Fatherhood

`3:18:14`

The Goldilocks version of the algorithm. Well, the problem is the algorithm finds out what you respond to-... not what you say you like. It's all revealed preferences, and unfortunately, those revealed preferences are not always pretty. I mean, we have this shadow, as Jung talks about, right? All these dark aspects of ourselves, and they are expressed in how long you linger on a tweet, and what you like, and what you don't like. And the algorithm holds up a mirror-... and it's not always pretty, and I just went, "Do you know what? I need a break."

`3:19:00`

That's actually a method I was using for a while. I was using a tool called, I forget. It was an email tool that would summarize every day, and unfortunately, freaking X cut off their access. Now to get access to the feed, you gotta pay some exorbitant-... sum that this startup couldn't pay. So I couldn't get it that way, and I actually thought, "Man, that's a miss," because X has and reveals some of the most interesting thoughts. Some of the most interesting people all the time. But it's like a damn slot machine, and most of the time you don't hit the jackpot. You hit, like, something else. And if I could just get it in sort of snack sizes, not like all of it-... it'd be nicer. But that's not the product. And I think this goes for all of social media. It's all optimized towards maximal extraction, and if we're making the parallels here to AI, that is the great fear, right? That once there is a reward function, how much time can I get this human to scroll away? AI and machine learning, before we called it AI, has become very, very good at delivering just the stuff that you will find most enraging and most addictive.

`3:20:31`

So I try to consciously flood the channel in the other direction, and this required a mental shift. I think if you look at my tweets, like, I don't know, five, 10 years ago, they tilted far more negative. If you look at my tweets now, I'd hope-... well, I guess we can do a sentiment analysis and see if it's actually true.

`3:20:55`

... it's more, it's more positive. It's more good vibes. It's more like, "Here's a bunch of cool stuff I found." "Here's what I'm excited about." "Here's what I'm building. Here's some encouragement to other people who are discovering things." I also accept that that is just not how human brains are built for maximum, engagement. Like, there is a, whatever, there's... I literally, I think you can quantify that negative sentiments find, what is it, 50% more traction or something? And eventually that just crowds things out. So that's why so much of the feed is that negative stuff, because we respond to it. But you can make a conscious effort to not do that. This is one of the reasons I've liked TikTok so much. I only use TikTok when I travel, and this actually was the first travel where I didn't use TikTok, and part of the reason was that even though the internet had high download, it was kind of crap anyway. It wasn't Starlink, so I couldn't actually use TikTok on the, on the plane, and I was too engrossed with the agents. But normally when I travel, I watch TikTok. And there it's such a marshmallow test. A video will scroll down and, like, it'll activate some sort of primal instincts of rage or lust or whatever, and if you linger on it, you don't get the marshmallow of science, excitement, art, music, all these other things. You have to be disciplined-

`3:22:21`

... to instantly scroll away-... such that the algorithm doesn't pick up your real preferences. And I find that just to, at the meta game of TikTok-... to be pretty interesting, and then also just fascinating in themself. Again, as we talked about, there are a lot of really funny, really talented people in the world that you would never, ever have heard of if it hadn't been for these platforms.