It is exhausting. I get bombarded daily by a deluge of hustle culture paraphernalia. Start a side hustle. Monetize your hobbies. FIRE by 30 (I'm too late for that). Build the next big thing. Optimize your life. 10x your productivity.
Rather than inspiring, I find this content draining and anxiety-inducing. Instead of materially improving my life, it makes me feel inadequate compared to more successful people.
I'm becoming better at blocking and ignoring this content but there is still a long way to go.
Social media FIRE content has become very weird. It started as an interesting take on lifestyle choices and personal finance education, but influencers took it and ran it through the social media optimization play book. Now a lot of it is hyper optimized to maximize clicks with exaggerated scenarios that make you wonder how they’re making claims (Retire by 30? I must read this article to understand how…)
The outcomes are also increasingly weird. People are quickly realizing that, no, retiring by 30 (or 35, or 40) isn’t going to happen for most people without extreme reduction of expenses. So then it becomes a weird game of minimizing expenses to an extreme degree to make their FIRE spreadsheets look better. What they don’t realize is that while it’s easy to go 1 or 2 years without buying new clothes or 5-10 years without buying a new car or computer, you can’t use those short sampling periods to estimate your expenses for the rest of your life.
I stopped reading FIRE blogs after seeing several stories from people who thought they had FIRE retired at a young age, only to discover years later that it wasn’t what they wanted or that their expenses were higher than expected, setting them on a path to failure. One particularly sad story involved a guy who FIREd with his girlfriend (or maybe wife?), but later she decided that she didn’t want to live an austere, childless lifestyle forever. They split up, and without combining housing and expenses he couldn’t afford to be retired any more. Now he had to rejoin the workforce having spent years doing nothing and letting his skills fall behind. It was a particularly sad story despite having done everything “right”.
> later she decided that she didn’t want to live an austere, childless lifestyle forever. They split up, and without combining housing and expenses he couldn’t afford to be retired any more.
My partner and I are both DINKs working in tech. I did the math and said "hey we could retire by 30 if we cut our expenses and changed our habits" (or other extreme age). The response I got was "I like the nice things we buy and do and thats worth working longer. When I'm sick of working, we can do this math again".
I think everyone should do the math, and understand how their finances interplay with future planning, because you may discover you can retire at 30 with changes, but you also may discover that you can't retire ever without changes.
I think important part of these calculations is answering question “am I free?”.
It should most likely not be taken to extreme like retire at 30.
But for me it is answering question if I can quit job on the spot and don’t worry. Other question if I can afford health care in case of family tragedy that will require years of rehabilitation.
If having nice things is taking away my freedom and would put me in high stress situation - I don’t want nice things.
Having FIRE kind of money in bank makes life easier even if you still want to work.
If you don't mind me asking, what all parameters go into the math and what all do you account for? For context; I'm 23, just turning 24, just started working full-time at a well paying job, so have been recently exposed to a lot of things that I need to do in order to "adult" per se; taxes, insurance, etc. Would be really grateful to have some light shed on this great unknown.
This topic could literally fill a university library with prose, so this comment is just a tip of what to consider... I'm just going to try and give you pointers to search for on your own and things to consider which maybe a 23yo wouldn't normally consider. Oh, and don't feel bad if you can't afford or plan everything today, you're just at the start of a great and evolving journey.
At a super high level, retirement is just living off savings until you die or the pool of money dies. The goal is for the money to outlive your spending. Realistically, you'll probably invest that money (401k, etc) so it should be "growing" even as you draw it down. The goal most people aspire to is to have the same "income" in retirement as you did working, by having so much savings that the rate you withdraw is equal to your old salary. Thats hard to do, and when you retire you may need less money, but it's a useful goal. There are a ton of "retirement calculators" [0] that you can plug in your financial situation into and it'll output useful info... eg. if a 23yo makes 100k a year, and save 1K a month, you'll have 3.7M at age 67, but you need ~4M to "make" 100k a year for the rest of your life. I've found each calculator online makes different assumptions about stock market returns, inflation, etc, so play with a few or do some math manually. I think these calculators area great sanity check and first stop for any long-term financial plan. More concretely, you'll hear about the 4% rule - you'll be unlikely to run out of money if you only withdraw 4% a year from a pool of invested money. So if you want to retire early with an $X/yr salary, you'll need to save 25X that amount. If you're comfortable dying broke (you can't take it with you!) then you can retire with less money, but you should when it would theoretically run out.
This should give you a basic idea of your savings rate for retirement. It's just a start, but you're young so you can improve it with age as you understand your lifestyle and career, and your financials change. Oh and my advice is get as close to maxing out a 401k as possible. Its tax-advantaged, so you'll have more money than if you paid taxes on it, and since there is a yearly limit, in later years you'll wish you put more in earlier.
Beyond retirement, you'll have other expenses in life (new cars, houses, kids, weddings, etc). You should vaguely understand those costs even if you don't know which ones you'll incur and when. Weddings are expensive if you ever wish to marry (avg wedding in the US is $20k). Children are expensive too - even getting a child can be expensive if you're not able to do it "naturally" - IVF can be $25k+. At 23 you may not know if you'll want a kid or if you'll have medical trouble, but the scale of these costs would have blown away 23yo me. Then there's all the obvious childcare costs... The point is there are a lot of life milestones that a 23yo may not be thinking about but a 33yo or 43yo may wish the 23yo started planning for, so you'll want to consider saving for more than just retirement. Oh, and on top of this save for a bad day, whether thats getting laid off, or a car accident, or a sudden death, or whatever.
Thats basically it for a high-level planning - understand what your vague costs are across your life, and do the math to understand how long it'll take to save for them. You can do further optimizations for taxes, and consider the distribution of funds, or optimize the account costs structures or a million other things. First, learn the big-picture income/saving/spending trends in your life... premature optimization and all that. Personally, I think of everything in terms of the 4% rule - what can my net worth get me in terms of income via the 4% rule - eg. every 25k saved is 1k a year in forever-income.
> Weddings are expensive if you ever wish to marry (avg wedding in the US is $20k).
Weddings are usually much less expensive. Average cost is misleading; median is more representative and much lower. Average 2020 wedding cost was 19k - 27k, while median cost was 11k. This reflects a few couples spending drastically more than average, and most couples spending less [1].
Also, wedding costs can be adjusted a lot. Unlike childcare costs, which are fairly inelastic, weddings can be much more easily tailored to lower cost. Fewer guests, outside venue, etc. -- these factors can be adjusted without life changes.
My wedding cost 5k in 2014. We had 15 guests -- parents, grandparent, siblings, and significant others. Ceremony was in a nice park, reception was dinner and drinks in a reserved section of a high-end restaurant in a metropolitan downtown.
> Children are expensive too
To clarify for the young: children are _much_ more expensive than weddings. It's like an expensive wedding every year. In my opinion, minimizing this cost while still having children is a very worthwhile effort in life planning for a 23 year old.
Consider a common scenario: childcare in or near a major city that would allow a dual-income household to work 9 AM - 5 PM with commute times factored in. In my experience, that's $15k - $30k per year, _per child_ [2]. Nanny care substantially minimizes marginal per-child cost for > 1 child, but still costs 25k - 40k per year.
Children are worth it! But do plan. Living near parents that are willing and able to help with childcare can greatly reduce costs. Choosing employers or careers that offer flexible or non-9-5 hours can also be a big help.
> Consider a common scenario: childcare in or near a major city that would allow a dual-income household to work 9 AM - 5 PM with commute times factored in. In my experience, that's $15k - $30k per year, _per child_ [2]. Nanny care substantially minimizes marginal per-child cost for > 1 child, but still costs 25k - 40k per year.
This is true, but some times when I talk to young people about children they imagine these costs extending forever. Childcare is an expensive, albeit temporary, expense.
It helps to map out which expenses would be incurred in which years in a spreadsheet. For many, childcare might come down to effectively consuming most or all of one spouse’s after-tax income for a few years, but maintaining career continuity can be worth it.
As I get older, I’m also seeing more of my friends decide that one of them will become a stay at home parent - and ending up happier because of it. I never would have guessed I’d see some of these people voluntarily choose to give up their lucrative careers to stay home with the kids, but then I look and see that they’re happier and less stressed than I am
> Childcare is an expensive, albeit temporary, expense.
It's $15-40k per year for 5-6 years, often per child. Consider 2 children born 3 years apart with no non-nuclear family childcare help, which means 8-9 years of 9 AM - 5 PM childcare needed for at least 1 child.
With a nanny in or near a big city at $25-40k per year, that's $200-400k total. With a childcare center in same scenario, it's likely similar in total cost, albeit with (to your later point) spreadsheet-worthy complexity.
This is great advice, but one more thing to remember is that $100,000 today is not the same as $100,000 in 30 years. It’ll be closer to half that if inflation reverts to the mean. Most calculators will factor inflation in (such as the one linked), but definitely worth considering it when planning your savings target.
You can get drowned in a lot of information on this, but the fundamental part of the typical advice (not advice in the more official financial sense) is this:
If you are able to save nothing for retirement, you can never retire. You'll never build up any savings.
If you are able to put away literally everything you earn, you already can retire - your expenses are already covered.
In between those is not a linear scale (as it goes from 0 to infinity). As you setup a life where you are able to save more of your income you do two things:
1. You are able to save more and you get to your target figure faster
2. You need to save less because your lifestyle requires less money
Those combine very powerfully. This can be impacted heavily if you earn well when you're younger because as you invest compound interest makes a big difference over time. Investing in boring index funds (I mentally categorise this as a broad bet on capitalism) and continuing until you have about 25-35x your annual expenses (depends on your risk, there's loads on this) is the overall picture.
To save me redoing the maths, assuming 5% return after inflation and 25x your expenses, saving 10% of your income means working for 51 years, 25% of your income means working for 32 years, 50% means 17 years, and 75% just 7 years. [0]
Before I get the usual responses "but I like nice things" - the point is being deliberate about your spending and your goals. I am in a very fortunate position with my income (as many of us techies are on this site) and could spend a lot more. I would get significantly diminishing returns for spending more however, and it would come at a cost of working more and spending less time with my loved ones.
"ah but you can die any time why live a life of cold beans from the can" - the idea that I can die earlier strongly suggests to me I want to be in a position where I don't need my job earlier - to have more time retired rather than dying at my desk. Also the point is to build a life around things I actually value, not avoiding spending altogether.
"I like my job" - great! Unless you'd work for free, there is something else you'd rather do. Before you're FI you also gain huge security. FI is just "I could walk away from this job and be fine forever" but before then you hit "I would be fine for a month" then a year, then 10 years, 20, etc. Having a decade of runway makes shaky job markets significantly less scary.
Build the life you want to live, and save for it. Spend deliberately on things that you value. If that's cars, find the best way of spending your money to have the most fun with them (a cheaper daily driver and regular track days might be more fun and cheaper than a car a few models up).
I'd check out the subreddits and the sidebars for the standard advice in the personalfinance and financial independence.
The FI subreddit has good advice https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ again check the sidebar for the must reads and key things there. Lots of the advice, particularly for someone your age, should be very generic.
The biggest thing with FIRE is that they very rarely/almost never account for the expenses increasing over time, and they never account for the fact that you will have multiple emergencies in your lifetime. Someone is going to break something and need an ER trip, a stoke scare, a heart attack scare, a relative is dying, etc.
> (Retire by 30? I must read this article to understand how…)
I've met a few such people and unsurprisingly none of them did it by following such advice.
It was always a combination of talent, circumstances and willingness to take huge risks. Not everyone has that and not everyone actually achieves this goal even when they do.
"I feel like I'm struggling to be able to retire comfortably by retirement age despite feeling that I'm well ahead of a number of my peers."
Same here. I don't know how most people will be able to support themselves at retirement age. I feel like there will be a massive collapse of the system.
In France, there were massive protests and dissension that threatened to change the party in power, because they raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. (I believe they did raise it nonetheless). The age at which you get a government benefit sufficient for many people to live comfortably.
In the USA, they keep raising the social security age, doing it so only effects future people who reach it -- currently I believe it is 67. They (republican-backed proposals in congress) are currently talking about pushing it to 70. And will only give you enough to live very precariously and thriftily anyway. (They're also talking about pushing back medicare eligibility age).
The USA is really not a great place to live unless you are very wealthy. But HN definitely has a higher percentage of very wealthy people than the population at large.
And then I hear that workers in China get one day off a month and companies will continue to talk about international competition...
Without reintroducing tariffs (I'm based in Australia) to protect working conditions, and widespread protest at how poor median conditions are getting I don't see how this situation reverses.
I'd love to see the logic of financial class applied back at them to at least reduce the number of direct votes they have at elections.
> Most people in the United States get 10 days or less annual leave.
After one year of service, the median is in 10-14 day range for vacation; the majority get 10 days or more, and only 39% get less. And this gets better with longer service.
It isn't "capitalism" it's the beginning of the end of the baby-boomers' Ponzi-schema economy. The handful of billionaires who get all the press have absolutely nothing on the trillions that have been transferred into the pockets of this generation.
Property taxes are nothing compared to health insurance, though.
I’d totally be living in a backwater doing far less work if not for needing $20K / year for health insurance for my family (and $10K on in reserve for my “out of pocket maximum”).
I'm not clear on how it's not relevant--Wouldn't you need some money for insurance no matter what?
I remember glancing at the medicaid qualifications for a friend and being stunned that you only qualify if you have less than $2k in assets, so I don't think that's a sustainable method for off-grid living assuming you have a house/cash reserve/whatever.
Maybe not the rest of the world, but certainly the developed world. Hell, even some Eastern European countries have both lower taxes and better health outcomes (socialized healthcare) than America.
Medical mistakes in hospitals sits at #3 on the list of 'things that kill people prematurely'. [0] Note that's from 2016, and it doesn't appear the CDC has updated their reporting methods.
The problem with this rose tinted pastoral view is that you (likely) have zero experience in agriculture, so this just isn't a realistic goal. Not to mention that small farms are basically razor thin in terms of profit margins.
Agriculture has lots of “inside knowledge” which gets passed onto next generation. You need to intern first with another farmer. Ironically, Jeremy Clarkson is doing exactly right this time.
Large scale agribusiness is already 100% tech solutions. This makes getting into the field and gaining experience harder, not easier. Even small scale farming requires a huge amount of tacit knowledge that can only be gained by doing.
What are you talking about? "In 2020, family farms accounted for 98% of total farms and 87% of total production. 89% of those farms were small family farms"[1].
“Likewise, the share of the value of production on small family farms declined from 26% to 20%.”
This and other resources keep pointing out that large scale family farms which are corporations at that point are nearly half. Then non family farms are another fraction like 20%-ish. Then not all of the “families” owning the farms even farm their own land. That’s only 51% of farmers doing that full time.
So 40%+ are landlords. Adam Smith the father of capitalism and Karl Marx and Engels all believed landlords are unethical and antithetical to capitalism or any economic system.
Even if the OP was wrong, your response is similar. Can we get some specifics of the actual finances?
Otherwise this is all propaganda for the US seeming more fair and equitable than it really is. Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave.
Except GP mentioned ownership and when presented with ownership stats we find ourselves talking about value production.
It comes across as a conclusion in search of evidence. What's happening is goal shifting.
I strongly believe that when a commenter makes an inaccurate claim, the bare minimum is pointing out the factual error. I'm under no obligation to speculate what the commenter really meant. I took them at face value - a completely fair approach. If they wish to clarify, or make a better argument, that's on them.
We are intelligent adults here. We don’t have to pretend my statements were these fallacies. A fallacy is a fallacy eventually.
It’s possible I’m too autistic to understand why you are behaving the way you are. Your behavior and defensive mechanism baffles me if it’s in good faith. When I got into politics I spent a long time looking over all sides and never ever thought things like what you wrote. I always thought looking for the truth is the best thing.
For me it doesn’t make sense in my world view to be pedantic the way you are behaving. It’s a rather traditional autistic behavior though. I know i spend a lot of time masking to seem more normal and not be so pedantic).
In my eyes class is the only thing that matters. Do you not believe in material dialectics? Your views sound very libertarian from my reading on those politics. I don’t believe in private property so we will have to disagree on caring about ownership.
In the meantime, expanding my backyard garden is a decent alternative. I used to spend most of my free time browsing the internet or tooling around with code. Now I hardly touch my computer on weekends.
Perhaps an Indian tribe will adopt us. Or Mennonites? I know I'm careening wildly into politically incorrect space but I think you get my (joking) point.
Being serious though, surely managing the farm to any degree will yield profits that will offset the property taxes.
>> It is exhausting. I get bombarded daily by a deluge of hustle culture paraphernalia. Start a side hustle. Monetize your hobbies. FIRE by 30 (I'm too late for that). Build the next big thing. Optimize your life. 10x your productivity.
You realize none of this is "real" right? I mean, a 31-year-old retired guy has got nothing better to do than send you spam? And if he's asking for money, then (surprise!) he's not retired. Almost all of these emails are self-evident - ask yourself "if this were true, why does need my money?" Ask yourself "if I were retired, would I waste my time sending out mails like this?"
>> Rather than inspiring,
They are not meant to be _inspiring_ - they're meant to be _profitable_. Seriously mate, it's a bottom-feeding hustle. It's not meant to inspire you. It's meant to separate you from some $. This is not success.
>> it makes me feel inadequate compared to more successful people.
Firstly, you are inadequate. You are insignificant. If you disappeared few people would notice, and after a week pretty much everyone won't care. In other words you're _just like everyone else_. You're not special. You're not special good, you're not special bad. You're just you. _Just like everyone else_. (I say this not to be a dick, but simply to state the obvious. Once you understand this, contentment is easier.) [2]
So some guy is more successful than you, richer than you, more famous than you. So what? I mean out of 8 billion or so, 8 billion-1 are "not the richest" - not the most successful - not the most famous? If you get anxious because there's someone ahead of you in the queue, well, good luck on that.
What about the length of the queue behind you? Ever notice them? You got food today? Shelter tonight? Income tomorrow? Man you don't know how good you got it - what da'ya want? A rocket into space?
Give yourself a break. You're doing fine. Live a life of gratitude and generosity. Give more money away [1]. And for goodness sake, don't measure your life by Spam. Seriously.
[1] - Giving money away is the best way to reduce the hold money has on your life. It might be $1. It might be $10. It might be whatever. Giving it away reminds you, you are in control of the money, not the other way around. And reminds you that whatever you have, there are folk out there with less.
Your sample on doctors at least is almost certainly off. Here [1] is a random recent report from Massachusetts but it's very much the rule and not the exception. All the following are on physicians:
- 55% showing symptoms of burn out
- more than 50% looking to reduce hours, 25% looking to leave medicine altogether
- 1 in 3 felt their work schedule allowed time for a personal/family life
And so on.
It's also not COVID. The reason I looked this up was personal anecdata from long before COVID. I have family in medicine and so was casually acquainted with a number of doctors, literally all of whom were less than enthusiastic about their jobs. You get paid a lot, but the hours are absolutely brutal, you spend an ungodly amount of time just filling out regulations related paperwork, and it's just generally a really painful career.
Part of being a good doctor is hiding all of this from the patient, and making it look like every day is a joy to be there doing what you love. In med school you literally study good bedside manner.
Not to nitpick there, but I wouldn't really call that much variance. That study showed a job happiness ranging from 24-43% by specialty. It's certainly a sizable range, but even the high end of 43% happiness is not what you'd describe as the sort of job people want to work till the day they die.
In addition to the sibling comment, social work is one of the highest burnout rate fields. Anecdotally, none of the LMSWs I know are still practicing, one I'm close with has changed careers to agriculture and prefers working as a farmhand to social work, despite having a MSW and state license.
We should promote an anti-hustle. Drink tea on the balcony! Don’t answer emails after 4PM! Grow plants on windowsills! Sketch in notebooks! Linger in cafés!
Many people that claim to be successful aren't. It's like stock traders that sell access to their newsletters and Discord channels, etc. They aren't making their money from their amazing stock trades; they are making their living from subscriptions. "Side hustle" people do the exact same thing. Certainly, there are people more successful than me or you, and most people on this board but they usually aren't the ones online making videos about it. When I was 20 or so I was pushing $250K a year in revenue on eBay and Amazon, which felt great at the time as a side gig for a college student; but I barely made a dime. This is an example of a scheme that is pushed all the time by people, and I know how difficult it is and how their numbers usually don't add up because I was there...even when seller fees were way less.
Somehow my old old email address ended up in a Helsinki Startup incubator’s investor list, associated with some Scandinavian venture capitalist. It’s been 10 years and I still get pitches emailed to that address regularly. At this stage if I’m ever in a position to find startups I’m going to fly over there and personally tell them to get fscked.
financial independence early retirement. It’s the notion that you can work towards retiring early where your money makes enough money to live off of independently from any employer.
Well, that's precisely how capitalism work. It doesn't work by making you feel good, otherwise it wouldn't sell you a product. It works by making you feel "not enough" and then pretending to sell you the solution
There is an old browser extension called Cloud to Butt, which does nothing but replace the first string with the second. Similar concept, if the "cloud" buzzword is the most annoying thing on the web to you.
In 2014 or so, I forked it and expanded the replacement list to include some celebrity names. Turns out that keeping that updated and "complete" was more effort than I wanted to put into it.
But, for a while, "President Butt" was a common phrase in my browser, and it still makes me giggle.
I made a "[in the] cloud" to "[on the] Moon" extension a while back, and I loved reading about Amazon's Moon Computing cluster, or how X company saved money by moving to the Moon, etc. And it would let me know that tomorrow's weather was going to be partly Moony with a chance of rain.
It made me smile so many times. I should revive it - dumb fun is a lot of fun.
> tomorrow's weather was going to be partly Moony with a chance of rain
It may have been Tumblr rotting my brain all throughout high school and college; but this reads as so incredibly poetic and I'm extremely happy to have made a decision to stumble in this thread to read it.
It's so nice to make a silly little app and have it surprise you in the best ways.
Internally, Google has a page with emergency contacts for every product in the company. Naturally, there any many Cloud products there.
Someone with the Cloud to Butt extension edited the page to update their teams details, not realizing they were also changing every Cloud product in the process.
Whenever I read articles like this I have a lot of sympathy and also a little confusion. Maybe it's because I DO have an adblocker but this just isn't my experience on the web. It feels so easy to use the web and generally avoid the deluge of shit OP talks about. I pretty much only go to sites on my bookmarks. I don't read the news (maybe that's a big part of this), I read blogs, forums, and then do some shopping. The rest is just work related stuff. The only time I'm ever really exposed to this sort of crap is Twitter but I curate who I follow and I try to stay on my chronological follower-only feed. Yet every time I see my parents using the internet it looks like an entirely different experience. It's unfortunate and sad
Once, not so long ago, inexplicably, I waded into the fetid swamp that is a new article's comment's section. There was a particularly unhinged commentor, we'll call them Pat, that was railing against the newspaper's staff. For some strange reason, I looked up Pat's past comment history, and it was mostly, though not entirely, all screeds against the paper.
The paper is the Denver Post. The Post is a paper thin shell of itself, gutted by the machinations of hedge funds too greedy to realize that sub-prime newspapers are even worse investments than world class ones. The Post even ran a picture of the wrong stadium for Opening Day for a few years, I think. Most of the Post's good staff had left years ago for the 'greener' pastures of purely online journalism.
Pat had further filled out their entire profile for commenting and said that they were a proud resident of Des Moines, Iowa. Seeing as they spent nearly all day commenting on the Denver Post, I had questions. So, I made a profile, got a free 30 day subscription and ability to comment, and then asked Pat the questions. Namely, are you a real person, are you really living in Iowa, and why are you spending all your days on this earth railing against a zombie newspaper in it's comments sections?
Pat confirmed that they were real, and that they lived in Des Moines. Further, and I'll not forget this, Pat said that the reason they spent all their days attacking the Post was "I just really fucking hate the Post, Rocky Mountain News was better and should come back" Rocky Mountain news had been truly dead for a decade at this point and was never coming back.
I could ask them more questions, and try to dive into their strange psychology, but lets be real, Pat is crazy. I have since returned to my policy of never reading the comments section. Thar be the weirdos.
I used to have the OPs experience and found the web equally as toxic.
It all got too much for me during Covid times however, and I did a huge detox and cleanse of my online content. I left LinkedIn which was my main source of my angst, blocked the news sites at the router and unfollowed thousands of accounts. I also installed a bunch of adblockers.
The habits have stuck for the most part, and life online feels so much lighter.
My thoughts and experience as well. Seth does not suffer or get exhausted online. He's had his list of what to avoid internalized for a long time. As do I. Believe it or not, you have some agency when using the internet. Even in the face of "the algorithm" (what that has come to mean).
I run into frustrations whenever I search for anything to do with products or something popular like parenting. Results are swamped by garbage as filled SEO content some of which I swear is written by chatGPT. I don’t know why Google doesn’t penalize those results. Come to think of it they don’t seem to mind surfacing content that’s behind a paywall either. I’m really not sure what’s going on over there these days…
My version of "shields up" is that I only get news from Wikipedia's current events portal and HN. I only stay in touch with my friends via group chats and personal blogs/newsletters of which I publish my own on Ghost.
Honestly, it works pretty great. I find mainstream social media to be a cesspool of irrelevant junk, so I don't use them. Technically, I have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but I rarely browse anything on either of those apps.
Ditto. However I came off Facebook about 6 years ago but I found that I was missing out on certain things (real life meetings between likeminded friends). I now keep a very carefully currated list of bookmarks to certain Facebook groups which I check occasionally. I only ever browse FB via bookmarks. The evil in Facebook seems to come via the feed on the landing page.
Every Sunday afternoon, I check out Facebook events in groups that I care about and click "interested". I'm ingesting events that I'm interested in into my calendar, so they automatically show up without me having to check the Facebook app apart from once a week on my laptop.
Same! I made myself years ago a little web app to fetch Wikipedia Current Events, the top n articles of the day (or the week) on HN, and a few subreddits and that's it. I also progressively stopped using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Things are quieter now.
When it's not enough I switch to text browsing via rss and gopher/gemini.
Wikipedia Current Events is very important to make sure that I'm not cutting myself completely off from the world, and after years of using it it's good enough when complemented with the local news from the people around me.
I wonder if you could pipe that content into GPT and have it give you back a summary. I was playing around with this in the OpenAI playground today. I think with a little prompt engineering, this could be very useful.
I've played with the readability lib by Mozilla before to extract articles from web pages and then feed that to the summarizers we had years ago but the result wasn't great. This is indeed different now, interesting!
Another thing that would be great is to use that to identify the news that really matter and mute the rest.
I could imagine a prompt containing something like "As a person that likes A, B, C, D, and F, does the following has a potential to be interesting to me: ..."
Similar. 95% HN and text.npr.org. uBlock origin keeps things pretty quiet for any adventures outside those spaces (following links and other things people send me.)
Same. HN and BBC World News, usually just the headlines. Podcasts for slow/nuanced takes on things. No facebook or instagram or anything.
The Wikipedia current events portal looks like a fantastic replacement for BBC World News though: slightly more in-depth content than just headlines. I'll give it a try.
Related, and perhaps relevant: lately I've noticed that a lot of my life is consumptive filler.
Reddit's the worst source, but that's not really Reddit's fault. I want more information, more stimulation, as a fix to sitting here bored.
What I _could_ be doing, like finally finishing the top half to that hutch in my garage, or working on the manuscript for a book I'm writing, often falls by the wayside because I just couldn't find the energy to change course.
But those things would be much more fulfilling than doomscrolling r/all.
I _know_ this. The trick is in figuring out how to overcome inertia.
I'm a dillitente in many disciplines and as such there's always something I can work on. Although I find myself falling into the consumptive pattern more than I'd like, I strive to learn new things and skills. For instance, lately I've been learning blender and building a model of a location I have frequent dreams/nightmares about.
Art and nature are my go-to activities. Hiking, biking, playing music, and doodling in blender are all pretty rewarding.
I can second learning to 3d model for personal fulfillment. It ended up being way more useful than I expected, ive ended up using it for 3d printing which I didnt even think about when I started learning, but now I have things on my desk that I made
Sometimes, when I encounter this, I use one as a reward for the other. Then I don't feel guilty for the pointless action because I did something productive first. The hard part for me is the gnawing desire to create something. That's when I get stuck and only come free once I have done enough work to scratch that itch.
If anyone wants to build this as a freelance project, email me (email in profile), I'll hire you to make it.
Some things I'd like with it:
1) Rewrite everything on a webpage in a peaceful and neutral tone
2) Rewrite everything on a webpage to be assertive/direct, instead of passive aggressive (e.g. lots of negative comments could be replaced with simply "I don't like this" or "I want other people to know I dislike this and agree with me")
3) Add emojis inline in text so that pages are easier to skim
4) Add topic based filters/flags/emojis so I can highlight things that I care more and less about
Right now it filters out entire posts on reddit/comments on youtube/sidebar items on Twitter. But I've been meaning to:
1. Expand the sites where it filters, and possibly have it automatically determine which HTML elements to remove instead of me defining it on a per-site basis
2. Make the filter list user-customizable, and change it from static words and phrases to sentiment analysis
3. User-created list of opinions you don't want to read (e.g. any arguments that are anti-nuclear energy/pro-nuclear energy, depending on your perspective). This one is especially important to me because I find contrarian opinions on certain subjects to be both exhausting and boring, and I find myself engaging with them far too often in a "someone is wrong on the internet" sort of way.
I see the value of your request, too. Sometimes it makes sense to see what a consensus is on something, but the language used to dissent can be sort of toxic.
I did an experiment where I got ChatGPT to rewrite headlines in neutral tone based on the content of the article. Works great. What you want is a great idea!
In other words, the author wants a tool (actually a group of people) to which they can delegate the content filtering. Which is... understandable, as the amount of info noise isn't going to go down. I imagine he's aware of the downsides as well.
With the current LLM advancements, a smart filter for the info noise could be built. Sure, it would a bubble just like recommendation systems, but at least it's tweaked by you, and not created by someone else. (in theory, in practice it will be a black box SaaS)
I agree. I also use a few specific threads on other forums where I know the posters generally post decent, informative subjects and otherwise shoot the shit.
I am really waiting for the day we can run LLM in the browser, since then you'll be able to perform these tasks without relying on a third-party to send content to. Imagine a smart email client that doesn't rely on your email server for spam filtering or bucketing.
Subscribe to a major daily newspaper on physical paper???
No pop up ads, no auto play videos, no cookies, no tracking of any kind.
Few if any conspiracy theories appear in the major national dailies. Sure you can definitely quibble with the Post, NYT or WSJ on many issues but on average and outside of the editorial pages they are very good.
MSM still have some of the problem mentioned by the author ("urgent but unimportant breaking news", "insights about the royal family", "things that are true but irrelevant"). NYT is also prone to writing "stories designed to demean, degrade or intentionally inflict distress with little recourse available" since their style differs from WSJ whose news section are written strictly in reverse pyramid style.
But yeah, reading MSM news without looking at social media discussions of those news can address at least 80% of the problems described by the author. The information explosion is irreversible and the Internet allowed higher parallelism and lower latency in consuming information compared to TV/Radio/Newspapers. Some degree of exhaustion is inevitable unless one trains themself to properly detach and disconnect on the regular.
One of my college profs, back in the day, alleged that all the news worth knowing about would eventually show up in, IIRC, the New York Times Book Review. Not necessarily in a timely fashion, but that's kind of the point: slow news. Seems legit.
I agree, I subscribed to a physical, high-quality Sunday newspaper (I hope this word exists in English, it's a newspaper that gets released once a week on the weekend) and I find it perfect. Frequent enough to stay up-to-date, but slow enough to not get caught up in speculation and clickbait.
It made me realize how basically no "breaking news" is important to my personal life. Reading high-quality reports a few hours once a week is enough to stay more informed than constantly discussing breaking news on Twitter and is far better for my well being.
I've found myself enjoying reading the weekly edition of The Economist digitally. Regular enough to be up-to-date, but slow and small enough that it has details about important events that have happened and very little speculation about developing stories.
You can get it through PressReader[1] and if you're in the UK it's very likely that your local library card will give you free access to it.
I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and one of the more interesting concepts it describes is of an Editor or Edit Stream, an individual or product that tailors the info you recieve from the noosphere. By the bullshit asymmetry principle, this is probably the logical conclusion of social media.
Yeah, a sad but probably true aspect of that book was the way that only wealthier people could afford access to reliable information, and everyone else gets their info from the free streams which are full of garbage and lies.
Didn't one of the "good guys" intentionally unleash the content-farming/bullshit-generating AI onto the net? I can't remember if it was the protagonist or not, but I couldn't get around to thinking it was a good idea on any world, but here we are with ChatGPT
Current Affairs has a recent-ish article about this fact of media culture[1], but you don't need a long article to understand that poor people who do not pay for information are the product not the customer, and further that poor people have weaker literacy skills. Not a healthy combo.
What if there are existing ways to avoid all the garbage but they are not a junkblocker button.^1
It always seems like people commenting on the obnoxiousness of the web/mobile, often "tech" journalists, here a blogger, demand solutions that maintain the status quo (which is required for them to make money), but require no change in user behaviour, allegedly "fixing" the problem nonetheless.
"I want a no burn button for when I deliberately put my hand on a hot stove."
1. I have created these for myself, they work well, and I am not a developer. That suggests solutions are not difficult. IMO, it is only artificial constraints promulgated by web investors and developers that make these problems seem insurmountable.
I've build several little scripts in my browsers over the years to deal with this. As an example, I have a stylus script that cuts the salacious celebrity and entertainment sections off CNN.com. I've also added to my lists in ublock origin to nuke taboola and other bottom of the barrel content ads that used to be hawked from the bottom of every blog.
Today I actually just consume a lot less news and media, and much less direct from the news sites. Community aggregation like HN, Lobsters, and a few subreddits lets me stay appraised without being intentionally distracted
> Today I actually just consume a lot less news and media
This is the norm for me, and I think is likely to be the norm for those who consciously consume news as opposed to zombie consumptification of whatever happens to be on-screen.
Replacing "checking for updates" with RSS can help this as well. Even moreso if you can get used to a brutalist rss reader like elfeed or gnus in emacs (I'm sure these exist outside of emacs if that's a requirement).
gnus even lets you use scoring to essentialy make your own recommendation algorithm and increase signal to noise, either manually or with adaptive scoring that does things like "if you read this, words in the subject have the score increased for future rss items".
I feel like I've got a pretty robust filter built in to my brain. I've never felt the need for ad blockers, my ignoring of (Google, Facebook, YouTube, in-site, TV, radio, etc) ads is so instinctive, it's like I literally don't see or hear them. Same with (mainstream, social, etc) media content, my ignoring of various categories of "news" (sport, celeb gossip, beauty, lifestyle, real estate) is so instinctive, it's just a blurry spot on the screen / page for me. I suppose that some people have this ability more than others, but then again, I imagine that almost anyone should be able to up their ability to a somewhat useful level, with a bit of practice.
In my opinion, the above, plus being reasonably selective about your main news sources, will always beat any hypothetical AI, in terms of achieving a signal-to-noise ratio that's optimum for you, as an educated, informed, and reasoning human.
A Dutch song from the 80's comes to mind, "Doris Day" by "Doe Maar" [1]:
Nee!
Er zit een knop op je TV
Die helpt je zo uit de puree
Druk 'em in en ga maar mee
De bloemen buiten zetten
...which translates to...
No!
There's a button on your TV
It will soon relieve you of your misery
Push it and come along
Let's go have fun (literally: put the flowers outside)
The song is about someone inviting you to go watch some band in a pub somewhere, saying there is nothing worth watching on the television anyway so why not switch the thing off and come along? There's your junk filter, right there.
I agree with him, but here's what you can personally do: use more healthy online services! Like Mastodon (and other ActivityPub or FOSS nets), well moderated spaces (e.g. /r/askhistorians), etc.. Social networks that don't value your time, your mental health, your growth and wellbeing should not be successful!
It's clear by now we need some kind of collective action against socially and individually bad services like addictive games and social networks. I'm not sure if that's just information campaign or even improving incentive structures to help prioritize user wellbeing along with profit for companies. Why don't shareholder track the social good a given company is doing? And the environmental good as well?
It sounds like this guy just doesn't like people at large anymore. Not really an insult, I feel about the same every time I hear of a new tiktok challenge and such(junk to me).
Sadly, we'd need societal change rather than just a mega content blocker to really effect change.
Yeah, between the pandemic, mask mandates, anti vaxxers, anti maskers, the tp shortage, the election and so called 'insurrection', 2020 was a huge turning point. Everyone found a reason to hate everyone. I'm guilty of this as well.
I'm not a big doomer, but I've never witnessed the country so irrevocably divided.
> Somehow, we survived as a culture for centuries without exposing ourselves to thousands of profit-driven manipulations dumped on our living room carpet all day, every day.
Ehh, it takes some thick rose-tinted glasses to actually believe this. Every mainstream social medium – whether TV, radio, newspapers, your USPS mailbox or even a literal town square – has been full of this kind of manipulation since the second it came into existence. There was never a reason to believe that the internet would be any different.
You don't need a Shields Up button to have a little self control on the internet. Seth is energized after a day on the internet. This blog post is about "we" being exhausted aka "you". Not Seth. If you are reading this, you can do it.
The big problem of language models is that we can't assess how truthful their statements are, only how grammatically correct they are.
I know people are working on mathematically assessing truthfulness of a statement for the next generation of GPTs. Imagine if we'd have such a formula! We wouldn't need the GPTs, we could instead assess truthfulness in something like an adblocker - if the scanned text block is below a truthfulness cut-off, block it.
I think there is also a hidden cost of this, which is, the filtering that the brain needs to do prevents you from seeing other opportunities. We have X amount of time and attention and these things fill that up.
For example, when it comes to improving personality/body language, there are lot of tools in theater/acting that can be useful. Mainstream media never talks about these opportunities. I came to know about these very late, accidentally.
My media habits are configured to mostly avoid this junk, but I think I also have developed a "junk blindness" similar to the "ad blindness" filters that cause people to not even look properly at blatant ads. If you visualised brain activity as someone views a feed of recommendations, you'd probably see a lot of that nonsense content is skimmed over autonomously by folks who aren't interested in it.
I for one miss the World Weekly News. At one level, it was pure entertainment. But of course at another level, the choice of themes reflected the communal Id.
There are people spending billions of dollars to get your attention. You can't win this game on their terms. Treat the internet as the dangerous medium it is, and protect yourself.
This filter already exists, don't turn on the computer, don't talk to anyone, lock yourself in a dark sound proof room.
I'm not even being all that facetious. Every interaction, every book, every news article is full of covering of the truth in some fashion or other. We carry the baggage of millennia coverings of what humanity actually is, so how could you hope to see past that to the truth of it.
Seems like someone wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
Most of us have vices like Twitter and Reddit and TikTok and even HN, yet we do everything but quit them when we decide that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
In this case, instead of deciding on better ways to spend his attention, he imagines an increasingly complex technological solution so that he doesn't have to change his habits.
> In this case, instead of deciding on better ways to spend his attention, he imagines an increasingly complex technological solution so that he doesn't have to change his habits.
What's wrong with that, exactly? Technology should serve us, not the other way round. Nothing wrong with a technological solution, if it works.
There are people who like those things. And unfortunately there’s a lot of very bright people who smugly assume those people are lesser-minded for liking those things.
Personally I avoid all that stuff. But it’s not objectively junk. Being able to filter the stuff, and to develop your own filter preferences, would be wonderful.
I wonder if this would be a viable use case for a browser plugin that talks to an LLM for the text stuff at least. Have it summarize bits of content and then apply some rules on categories you don't want to see.
What we need is to build more refined and stronger intuition about Epistemology, and maybe also learn to prioritize minding our own business more than distant/unverifiable/likely distorted events.
Part of the solution is certainly better mental habits by information consumers, but it's not fair to expect normal people who are just trying to go about their business to bear all the costs of trying to stoically ignore this mental pollution—and it is pollution. It sucks that the business models of many websites apparently depend on bombarding people with 90% crap that you need to fight through to get to the 10% you want, and we ought to demand a better solution than "just suck it up."
This is not completely new, we had tons of junk ads in mail and TV.
Humans are not too bad at learning to tune out the noise, it takes some time to adapt.
I've seen quite a few young people who simply decided to not play the game, they stay out of Tiktok/insta, they read books, they don't care about their phones...
At some point I believe that Smartphones are going to not be much more exciting than TVs.
> and maybe also learn to prioritize minding our own business more than distant/unverifiable/likely distorted events.
This has substantial epistemic issues, particularly if you include complex causality (since it is often not possible to accurately derive what "one's business" is, what "is" or is not verifiable in fact, or what is "likely"... All of that is driven by sub-perceptual, culturally conditioned heuristics).
I subscribed to AppleNews for a while because I thought, I’ll get some news without being on something like Facebook, and I can like/dislike things for signal and avoid all the celebrity crap. And the thing is, it mostly worked, but not quite enough.
For example, I found that downvoting every article on a topic wasn’t enough to give it the signal, “stop fucking showing me this topic.” (And this was true even when there were literally hundreds of articles on the same topic. I had to do this with Elon Musk-related news around the time he bought Twitter.) Then I learned you could block entire topics. That helped, except when it didn’t. Despite having downvoted hundreds of articles on a topic, and then actively blocking the topic, sometimes it would just show me news articles about the specific thing I asked it not to.
At this point I’ve lost any hope of finding a solution to getting the news I want without a ton of extra crap. I have ad blockers, but the news sites are so shitty to use. I wanted AppleNews to work, but there are too many ads and it doesn’t actually show you just the stuff you want. It’s constantly trying to push other stuff at you, the very thing I was paying to avoid. I give up. I’ve just stopped reading news altogether. This is what the industry has come to. It no longer contains enough value to even deal with.
Most pages should have SSR enabled. The front page is an exception, detecting if youre logged in via localStorage. https://www.forth.news/topstories might be what youre looking for.
You might not like his content, but he seems to be a pretty sincere guy. I've been following him for 15 years now and there was never a time when I didn't think he was trying to be helpful. And he's taken on ambitious projects like the altMBA.
I think the big issue is that it's hard to determine what falls into that category sometimes. We live in an era where any editorial decision is treated as "cancelling" someone. Even if you get it right 99.9% of the time, the Streisand Effect will catapult the rare mistakes to the forefront and erode any trust in your decisions.
One person's Ponzi-scheme or MLM is another person's crypto-revolution democratizing finance. One person's pump-and-dump is another person's GameStop. One person's irrelevant information is another's call to action.
I think a lot of people also aren't receptive to being told that they're wrong. Lots of people are posting about tech companies doing layoffs while having record profits, but then when I actually look at the profits, they're actually down. Is that misinformation? If I'm running a system (either a site where people post or a browser plugin that removes content), I would get roasted for taking that down. If I took down things meant to demean, degrade, or intentionally cause distress, I'd be taking down a lot of Republican content. They'd yell that they aren't demeaning a trans woman by calling her a man and that they're just stating a fact. Which one of us is correct in our judgment?
All that said, I do think there's a ton of value in Seth's idea and his presentation of it. I think he really hits on something important when he talks about things that might be true, but are irrelevant and things that are really just mean. I'd also add that there's a certain kind of post/article that's just meant to produce a visceral emotional reaction (usually anger) without anything really actionable or meaningful - I think that's what he's getting at in other terms. I think there's a lot of value in trying to get that junk out of one's life, but it's hard.
It's also hard for platforms who live and die by engagement. It's not just about the ad views. It's also about being the app/website that people instinctively open constantly. If you widdle down the content to the calm stuff, do you end up as an app that people forget about because the visceral emotional reactions aren't making them think about opening the app again? If they open it and there isn't new stuff, do they go somewhere else to fix their boredom?
All that controversy drives more content. Crazy tweets from Musk lead to lots of people who dislike Musk to quote-tweet him dunking on him. All those dunks drive engagement. A right wing person can say something and that will get so many people agreeing and disagreeing and fighting on a platform.
All that irrelevant stuff like celebrity gossip offers a constant stream of easy to consume bits for people. A good article requires thought, patience, attention, etc. A celebrity gossip pic works well for mindless doom-scrolling.
If a platform doesn't offer that, does it just become too small and end up losing the traffic to competitors who then have a war chest to fight off the "good" platform? To an extent, HN is a counter example. At the same time, would HN have survived if it weren't a bit of a passion project of YC? Competitors aren't looking to "kill" HN because it's clear HN isn't really looking to expand and become a big business. Likewise, HN doesn't have management looking to figure out how to maximize profitability or what the next big thing will be. It might be harder for more commercial platforms where they might start losing engineering talent to competitors whose engagement engines print money which they can use to lure engineers. We've seen many articles talking about tech giants hiring lots of people in part to prevent other companies from having talent.
I think there's lots of value in Seth's proposal. At the same time, I think it's tough.
The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well. I'd be perfectly comfortable having anything that looks like a conspiracy theory hidden, and if tomorrow it becomes a verified fact (with enough evidence having accumulated for it to get covered in a non-mocking way by NYT or NPR or whatever), to see it then. Occasionally it's possible I'd find out about a few true things later than everybody else, but it's not like the course of human events depends on my knowing things the moment they're knowable. I think I'd be fine.
> The vast, vast majority of yesterday's conspiracy theories remain just conspiracy theories, and the vast majority of today's likely will as well.
Maybe! You have no way of knowing which ones.
> I'd be perfectly comfortable having anything that looks like a conspiracy theory hidden
To rephrase: you'd be happy to have anything that makes you feel like it's a conspiracy theory hidden from view. A perfect way to guarantee confirmation bias.
I suggest the alternative approach: if you aren't willing to keep an open enough mind to consider new evidence that challenges your assumptions, don't have an opinion.
> with enough evidence having accumulated for it to get covered in a non-mocking way by NYT or NPR or whatever
As a side note: if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head. Just judging based on their commentary concerning topics in which I am an expert, neither is a reliable source of "blind faith" information. Danger, Will Robinson.
The claim 'today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact' implies that you do know, or at least think you do. Which is it, do you have evidence confirming specific conspiracies or not? You vacillate between jaded confidence and wide-eyed ignorance whenever it looks like it will score you a conversational point, with no consistent model of the world behind your words. No wonder, because the consistent model of the world that works is "the vast majority (but not all) conspiracy theories are false", and that's the model you've decided to pick a fight with for some reason. Naturally your first response to a challenge is to flip the table and throw all the evidence on the ground.
I am pretty confident in my ability to prove that the Earth is round. I have sufficient faith that politicians do not harvest blood from babies to perform magic rituals. Many others and I do have some way of knowing which conspiracy theories will never be proven true.
I happen to have a keen interest in how different people experience ideas like conspiracy theories and the unknown in general, so I am always on the lookout for it in discussions online or in meetups - it is uncanny how often the Earth being around is offered up when someone is challenged about the unknown, including people who have substantial backgrounds in science or philosophy. Very LLM-like.
Definitely, but I put this in the "listen to all sides and think for yourself" bucket, which is (sadly) not something most people are willing to do.
If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
I don't have time to listen to 1000 dumb ideas per day. I have a life to live. Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan. I'm fine only caring about news after it's mainstream knowledge. Or even never; most news isn't worth the time it takes to consume it.
> Also, I don't want my brain to get infected with whatever got Joe Rogan.
If your brain is so fragile that it can't listen to some guy on a podcast without being "infected", then you're gonna have a hard time.
Again, I'm not suggesting blind faith in dumb ideas. I'm not suggesting that you have to be an expert on anything. I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
You already believe in hundreds of bad ideas and so do I. Feeding your brain bullshit reinforces bullshit output.
On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
> On top of that the only thing most of us can say about almost everything under your rules would answered with 'I am not fully informed', shit, humanity isn't fully informed on anything.
Yes. Exactly.
I'm calling for more modesty, and less political vitriol driven by a fictional, exaggerated sense of certainty.
(Also, reinforcing that ideas cannot hurt you, which is an odd mental pathology that has become distressingly common as of late.)
> If we could just get people who aren't informed to recognize that they're not informed and not have an opinion, that would be a huge win for civil discourse.
I agree, but I think this falls into the category of "we've tried literally nothing and we're all out of ideas".
If someone is sitting on a pile of $, I think something quite effective (but oh, would it be controversial) could be built.
> I'm suggesting that you have the will to say "I am not fully informed" when you don't know the answer.
"The spirit (will) is willing (well, sometimes) but the flesh is weak". Free will, heuristics, and consciousness/reality are extremely complex topics. I believe very strongly that modern day people have this ability in similar quantities to the ability of people from 50 years ago to not be racist. It is innate, second nature, System 1, outside their control.
From below:
>> Eventually you have to trust someone with something.
You have to. While this is not logically, physically, necessarily true, I think this is literally true for most people, as a consequence of the evolved nature of consciousness, combined with culturally-ingrained norms, one of which is whether philosophy was a part of the educational curriculum one was exposed to... And even then, how good one is at it, in fact (which is typically inaccessible, thus imagined/simulated).
Another:
>> To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter.
Also simulated. Sure, it's "just snark", "speaking colloquially", {excuse du jour}, but I wonder if the mind atrophies with lack of use like muscles do.
A problem: this is a razor that is useful for approximating what one believes to be true, it is not proper, strict epistemology.
Also: it only yields belief, not truth, because it doesn't even try for truth - rather, it advises against doing that.
Would be interesting to see what Carl would say in this context, as I presume he meant it in the context of science/physics, not metaphysics.
I have arguments now and then with people on Carl Sagan videos on tiktok, and it is eye opening how many science fans are utterly incompetent when it comes to epistemology and logic. With just a tiny bit of abstraction (removing the object level specifics of the claim), they are indistinguishable from religious fundamentalists in their confident incorrectness / epistemic-unsoundness.
An extremely interesting and complex discussion could be had about the merits of that advice.
In a perfect world, it would be fine, since science is highly trustworthy. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from perfect, making it far less easy to determine how optimal the approach is.
And ironically, you would think that science minded people would understand and appreciate these complexities and their legitimate importance, however in my experience they tend to be the ones most averse to them.
"Which ones are true" is far less relevant to my life than "which ones are relevant".
I simply have no use for the information about who blew up the Nord pipeline, or how covid started. I'll evaluate claims affecting issues relevant to my life.
The controversy of conspiracy theories is extremely powerful and is a distraction I choose to ignore, without evidence of contextual relevance that outweighs the low confidence in the evidence for the claim.
> if you think this is an objective standard for reliable evidence, you're in over your head
I don't, and I'm well aware of Gell-Mann amnesia, but I'm also not going to personally interview every witness of every event, or personally become an expert in every subject so as to be able to independently have a well-informed opinion about all of them. I accept that this means that sometimes I will not be perfectly informed, but even if it were possible to do all those things (and it isn't), it's not the way I would choose to spend my life. There are other ways to spend my time that I find more fulfilling, and I accept that that means outsourcing the work fact-finding to people who do it for a living, even if I know they're imperfect, and even if I know that at least in certain domains, I might be able to do it better if I tried.
> Danger, Will Robinson
To you, the danger is not knowing that there are, in fact, lizard people controlling the government. To me, the danger is in ending up spending my free time poring over fringe lizard-people Twitter. Personally I'm perfectly willing to accept the former danger to avoid the latter. I think we just have different priorities.
I was just browsing your site a few days ago; did you just push a UI update? It looks a lot better and is a lot more relaxing on the eyes (eye strain) that it was before. Looks great.
Is it not difficult to know whether a conspiracy theory ends up being a conspiracy or on the other hand a belief ending up being an actual conspiracy and the only tool to suss things out is the passage of time? We will likely not have certainty on the JFK assassination, unless the remaining sealed docs have relevant info.
Not all journalism is created equal. I've found that NYT's The Daily coverage of SVB has been rife with misinformation and editorialization. They picked a controversial narrative du jour and expected the listeners to be stupid enough to believe whatever lies or spin they say.
But basically, we cant be a truth telling machine. We can, however, filter out the obvious noise and hold our journalist partners accountable if we find issues with their reporting. We speak with every reporter who onboards to the site, and reach out when needed.
How will you try to find issues? Many claims are made and accepted as true in the media without any verifiable facts to back them up. There's an inherently political valence to which claims receive this treatment at every level (national, geopolitical, etc).
That claim itself sounds like it could use some verification to back it up.
That said, this is why we vet journalists as they come on. We cannot guarantee that no one will ever get something wrong, but we can limit how often it happens. On Twitter/HN/etc, anyone can post anything and face little to no consequences -- thats how trolling can happen. Journalists have bylines attached, and those mess ups can haunt them the rest of their careers. They don't want to get things wrong. We don't want them to get things wrong either. And if something is wrong, then we put out a correction.
I personally don't think a journalist is "held accountable" if all that's being done is an email to them asking for a correction or clarification in an article.
Generally, corrections and retractions are the responsibility of the editor, not the individual journalist (of course, the editor can delegate the work, but they're still responsible for it). The mechanism and its working is pretty well established, by now.
We have not; though I believe they take a little more of a position than we're comfortable with -- we're looking for straight reporting, without opinion.
> today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact.
How many tomorrows will we be waiting through to finally verify that the moon landing was faked, that the UN has a plan to invade the US using black helicopters, we're all being poisoned/mind-controlled by chemtrails, deepwater horizon was a false flag operation by environmental activists, Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and Sandy Hook was invented and staged by crisis actors?
> "conspiracy theory" has always been a term of propaganda and rhetoric
"Conspiracy theory" as a label has a substantial meaning. They usually require the existence of hidden powers, thrive on being outside/rhetorically above the mainstream, resist falsification ("the lack of evidence is exactly what we'd expect if powerful people were covering it up!").
The label can be used in bad faith, but so can names for rhetorical fallacies.
> There is no button for bypassing the noise of human civilization and remaining above the fray.
But there is. Everyone is driven by risk and reward, you get a pretty good idea of what is true and what isn't if you are able to objectively overlook a person or organization's motives and what they have to gain from saying something and what they might lose if they are fudging the truth.
For example: What did the WHO have to gain or lose from taking China at their word on how Covid-19 didn't come from Wuhan early on in the pandemic? Oh, they would've lost the cooperation of the largest country by population, and without them, the WHO basically becomes irrelevant since you lose the ability to coordination disease responses with 1/7th of the world's population.
I wasn't talking about the origin of Covid in particular; there are plenty of other examples of "facts" that turned out to not be facts in the past few years. The entire meme of "fake news" is a parasitic mind-worm that didn't exist before 2015 or so.
But thank you for illustrating my point, however indirectly: the non-natural origin of Covid was a conspiracy theory, and is now just a politically flavored debate.
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?'
Can you give some of the other examples? The only ones I can think of are COVID related and even then there were also plenty of COVID conspiracies that were "facts" and not facts.
When it comes to war, the default assumption of citizens of ANY country is that their government is withholding vital information which would make them not support the war. Either they are outright lying (WMDs in Iraq) or hiding information (Secret War in Laos, the Iran-Contra Affair, the US placing nuclear
missiles against USSR in Turkey, or secret operations designed to draw another country into a war).
Years later they will declassify it and be proud of their choices, not even regretting the millions of people who died as a result.
Often if there is a proxy war somewhere, it was because the KGB or CIA was involved in instigating it.
So when we are told that we are simply “arming moderate rebels in Syria”, that is not much different than Russia saying they are “supporting the separatists in Donetsk” since 2014. They empower mostly terrorists and exacerbate conflicts that would have otherwise been resolved if US or Russian weapons weren’t used by the separatists / terrorists.
Same with Saudi and Iranian government in the Yemen civil war. A popular revolution (Arab spring) to overthrow some hated government sounds like a great achievement until larger powers get involved and arm the counterrevolutionaries against the revolutionaries leading to a bloody civil war. In Russia this happened after the Bolsheviks took power - with 20 million dead.
So when you read about the war in Ukraine, say, your default assumption can be that you are being told only enough to support the war as the current administration wants you to, and all dissent would be forcefully suppressed. In 8 years expect to finally learn what the CIA has done, because at that point they could declassify the full extent of it:
Ukraine, like Syria, was a theater for a proxy war between USA (wanting to fully surround and tame Russia) and Russia (wanting to maintain its influence in its own neighbors just as China and USA want to do). I would not be surprised at all if it involved covert arming and training of “not so moderate” people on all sides. Very likely the uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2021 had elements of spy agencies fomenting revolutions to do regime change there and see what can happen.
The Russians do it far less stealthily (Strelkov and Motorola) than the CIA. But they have gotten better at it … just in the last few months the resignations of governments in Slovakia and Moldova (that get hardly reported in the West) have me suspecting strongly that Russian saboteurs have tried to foment revolution there to overthrow pro-Western governments, just as USA did the other way in Ukraine.
Iraq WMD[0] were moved from Iraq to Syria by air bridge[1], where they are used frequently[2].
USA spent lot of effort to strip Ukraine from nuclear weapons and other military tech which can be used to harm USA, see Budapest memorandum. Just year ago, USA predicted that Ukraine will fall in two weeks, but Ukraine refused to comply with that.
You're right. Both USA and Russia had terribly miscalculated, while they were both arming terrorists and ramping up the proxy war in Ukraine.
If Russia attacked Ukraine's capital the way USA attacked Iraq and other countries ("shock and awe" and carpet bombing) then yes they would have surrendered. Russia did this in Syria (Aleppo, Homs) and Chechnya (Grozny) where the entire city was razed to the ground. There, they were fighting anti-government forces, and just like in Afghanistan etc. they were very brutal.
It had all the same elements: NATO welcoming Georgia, two breakaway republics who wanted independence, Russia intervening on their behalf, Russia sending a slow-moving convoy of tanks to the capitol to intimidate them and force them to agree to stop shelling these breakaway regions forever. (Russia of course would station peacekeepers there to make sure of that, and also to protect their black sea fleet / military interests).
The difference is, in that war, they reached an agreement in a week, and the war was over. Nicolas Sarkozy helped make that happen.
This time around, Ukraine was too far into NATO + CIA arming and training their army and irregulars (far-right batallions) all over the country, for it to have ended that way. Russia had hoped that it would all be over by the time the tanks reached Kyiv. But that never happened.
Here is a lot of evidence for this:
1) Russia already had done this exact thing with Georgia. It's more reasonable to expect them to want to do the same thing and expect a similar result. After the agreement, Russia never went further to take over all of Georgia nor since 2008 went beyond stationing peacekeepers in the breakaway republics, so all the breathless claims that if peace agreement is reached, Russia will continue invading Europe, seem to be totally contradicted in the case of Georgia.
2) All military experts were baffled why Russia didn't use its air superiority to decisively win in a few days
They badly miscalculated, yes, but even if they hadn't -- doing a Desert Storm was never an option. Two primary reasons.
If Russia attacked Ukraine's capital the way USA attacked
Iraq and other countries ("shock and awe" and carpet
bombing) then yes they would have surrendered.
One: Russia never had the option of carrying out that sort of attack because they have repeatedly demonstrated that their military isn't capable of carrying out those sorts of ultra high tempo, synchronized, combined arms operations. Russia has some modern toys, but their ability to actually conduct a war is essentially WWII (if not WWI) era attacks with artillery and human waves.
Two: Anti-tank and anti-aircraft defenses are more potent and more plentiful than they were in the conflicts you named. I'm not even sure that the US could pull a Desert Storm these days in an era of S300/S400 air defenses and anti-tank Javelins.
This time around, Ukraine was too far into NATO + CIA arming
and training their army and irregulars (far-right batallions)
all over the country, for it to have ended that way. Russia
had hoped that it would all be over by the time the tanks
reached Kyiv. But that never happened.
I don't know that we need conspiracy thinking here. After Georgia and Crimea it wasn't exactly rocket science to see that Putin was going to keep snatching up territory every few years. Yes, NATO attempted appeasement in the past... it clearly. did. not. work.
NATO needed to draw a line in the sand, and Ukraine was willing to fight.
I'm also curious about this statement:
Both USA and Russia had terribly miscalculated
How has the USA miscalculated? They have a partner in Ukraine who is willing to fight like a demon to hold back Putin and dissuade him from attempting more of this in the future. All NATO has to do is send toys and money. The strategic value NATO is getting here is tremendous, and most of the world seems to think that stopping Putin is a just cause.
All military experts were baffled why Russia didn't use its air
superiority to decisively win in a few days
Really? Not the ones I follow. This is pretty cut and dried. Air superiority against Ukraine's air defenses would require some really hellacious SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) operations and a willingness to sustain some shocking and expensive (by modern standards) losses of fighter aircraft.
Russia has the ability to do neither of those things. They don't have stealthy aircraft, they don't have a lot of aircraft in general, and they can't afford those losses. I'm actually surprised that anybody would be surprised.
They clearly miscalculated since they thought Ukraine would surrender in days, and offered Zelensky a plane to fly out of there. They had expected to sacrifice the Ukrainian people by waging a years-long guerilla war arming neo-nazi groups with stingers and so on, just as they did the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Just for reference 2 million civilians died in the Afghan war we perpetuated just to stick it to the Soviets and “make them bleed for as long and as hard as possible”.
Whenever governments try to force others, it backfires:
1) Ukraine tried to force Donetsk and Luhansk to submit, bombed them and didn’t want to give them autonomy. Russia got involved and now Ukraine is in much worse shape.
2) Russia tried to force Ukraine to submit, stop bombing Donetsk and not join NATO. They rolled in with tanks, but USA and NATO got involved, and now Russia is stuck in a quagmire and is economically isolated from the West. Putin got the very NATO unity and expansion he feared.
3) The USA tried to force Europe and the rest of the world to sanction Russia “or else” economically, even (likely) blew up the gas pipelines so there would be no temptation to renew relations with Russia. Now US dollar hegemony is increasingly under threat, and going down from its peak. USA gets the very exodus from the dollar that it feared.
BRICS is an expanding economic alliance against USA just like NATO is a military alliance against Russia (and soon, QUAD will be a military alliance against China).
China is taking a leadership position in the world, it will likele reconcile Saudi Arabia and Iran (sunnis and shiites), end the war in Yemen, and take them both into BRICS. It will own the Middle East. BRICS already rivals G7 in economic size and far exceeds it in population but they are now working on bilateral trade and a basket of currencies to exit US dollar.
That means all that free stuff from abroad will be coming to an end and the dollar’s purchssing power will be lower, and less H1B visa scientists coming to boost our ranks.
It always backfires when you try to push people around. Better to simply listen to them and care about their issues.
They clearly miscalculated since they thought Ukraine
would surrender in days, and offered Zelensky a plane
to fly out of there
That's a contingency plan, not a miscalculation. Of course it makes sense to be prepared for as many possible outcomes as possible.
If Zelensky was willing to fight, we were ready to arm him. If Zelensky was not willing to fight, we were willing to offer him safety because he would be much more useful in American hands than Russian ones, and we would have armed insurgents.
To call this a "miscalculation" makes about as much sense as calling it a "miscalculation" to have fire extinguishers in your house if a fire never actually occurs.
They had expected to sacrifice the Ukrainian people
"Sacrificing" implies we're merely using them. This is a mutual arrangement. Nobody is forcing Ukraine to fight. They are willing, and we are arming and assisting them. No, it's not idealistic altruism but we share common goals.
It always backfires when you try to push people around.
Better to simply listen to them and care about their issues.
I don't disagree with the second half of your post, but it's a massive non-sequitur. Nobody is pushing Ukraine into fighting.
You logic is hard to follow. Can you explain why Ukraine suddenly invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, started to bomb Ukrainian cities and how Russia was involved into all that?
A politically charged example would be the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Supposedly it was a conspiracy theory too dangerous to even share … when in actuality it was legitimately his laptop. It was an unprecedented use of censorship that failed spectacularly.
This one is a real oddity-- in some context he said it wasn't his laptop, on the other hand he is suing the the guy for violating his privacy --which is plausible if say someone hacked into his actual laptop and stole his emails and photos and stored them on this laptop... but then people were claiming the emails were fake --and we had like 100 ex-intel saying it was Russian disinfo... and of course they now are backpedaling.
Normal people don’t care about the laptop story. They don’t care if he goes to prison or not. It’s not relevant to almost anyone.
Then Joe candidly spoke about his fucked up son — everyone cares about that. Eventually we all know or knew someone that can’t seem to get it together, often someone we love. I doubt US presidents are capable of love, that was probably as close as we’ll get. Meanwhile, anyone talking about the story after that starts to look like a monster.
Charge the guy, don’t charge him, who cares? I’m sure if there are solid charges a US Attorney will prosecute. There are 94 of them and Biden has only nominated 70, plenty left over from last admin to pursue it if they want (plus the 2 years they’ve had since the election).
Normal people don’t care, they are busy trying to survive and a brand new marker would run out of ink before you could draw a line from “president’s quiet failson” back to their life.
I used this politically inflammatory story because it was an example of the platforms literally censoring news. How is that not relevant to the discussion at hand? I didn’t mention “normal people” or if they should care about it, that’s orthogonal to the topic.
If normal people don’t care then why did 100 ex-intel guys bother to write an article claiming it was Russian disinformation at the risk of influencing a national election and ironically then actually influencing said election which they claimed was trying to be influenced by the Russkies?
By this logic, the WHO is permanently beholden (like: gun to the head) to China and India for exactly your rules. I don't agree. The mainland Chinese gov't did not cooperate. The world survived (mostly) due to excellent science (new vaccines).
> today's "conspiracy theory" is tomorrow's verified fact
Most popular conspiracy theories remain just that, if not provably false. Horrible events do not compute for most, and they reach for alternate answers.
> Conspiracy theories offer easy answers by casting the world as simpler and more predictable than it is. Their popularity may pose a threat to societal well-being.
> In fact (pun not intended), "conspiracy theory" has always been a term of propaganda and rhetoric.
Wow, just wow. I'm not sure if it is even possible to be more wrong about something than you are about this.
That vast majority of conspiracy theories remain exactly the type of garbage they started out as. I can't even imagine how you could come the position that they are some sort of billboard of truth, ignored by the masses. I mean you literally embedded a conspiracy theory into your stance that anybody who argues against a conspiracy theory(which is evidentially truth by definition) is one who is attempting to suppress the truth.
All of those subjects are just topics: a simple Bayesian classifier can identify those kinds of stories, arbitrating "the truth" (or lack-thereof) doesn't come into this. If empowered with this kind of filter I can assure you that I'd block-out stories about whoever this year's disgraced musician is, or whatever Prince Andrew's getting up to now, regardless of whether they're true or false.
It's not for society, it's for the author's specific needs. On Twitter, you can filter certain keywords you don't want to see. Why not build a tool to do that sort of thing for the entire web?
What's good about ChatGPT is that the bloggers like Seth will have hard time finding the audience for their empty, virtue-signalling rants. Anything that might raise a suspicion of being a product of AI will be instinctively filtered out by the users. Maybe this will be the start of a new era in journalism? :-)
Personally I think 10 years ago I would have found this content to be not that inspiring, feel like it didn't challenge enough. Today I feel like Seth does a reliable job of surfacing a lot of solid essential basic-ish ideas, but equivocating the idea well, and I find the world in dire need of essential basic sense. Seth is a reliable person illuminating the way.
Maybe the AI can outproduce him, but as a waymarkerof sense, Seth has been deeply reliable over a long period. Your position that the words matter, that this sense making can be co-opted seems foolish to me. Navigating the context of the world, as Seth does, & highlighting core essentials, is not a task I think we'll see real meaningful output from AI on. It will be a cheap pastiche assemblage with no broader sense, for a long time. A vaguely choosey averaging.
I'd counter ask everyone & yourself to ask, what are you signaling?
His mention of conspiracy theories triggered me :-)
"Conspiracy theory" is a label assigned to anything you disagree with.
I really need a button to automatically filter out bloggers complaining about "conspiracy theories". This expression alone betrays a phony.
Rather than inspiring, I find this content draining and anxiety-inducing. Instead of materially improving my life, it makes me feel inadequate compared to more successful people.
I'm becoming better at blocking and ignoring this content but there is still a long way to go.