Three things that shook me awake to the idea that the information barrage of the internet is a tranquilizer/red herring:
- Bad Mental Health: At the start of the war in Ukraine I read/listened to the news every day. I’d frequently cry, hearing an interview from someone who was trapped in a bombed out building etc. After a few weeks I realized I was being emotionally exhausted by something around the world about which I had no control.
- Enshitification: Working for a b2b “tech/coding education web app” company as a data scientist and realizing the perversity of incentives which were ruining the product.
- Increasing Opportunity Cost: Working on LLMs and realizing that the possibilities for what I could do were expanding because I would now have more answers and information at my fingertips than ever before.
Great post… it was useful to be able to reflect and understand my experiences with these abstractions.
Three things that shook me awake to the idea that the information barrage of the internet is a tranquilizer/red herring:
- Bad Mental Health: At the start of the war in Ukraine I read/listened to the news every day. I’d frequently cry, hearing an interview from someone who was trapped in a bombed out building etc. After a few weeks I realized I was being emotionally exhausted by something around the world about which I had no control.
- Enshitification: Working for a b2b “tech/coding education web app” company as a data scientist and realizing the perversity of incentives which were ruining the product.
- Increasing Opportunity Cost: Working on LLMs and realizing that the possibilities for what I could do were expanding because I would now have more answers and information at my fingertips than ever before.
Great post… it was useful to be able to reflect and understand my experiences with these abstractions.