15 chunks · 11 episodes
... They might not have a cognitive immune system to protect against informational junk food. They never had a situation where there wasn't a constant stream of hyper-interesting information.
...ful creative tool since the internet and using it to... serve more personalized junk food? I think they're a sloppy party trick that we'll look back on with a mixture of embarrassment and regret.
...s, like AlphaGo being able to be beaten by middling players. The reason we like junk food is also Goodhart's Law. Evolution cheated with a good enough heuristic that worked well in a high friction environment. But then the environment opti...
We're constantly consuming junk food software. As everything centralized it became all junk food all the time. As the Cookie Monster would say, junk food is a sometimes food. In modern s...
"Revealed preferences" show that we like junk food, slop, and don't care about privacy. That's what our lizard brains want, not what our higher brains want. That is, it's not what we want to want. At ...
...yper-engaging. Things that keep people drawn in and addicted. The equivalent of junk food… or an addictive drug.
...t of engagement-maxing, and tends to give you content that is the equivalent of junk food. But self-distributing content that aligns with your aspirations could be a net positive. Self-distributing, aspirational content. Imagine self-distr...
...hing is a first order phenomenon. Its healthiness is a second order phenomenon. Junk food always tastes good automatically and quickly, but your awareness that it's bad for you takes focus and that awareness can come and go easily.
Genuine resonance is not "ohh this tastes good!" You can get that in junk food. It's "oh this tastes good" and also tomorrow you say "I feel good that I did that". You need both. Junk food gives you only the former. Vegetables g...
...tatistics. But it's impossible to distinguish between truly resonant things and junk food in a quantitative way. Our revealed preferences can't distinguish between the two.
... Superficial appearances of what matters, but without substances. Performative. Junk food. Not resonant, authentic, or real.
...s in the uncanny valley of friendship. An eager servant who feeds you emotional junk food, knows your deepest secrets, and subtly optimizes for a multinational corporation's engagement metrics.[gh] "Parasocial" captured something important...
Today we're all in a one-size-fits-none cafeteria, served the same bland junk food. Software should be a digital meal that is bespoke to us. Healthy, nourishing. Software that nourishes our souls.
...thy for you. Aligned with your interests. Today's software is unhealthy for us. Junk food. Optimized to make us salivate and gorge. "Have you seen this terrifying but captivating meme? What about this one? … " Organic software would be hea...
... magnitude more potent than the stimuli we evolved for. Examples include modern junk food and also our informational junk food. Capitalism is great for giving users what they want, not what they want to want. Why is there an obesity epidem...