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Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few movies I've recently watched have bee

Thank you for this advice. Upon some self-reflection, I think I realize now that I've fallen into this exact trap. The few movies I've recently watched have been the kind of formulaic drivel that I know I'm sick of, and yet I've never felt any desire to watch genres I'm not already familiar with. I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things while doing absolutely nothing to challenge or improve that perception - and all the while I'm longing for some nostalgic idea of the past.

squidsoup 4y ago
> I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things Oh, you're going to love Béla Tarr, maybe start there.
- vmladenov 4y ago
  It’s a bit fiendish to nudge an unsuspecting victim towards Satantango like that :P
didericis 4y ago
I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas. I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend. That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.

squidsoup 4y ago

> I seem to get some perverse kind of satisfaction from reinforcing my nihilistic view of the current state of things Oh, you're going to love Béla Tarr, maybe start there.

vmladenov 4y ago
It’s a bit fiendish to nudge an unsuspecting victim towards Satantango like that :P

didericis 4y ago

I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas. I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend. That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.