2 ms·

> the brain treats information as a reward in itself; it doesn't matter whether the info is accurate or useful, the brain will still crave it and feel satisfied

> the brain treats information as a reward in itself; it doesn't matter whether the info is accurate or useful, the brain will still crave it and feel satisfied after consuming it This doesn't jive with me, what kind of information different people are attracted to is very different. I'd argue that the difference comes from the brain trying to classify what information is useful and then rewarding you for engaging with that useful information. So for example, at least for me TikTok isn't useful and thus doesn't engage me at all, its just irritating to try to get into it. But for many other people their brains obviously identifies TikTok differently than mine, likely seeing it as useful so rewards them for it. So the problem is information that most people misclassify as useful even when it isn't. It is like sweeteners, they don't give you calories but your taste buds still rewards you as if you did get a lot of calories. I'd say that isn't an obesity crisis though, people sit and eat those artificial sweetener information all day and thus starve out on real useful information since they don't get any of it.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
> TikTok isn't useful If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok. Yeah, most of the content is unproductive attention bait, but that's true of any medium. Yeah, some information compresses poorly and really does require irreducible minutes or pages. However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  Nothing is stopping you from putting a 10-second webm in that instruction manual, and has the advantage that you're not selling your soul to a company that probably hates you.
- skydhash 2y ago
  > If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok. What has grown is irrelevant information. We don't need compressed communication (which loose nuance and is dangerous, because it leads to erroneous understanding) or high bandwidth one (which doesn't lead to reflection and internalization). What we need is better filtering. Be conscious and mindful of what you're spending your time on. Instead of watching 500 hundreds video of making cakes, just buy a cookbook and go make cakes. > However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok. Short Training Videos existed before tiktok (I had a VHS tape for learning Windows and it was mostly a collection of these). But that's mostly like watching someone play a song on the piano and believing you can do it too. If you have a good memory, you can probably replay the same song, but you still can't play the piano. Some fields don't have that depth of theory. But books are still the best at transmitting it (watching an expert is best at understanding it).
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    It's funny that you're repeating my statements on other forms of media sometimes being more appropriate back to me as if I hadn't thought of the possibility, lol. Better filtering values compression. There are other concerns -- I mentioned them myself -- but compression is orthogonal and significant and TikTok progresses considerably on that front and if you don't see the value in it you're missing out in a big way.
  - unhingedcrouton 2y ago
    > What we need is better filtering. Better filtering, while useful, is a fools errand. What we really need is to remove the incentives to produce junk content. I have no idea how but I am pretty sure it is related to digital ~~cancer~~ advertising.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > But books are still the best at transmitting it 1:1 interactive training from an expert is far better than reading a book, it just doesn't scale.
ffwd 2y ago
I agree and I think if there are any hazards to modern information landscape it's kind of 2 fold (that I can think of) 1) the brain likes simple generalized information/models more than specific information and 2) the brain likes information that confirms our existing beliefs more than staying in a gray area where it's not sure what information is true or not. Regarding first one I think one of the main challenges will be finding which general explanations are true or not. This can be anything from cultural things like gender discussions to conspiracy theories to scientific theories. If there are generalized models that explain a lot of phenomena, the brain likes those, but at the same time they can also take the place for when empirical evidence should have been gathered (that doesn't fit with the general model), and so in that sense they can be hazardous. And models that already have stood up to a lot of empirical data are especially hazardous because they have already proven themselves to some extent which means there's even less incentive to gather empirical data. Or at least that's my current (maybe hazardous) general view. I also don't think we should give up on generalized models because they are so powerful and useful, but it's definitely a challenge in todays climate because they get so many clicks and they are very satisfying to know.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  I love conspiracy theories. Delectible little mixtures of fiction and non fiction with lots of individual parts to be analysed. Useless information but fun to think about... like a video game. My favourite is bigfoot being an interdimensional being that communicates via infrasonics.
johnisgood 2y ago
Yeah, if anything, watching TikTok would make me feel guilty for having wasted my time. It does not work for me for entertainment either.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  I feel the same, especially since I've actively avoided TikTok after first trying it out shortly after the Musical.ly rebrand. What makes it worse is literally _every_ other social media network baking the a TikTok clone into their existing apps; Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, the list goes on and on. So even though I've avoided TikTok, I can't stop this garbage dopamine-slop content from being shoved in my face. Especially egregious is SnapChat, which immediately moves you to their version of TikTok and autoplays videos after you finish checking your friends stories, with no warning. I always feel like utter garbage after falling down these rabbitholes; That's time I can never get back, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Thankfully more and more people are seeing the issues caused by these social networks, so going full cold-turkey and uninstalling the worst offenders isn't unheard of and isn't as much of a blow to one's social circle as it once was.
Lisdexamfeta 2y ago
I think the essay is really speaking to a particular type of person, one whom is described in Tyler Cowen's book The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. This sort of person is probably reasonably common on HN (and that help explain the upvotes for the essay) but not super common in the broader and larger population. The real kind of underlying question is about how to be most effective.
- stevenAthompson 2y ago
  I believe that's generally referred to as the "assumed similarity bias", and does appear to be what's going on here. I recently read someplace that only 54% of Americans read at least one full book last year, and that includes audiobooks. It doesn't seem to me like a world full of infovores.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    That assumes reading a book is the sole source of information. While it's true that books are a treasure trove of information, someone that scours the Internet all day long for bits of information and reads zero books would be an uncounted infovore in that statistic.
    - stevenAthompson 2y ago
      I don't mean to imply that books are the ONLY way to consume information, just that reading correlates strongly with being an information addict and that many people don't read at all. Therefore, it seems to me, many people are not infovores.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Sure, many people don't read books, and thus many people are not infovores, but I think that most people are, or a larger percentage than you think, when you consider how much different information is out there. The Earth's radius being roughly 6400 Km is one kind of information, but so is knowing which of my friends is selling a washer/dryer. Even if they're not reading a book but listening to a video on tiktok, or a picture on Instagram, they're still picking up information like which celebrity is dating whom, and who's wearing which brand of luxury handbag, or which sports team beat the other sports team, and while you may not value that information highly, it's information that's valuable in their world.

schmidtleonard 2y ago

> TikTok isn't useful If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok. Yeah, most of the content is unproductive attention bait, but that's true of any medium. Yeah, some information compresses poorly and really does require irreducible minutes or pages. However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok.

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
Nothing is stopping you from putting a 10-second webm in that instruction manual, and has the advantage that you're not selling your soul to a company that probably hates you.
skydhash 2y ago
> If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok. What has grown is irrelevant information. We don't need compressed communication (which loose nuance and is dangerous, because it leads to erroneous understanding) or high bandwidth one (which doesn't lead to reflection and internalization). What we need is better filtering. Be conscious and mindful of what you're spending your time on. Instead of watching 500 hundreds video of making cakes, just buy a cookbook and go make cakes. > However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok. Short Training Videos existed before tiktok (I had a VHS tape for learning Windows and it was mostly a collection of these). But that's mostly like watching someone play a song on the piano and believing you can do it too. If you have a good memory, you can probably replay the same song, but you still can't play the piano. Some fields don't have that depth of theory. But books are still the best at transmitting it (watching an expert is best at understanding it).
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  It's funny that you're repeating my statements on other forms of media sometimes being more appropriate back to me as if I hadn't thought of the possibility, lol. Better filtering values compression. There are other concerns -- I mentioned them myself -- but compression is orthogonal and significant and TikTok progresses considerably on that front and if you don't see the value in it you're missing out in a big way.
- unhingedcrouton 2y ago
  > What we need is better filtering. Better filtering, while useful, is a fools errand. What we really need is to remove the incentives to produce junk content. I have no idea how but I am pretty sure it is related to digital ~~cancer~~ advertising.
- fragmede 2y ago
  > But books are still the best at transmitting it 1:1 interactive training from an expert is far better than reading a book, it just doesn't scale.

ffwd 2y ago

I agree and I think if there are any hazards to modern information landscape it's kind of 2 fold (that I can think of) 1) the brain likes simple generalized information/models more than specific information and 2) the brain likes information that confirms our existing beliefs more than staying in a gray area where it's not sure what information is true or not. Regarding first one I think one of the main challenges will be finding which general explanations are true or not. This can be anything from cultural things like gender discussions to conspiracy theories to scientific theories. If there are generalized models that explain a lot of phenomena, the brain likes those, but at the same time they can also take the place for when empirical evidence should have been gathered (that doesn't fit with the general model), and so in that sense they can be hazardous. And models that already have stood up to a lot of empirical data are especially hazardous because they have already proven themselves to some extent which means there's even less incentive to gather empirical data. Or at least that's my current (maybe hazardous) general view. I also don't think we should give up on generalized models because they are so powerful and useful, but it's definitely a challenge in todays climate because they get so many clicks and they are very satisfying to know.

mikrotikker 2y ago
I love conspiracy theories. Delectible little mixtures of fiction and non fiction with lots of individual parts to be analysed. Useless information but fun to think about... like a video game. My favourite is bigfoot being an interdimensional being that communicates via infrasonics.

johnisgood 2y ago

Yeah, if anything, watching TikTok would make me feel guilty for having wasted my time. It does not work for me for entertainment either.

DaSHacka 2y ago
I feel the same, especially since I've actively avoided TikTok after first trying it out shortly after the Musical.ly rebrand. What makes it worse is literally _every_ other social media network baking the a TikTok clone into their existing apps; Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, the list goes on and on. So even though I've avoided TikTok, I can't stop this garbage dopamine-slop content from being shoved in my face. Especially egregious is SnapChat, which immediately moves you to their version of TikTok and autoplays videos after you finish checking your friends stories, with no warning. I always feel like utter garbage after falling down these rabbitholes; That's time I can never get back, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Thankfully more and more people are seeing the issues caused by these social networks, so going full cold-turkey and uninstalling the worst offenders isn't unheard of and isn't as much of a blow to one's social circle as it once was.

Lisdexamfeta 2y ago

I think the essay is really speaking to a particular type of person, one whom is described in Tyler Cowen's book The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. This sort of person is probably reasonably common on HN (and that help explain the upvotes for the essay) but not super common in the broader and larger population. The real kind of underlying question is about how to be most effective.

stevenAthompson 2y ago
I believe that's generally referred to as the "assumed similarity bias", and does appear to be what's going on here. I recently read someplace that only 54% of Americans read at least one full book last year, and that includes audiobooks. It doesn't seem to me like a world full of infovores.
- fragmede 2y ago
  That assumes reading a book is the sole source of information. While it's true that books are a treasure trove of information, someone that scours the Internet all day long for bits of information and reads zero books would be an uncounted infovore in that statistic.
  - stevenAthompson 2y ago
    I don't mean to imply that books are the ONLY way to consume information, just that reading correlates strongly with being an information addict and that many people don't read at all. Therefore, it seems to me, many people are not infovores.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Sure, many people don't read books, and thus many people are not infovores, but I think that most people are, or a larger percentage than you think, when you consider how much different information is out there. The Earth's radius being roughly 6400 Km is one kind of information, but so is knowing which of my friends is selling a washer/dryer. Even if they're not reading a book but listening to a video on tiktok, or a picture on Instagram, they're still picking up information like which celebrity is dating whom, and who's wearing which brand of luxury handbag, or which sports team beat the other sports team, and while you may not value that information highly, it's information that's valuable in their world.