I recently interviewed a dentist. You may find the text insightful. Note that this is not necessarily representative of the experience of all dentists. My reasons for doing so are listed on the “about” page of the linked website.
> “ Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.” “
I know people who cut themselves because of Instagram and not feeling adequate enough. I think there’s a similar version of this with competency for males. The feeling that you will never be good at what you do or that you need to do something to get there just hasn’t been exploited yet.
Checking out the Wikipedia page, it seems quite useful, but more observational (like, liked people do x, and that seems a contributor to their likability not a product). I don’t know how to translate that into a poster, though.
This makes me think about who we revere as scientists and who we compare ourselves to.
A lot of success in life is out of our control. Conditions produce outliers, not diligence and hard work (Outlier X probably did work hard, but the conditions were so for their nervous system to act as such).
If you have a good understanding of how to hack YouTube (or other social sites) that seems plausible. Some list video channels appear to have crossed that mark (I bet a well trained GAN or GPT-3 could easily reproduce content of that quality—it’s not about talent of any sort). Though actually doing that could be considered unethical, as it would be contributing to the wire heading of children (who else watches list videos?) to an algorithm obsessed with watch time optimization.
I've heard it used as an explanation for our species level sense of camaraderie and cooperation. A near extinction event may have been one of the best things to ever happen to us. (I don't entirely agree, but it's an interesting thought)
> “I realized that those ants were badasses and terminally cool”
Ants don’t seem to care about legacy: one ant is pretty much the same as every other one and each life isn’t that important to the functioning of their community. All they seem to care about is the good of the colony and doing their job well. Ants are amazing creatures.
I hope the creatures we are ants to see us the same way.
Person in US school system here. I’ve had to use Chromebooks for school, and all I can think about is what Richard Stallman would do if he were in the US school system right now.
I really wish I started with lisp, the unity of the whole language teaches you that you’re not just telling a computer what to do, you’re making abstractions on top of the base language.