3 ms·

> A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my doma

> A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist. This is such a nice quote, and really straight to the point. I love it. I think social media and how it is designed as a game bugs me a lot, because the more I try to understand the mechanics behind it, the more I feel like I don't understand anything at all. The human species is a very emotional one, and is ragebaited very easily (myself included), given the right parameters are known from an OSINT perspective. The internet right now is a social system, which kind of implies that it always needs an emotional context, like where the people debating it are coming from, how they've been primed into their opinion with their own experience, and what the context means in a transferred perspective of another area of expertise. And that is somewhat orthogonal to how science works, where the more experience we gain, the more we understand how less we know, which actually means that more experienced people have less intention to do further research, because it's a net negative reward system. And I think this is somewhat a huge problem, because the lack of transparency of these emotional contexts makes things on the internet attackable in the sense that they can be rage baited, frowned upon, derailed into non-mattering discussions etc. The most rational statement can be shat into oblivion over minor wordings mistakes, which doesn't make sense from the perspective of rationality - as if every human on the internet claims to be perfect by default unless proven otherwise. And we all know that a lot of people are constantly in the news for something that they said or did in the past. It's like a witch hunt out there, and I don't understand how we as a society can even tolerate that, let alone embrace it by viewing, sharing or liking it. Social media also does not reflect gains in experience over time, as everything "has to be in the moment", otherwise it would not work as a system. (I wanna point to Chamsky's ideas about propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 here). The optimum social media post is the one with the most ridiculous claims and the least amount of scientific evidence, while also being total hyperbole in an emotional context that's abused for marketing purposes. So yeah, overall I think I am just frustated by the state of things, but I also have no clue how we can collectively solve it in a sustainable and communital (?) manner.

6510 2y ago
They put a arcade shaped device in an elderly home that showed life expectancy based on the food served and blood work. (I'm not really sure what the machine did, maybe it also took blood samples.) The elderly could enter what parts of the meal they skipped, additional things they ate or planned to eat then got a graph showing the life expectancy for someone their age on that diet. It was probably crappy science but the response was hilarious. One old man said that before the machine was installed he never ate salads in his life and didn't care much for vegetables. Another ate fast food several days per week and said the machine took all the joy out of it. It's just not enjoyable enough to lose years over. It was hilarious what a feedback process does. I think it entirely possible for human dialog to produce useful practical results. I know it is possible. It normally takes a bit of will power and/or vision to get the joy of accomplishment but the endorphins are so much more potent than those triggered by a tik tok video. We use to have forums where people asked and answered questions. When people stopped bothering to say thanks, limited participation to 1 post, then stopped answering, then stopped asking and finally forgot how the process even worked I wrote out this idea in the comment section of the official yahoo 360 blog: It was to force users into that pattern by requiring the top post to be a question and the responses answers. A point system, ranks badges. Pretty much exactly what yahoo answers was. The more questions you ask or answers you give the more points you score. There are no dumb questions. They made it exactly the way I described except from the monetization. You can put ads on it but the idea was to sell the answers as a service to big companies. You will inevitably have a million Microsoft office questions and answers. At some point MS should be willing to put their name on it and shape the service to fit their brand, allow login with an MS account etc. They don't have to, it doesn't have to be expensive, there are plenty of companies with horrible documentation. I don't pretend to have invented q&a or the answers platform I just fooled around with the idea. Before came google answers, after came stack overflow. I totally haven't figured out how to quantify but I'm sure people can be forced into a pattern where we have constructive dialog that leads to actions/projects/accomplishments/achievements. All that is needed is feedback, a sense of progress in the process, seeing a goal come closer. I don't want it to be a game but if that is what it takes. That things online have turned to shit is actually wonderful. Before things can improve first they have to get worse. There is this huge vacuum now where our ambitions use to be. If figured out all it takes is a bit of code :) (What I consider) a truly wild thought I've kept to myself. With LLMs you should be able to do many-to-one communication. The internet only has one-to-many. (With everyone screaming to be the one) It should be possible to have a constructive exchange of thoughts between millions of people, merge similar statements, have stuff float to the top, etc. The LLM doesn't have to be intelligent, it only needs to help glue the collective human intelligence together and make it do useful things. If we can effectively organize that much feedback there might be no point in doing anything on your own or with a small team. If enough people enjoy the process money or ROI also stops being an issue.

6510 2y ago

They put a arcade shaped device in an elderly home that showed life expectancy based on the food served and blood work. (I'm not really sure what the machine did, maybe it also took blood samples.) The elderly could enter what parts of the meal they skipped, additional things they ate or planned to eat then got a graph showing the life expectancy for someone their age on that diet. It was probably crappy science but the response was hilarious. One old man said that before the machine was installed he never ate salads in his life and didn't care much for vegetables. Another ate fast food several days per week and said the machine took all the joy out of it. It's just not enjoyable enough to lose years over. It was hilarious what a feedback process does. I think it entirely possible for human dialog to produce useful practical results. I know it is possible. It normally takes a bit of will power and/or vision to get the joy of accomplishment but the endorphins are so much more potent than those triggered by a tik tok video. We use to have forums where people asked and answered questions. When people stopped bothering to say thanks, limited participation to 1 post, then stopped answering, then stopped asking and finally forgot how the process even worked I wrote out this idea in the comment section of the official yahoo 360 blog: It was to force users into that pattern by requiring the top post to be a question and the responses answers. A point system, ranks badges. Pretty much exactly what yahoo answers was. The more questions you ask or answers you give the more points you score. There are no dumb questions. They made it exactly the way I described except from the monetization. You can put ads on it but the idea was to sell the answers as a service to big companies. You will inevitably have a million Microsoft office questions and answers. At some point MS should be willing to put their name on it and shape the service to fit their brand, allow login with an MS account etc. They don't have to, it doesn't have to be expensive, there are plenty of companies with horrible documentation. I don't pretend to have invented q&a or the answers platform I just fooled around with the idea. Before came google answers, after came stack overflow. I totally haven't figured out how to quantify but I'm sure people can be forced into a pattern where we have constructive dialog that leads to actions/projects/accomplishments/achievements. All that is needed is feedback, a sense of progress in the process, seeing a goal come closer. I don't want it to be a game but if that is what it takes. That things online have turned to shit is actually wonderful. Before things can improve first they have to get worse. There is this huge vacuum now where our ambitions use to be. If figured out all it takes is a bit of code :) (What I consider) a truly wild thought I've kept to myself. With LLMs you should be able to do many-to-one communication. The internet only has one-to-many. (With everyone screaming to be the one) It should be possible to have a constructive exchange of thoughts between millions of people, merge similar statements, have stuff float to the top, etc. The LLM doesn't have to be intelligent, it only needs to help glue the collective human intelligence together and make it do useful things. If we can effectively organize that much feedback there might be no point in doing anything on your own or with a small team. If enough people enjoy the process money or ROI also stops being an issue.