the balance toward just one thing.

  I realize my argument could be viewed as slippery slope, but from a different perspective, actions like FLoC could be stake-driving—attempts to move the window of what is acceptable.

  I presume you don’t remember the introduction and popularization of cable TV.

  Nope! I was born too late for that. Growing up, TV for me and my friends was already something slow and boring and full of TV shopping channels.

• matto 22 May 2021 17:01 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

  From what I’ve read, Firefox, Brave, and Safari are also not interested in FLoC either. The community behind Wordpress, which powers ~40% of the worlds websites, is considering treating FLoC as a security concern, too.

• matto 22 May 2021 23:56 UTC

  2 points

  on: Sym­pa­thy for the fer­ry­man of Hades, or why we should keep Trump off Twitter

  I had been thinking of social media as “digital nicotine”, but the metaphor of MMORPG/​casino fills in a large gap in that picture.

  Nicotine is a natural substance that presses certain buttons in our brains that make us crave more of it. Cigarette companies’ whole deal is to figure out the optimal delivery platform (form, size, flavor, etc.) and make money off our brains’ reaction.

  But MMORPGs and casinos, they’re designed by us to be like little theme parks for our brains. Instead of pressing buttons like “pleasure” or “chill”, they press buttons like “family”, “status”, etc. Coupled with instant feedback loops that can optimize the input for each unique user in real-time, it seems to me that social media is on a whole different level than mere nicotine.

• matto 24 May 2021 14:12 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Measure’s comment on: The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

  Yes, technically this would be easy, even simple, to do.

  However, I think the problem would be about FLoC being enabled by default. If a hundred thousand technical users disabled FLoC, that would do nothing for the other 3+ billion users with Chrome enabled (estimating based on Chrome’s 70-80% market share). And the reason why I find that worrying would be why I would be worried if cigarette companies put opium in their products—I would feel that millions of members of society around me would be getting exploited.

• matto 15 Jun 2021 14:19 UTC

  8 points

  on: Avoid News, Part 2: What the Stock Mar­ket Taught Me about News

  I really like the “storyteller” metaphor. Most of the news that I read seems to contain a handful of facts weaved into a work with a plot, characters, etc. One such story that comes to mind is the one about Scott Alexander published by the NYT. While it contains many facts about Scott, the whole piece is contorted into such a weird shape (eg. the hints about alt-right ties) that there’s a taste of fiction to it.

  So my conclusion is that people who really want good information are better off today, but the average person’s information diet is likely getting a bit worse.

  This seems to be a replay of the food situation from the 20th century, when we figured out ways to produce huge quantities of food. The average person did not have the skills to search/​filter in that area of life, which triggered a huge increase in average body weight because of all the food-like substances like fast food. Today, in an age of information abundance, despite having access to more, high quality information, there’s also tons of fast-food-like information that merely captures attention, but doesn’t serve any purpose.

• matto 18 Jun 2021 20:12 UTC

  3 points

  on: Un­bundling Hu­mans, or, Un­bundling Hu­man Creation.

  Thank you for writing this out. Even though I knew about the bundling/​unbundling idea, it would have never struck me as something to apply to human mating. It’s a pretty interesting way of looking at the knobs that are available to us in this domain and trying to figure out potential futures.

  perhaps kids becoming earning machines or cash flow positive, like their 18th century counterparts.

  This reminds me of the recent ACX book review on “How Children Fail” in the sense that, an arrangement like this would give children more autonomy than they have now, which may prove a huge improvement over the education system that tries squish kids into uniformity in some high-modernist ideal.

• matto 16 Jul 2021 14:14 UTC

  3 points

  on: How to Sleep Better

  Good write up. Do you think that by having whoop’s data available, you began nudging yourself toward a different rhythm (even not entirely consciously)?

  I agree with your conclusions. Sleep seems like an obviously easy thing to do, but somehow many people drift away from an optimal equilibrium. I know I did, for a couple of years, until I realized it about a year ago. I began taking sleep supplements (valerian root), which brought instant and welcome relief. However, this didn’t help with the underlying problem, so I couldn’t sleep well if I didn’t take the supplement.

  2-3 months ago, I read some comments on ACX about CBT for insomnia. I obtained “Say Goodnight to Insomnia”, a self-guided CBT course that takes 6 weeks. It begins by going over much of what is written in this post, then the 6 week course starts. By week 3, I was falling asleep without any supplements 4-5 nights a week and waking up rested, as if by miracle.

  I think what helped me was:

  • understanding that my body knows best how much sleep it needs. Before, I was getting anxious about not getting enough sleep, which prevented me from sleeping, which made me more anxious, etc. A vicious cycle. Understanding this somehow made the anxiety go away. This also brought a change of habits—I don’t force myself to sleep, and only sleep when I’m tired.

  • taking sleep hygiene seriously. No screens an hour before bed, adding cardio to my exercise routine, ensuring that the window is open and that the temperature will be just right.

  I didn’t even get to week 4 because right now, I’m doing good enough that I only take the sleeping supplement maybe 1 times a week, usually after a more stressful day.

• matto 19 Jul 2021 14:13 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sam Clarke’s comment on: How to Sleep Better

  I don’t adhere to these guidelines strictly, which helps when they conflict. For example, if I’m tired before my usual bed time, then the “no screen rule” goes out the window because I won’t have trouble sleeping. And when I’m not tired by my usual bed time and haven’t been looking at a screen, then I have plenty of paperbacks to keep me company (or exercise, or cooking, etc.) before I eventually get tired and fall asleep.

  Practically, this means that I don’t use screen after 9pm. I usually fall asleep between 9:30pm and 11:00pm, where the median is around 10:15pm or so. I guess this variance comes from different days, days when I do a lot of exercise or little, days with plenty of sun or just a bit, etc.

So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

• matto 24 Jul 2021 19:06 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: spkoc’s comment on: Covid 7/​22: Er­ror Correction

  I agree with you that social media is an existential problem to our civilization. In my mind, it is as dangerous as climate change, yet taken far less seriously.

  However, I think that the west/​China dichotomy is a false one—there is likely a way to evolve the (western/​democratic) system as it is into one that continues to allow the free flow of information, and at the same time limits harmful information. It seems easy to discount this because social systems take much longer to develop and implement than, say, a new car design. I hope that, given how fast the Internet evolves, we won’t have to wait long for an alternative to appear though.

• matto 25 Jul 2021 2:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

  I’ve seen papers like this: https://​​www.researchgate.net/​​profile/​​Walter-Quattrociocchi/​​publication/​​331936299_Echo_Chambers_on_Facebook/​​links/​​5c93b14b299bf111693e20f4/​​Echo-Chambers-on-Facebook.pdf. However, given the difficulties in testing for their existence, I assign only a weak probability that echo chambers are real enough to affect human behavior.

  Would you mind sharing your studies that they are an overrated issue? I would love to adjust my position.

• matto 27 Jul 2021 2:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

  Thanks for sharing those twitter handles, I’ll check ’em out.

  They found that the overwhelming majority of users were deeply ingrained in either a science community or a conspiracy community;

  Yes, they mention this specifically in how they setup their experiment—they sampled FB groups that were explicitly either about conspiracy theories or science—so their sample is not representative of the larger group.

  I think their main finding is this: “In the discussions here, users show a tendency to seek out and receive information that strengthens their preferred narrative (see the reaction to trolling posts in conspiracy echo chambers) and to reject information that undermines it (see the failure of debunking)”. However, it does seem to me that their method would lead to this finding, like if you go out looking for echo chambers, you will end up finding them, because there are over four billion users on social media.

• matto 27 Jul 2021 2:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

  You laid out the problem and all its sub-problems quiet well.

  I suspect that the only way out is to provide a solution that has all the advantages of e.g. Facebook, without most of the disadvantages.

  I’m writing a post about a potential solution like this that I picked up from reading a paper :). It’s a very interesting space, which I feel doesn’t get a lot of focus because a) most people dont want to build/​program b) most people are satisfied with things as-is and c) the problem space is huge and searching it is hard. But with the malleability of software, I think that once we hit a new, working set of ideas, they will take over as quickly as social media pushed out traditional forums/​mailing lists/​link rings back in the 00′s.

  Facebook is like GMail + instant messenger + web forums, all in one, and requires minimum setup.

  Well put. It’s like Facebook/​Twitter/​etc. are an extra layer above everything else, a “layer 8” in the OSI model, that allows people to completely not care about all the protocols, filesystems, name-spacing schemes, storage requirements that sit underneath it. Just point your browser to this one page and you get it all (no installer, no plug’n’play, no versions/​updates, no fees...).

  Now another question is how to pay for the costs. (...) Then we have the problem of policing content… (...)

  I feel this is very accurate in how it points out that we’re dealing with issues on both the technical layer and the social one. My gut tells me that purely technical solutions like mastodon will never take over because they don’t address any of the social issues like usability, moderation, accountability, etc.. I don’t have a good example of something that would work well on the social layer, but not on a technical one.

  Currently, I place a lot of hope on stuff like the push for decentralization and web3. (I need to read up more about it though as right now these are just utopian ideas in my head). If we were able to get the efficiencies of centralized platform on a decentralized one, then that, I think, would have a good chance of winning in the sense of migrating over hundreds of millions of users. I imagine it would work by allowing users to very precisely price/​pay for what they use, eg. the average user would most likely pay most of their fee for photo/​video storage, while a power use would dedicate most of their fee toward specific features, or even characteristics like uptime. In both cases, they could still enjoy living on a higher level of abstraction than running their own email servers, but they get as much value as the price they’re willing to pay.

• matto 1 Aug 2021 19:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Josephine’s comment on: Josephine’s Shortform

  I’m impressed by how accurately this describes learning complex skills.

  I’m practicing writing and I feel the same way most of the points describe: as if I’m exploring a system of caves without a map, finding bits and pieces of other explorers (sometimes even meeting them), but it’s all walking a complicated, 3d structure and constantly bumping into unknown unknowns. Let me illustrate it this way: about 3 years ago, when I started on this journey, I thought I would read 1-2 books about writing and I’ll be good. Now, I’m standing in sub-cave system #416, taking a hard look at “creativity”/​”new ideas” and chuckling at my younger self who thought that sub-cave system #18 “good sentences” will lead him to the exit.

  And even though I haven’t practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since the pandemic began, I see a lot of similarities there. At first, I thought I just have to practice a move. Then I noticed that there are many small variations depending on my energy level, the opponents size and weight, etc. Then I noticed that I could fake moves to lure my opponent into making mistakes, but I should avoid mistakes myself. Then I noticed that my opponents were better in at some moves than others. Then I noticed that my own build gave me certain advantages and disadvantages. Then I noticed...

  At the end, just before the lockdowns, I learned a lot about humility and began to discard all the “factual knowledge” I got from youtube videos or books and instead began focusing on sets of small details to explore how they worked in different situations. Then, just practiced it over and over until I saw “the thing”.

• matto 5 Aug 2021 13:51 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: ro­hin­mshah’s Shortform

  If you look at my posting history, you’ll see that all posts I’ve made on LW (two!) are negative toward social media and one calls out recommender systems explicitly. This post has made me reconsider some of my beliefs, thank you.

  I realized that, while I have heard Tristan Harris, read The Attention Merchants, and perused other, similar sources, I haven’t looked for studies or data to back it all up. It makes sense on a gut level—that these systems can feed carefully curated information to softly steer a brain toward what the algorithm is optimizing for—but without more solid data, I found I can’t quite tell if this is real or if it’s just “old man yells at cloud.”

  Subjectively, I’ve seen friends and family get sucked into social media and change into more toxic versions of themselves. Or maybe they were always assholes, and social media just lent them a specific, hivemind kind of flavor, which triggered my alarms? Hard to say.

• matto 7 Aug 2021 16:55 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: greylag’s comment on: So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

  That’s a good point. Another way to look at the difference between Facebook and X would be that Facebook/​Twitter/​etc. lean heavily on self-expression. Very little of the content on those sites actually aim to contribute to something, like a dialogue or body of knowledge. I think this is why communities focused around specific goals, say, writers, weight lifters, or rationalists do not do their work over Facebook/​Twitter/​etc. Some might use those to stay in touch, but the serious work gets done on yee old phpbb forums and the like, where self-expression is not the main point.

• matto 13 Aug 2021 3:29 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: greylag’s comment on: So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

  Wow, thanks for those links. I’ve spent a few hours going down the garden/​stream rabbithole. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before—though I’ve seen tools like Roam or the Zettelkasten and such, and of course I’ve read the Vanevar Bush article, but somehow it never occurred to me that maybe we already have working, albeit relatively not so popular, systems that work very differently than Facebook.

A Bet­ter Web is Coming