SuoDuanDao

I'm currently teaching Chinese high school students, and I don't buy it. There is certain content that's blocked here, but most of what's on the local tiktok is pretty trash either way because t's not the subjects, it's the format. You can try to surface more wholesome five-second videos but even if you succeed, they'll still be five-second videos.

Beyond a Free-for-all, ID-checked gates, or a sanitised platform there's a fourth option: you declare what you want less of and your own software enforces it against the platform's preferences.

Ads are everywhere. I really think the 'fight against advertising' needs more of an aiki bent than it has. Advertising is such a massive juggernaut, we have as much hope of stopping it as a naked person has of stopping a freight train whose operator doesn't slow down for suicides.

But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.

The trouble with adblocking is that it causes discomfort to a powerful party without making any demands. We withhold attention at scale, but we never say what we'd accept in exchange for giving it back. The only thing the advertisers can do is escalate, and they own most of the spaces we operate in.

There probably is a bargain - however faustian - to be struck. Advertising optimises for money transferred immediately over long term positive-sum introductions. It's obvious why they do that, but adblocking could be the leverage needed to encourage something more long-term beneficial for all.

What I can't work out is who the counterparty even is. My own hope is that Google and Meta face a 'kodak moment' - with genuinely better advertising simply overtaking their business. What I'm unsure about is how advertising's equivalent of the digital camera finds buyers - plenty of us want to walk away from advertising, and it's possible to adopt something less mutually destructive as a user... but the free stuff advertising currently pays for is not so easily replaced. Anyone have an idea what disruption would even look like in that space?

That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'.

I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?

This reminds me of 'friendzone' discussions - "if this guy keeps asking to date you when you've made it clear you're not interested, why talk to him at all?" -"Because he does all kinds of things for me that would be inconvenient to get elsewhere!"

I feel like there's a third way between 'regulate it' and 'stop using it'. Give the guy a reality check maybe. I heard the term 'make refusal legible rather than silent' and I think that applies to the situation very well, if Uber saw a more profitable - and less annoying - use of that space I'm sure they'd switch. Then again, I am working on an app that would do something like that so I'm probably biased towards seeing every problem with a matching shape.

I'm sapiosexual, so really hot and not all that clever can't co-occur from my perspective. But education is orthogonal to intelligence and really not a factor. I'd probably find e.g. an intelligent woman raised in a hunter-gatherer society more attractive than an equally intelligent woman educated in an academic field I don't respect.

10 000 hours is the number observed among elite performers (Olympic athletes, chess grandmasters, concert level musicians and the like) - I don't think most people complaining about the difficulty of contemporary dating are aiming to be in the top 1%.

I think you're onto something. It seems like thinking about 'meta-relationships' tends to depersonalize the individual interactions and devalue the individuals involved. It's as though successful relationships are a fitting problem, and looking at the macro environment strips out the individual quirks which optimize for one's own fit.

If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.

why was this flagged?

Spending more to reduce recidivism is like insulating your house - if you think you can't afford it, you probably can't afford not to do it.

Canada's internet companies are basically crown corporations. Squashing competition doesn't help the consumer as much as you might imagine.

I'd guess there is still more interest in moving to London proper than space for additional housing within the city though.

I'd say Jo Zayner's the closest to Tesla due to the showpersonship and self-experimentation in public.