Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideosSocial

First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones

Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a... See more

Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

sari azout • My Favorite Questions

Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the w... See more

nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times

A personality sketch of the marginal user

Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about the marginal user. Let’s call him Marl. The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headlin... See more

Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User

Jordan Schneider: I want to come back to Her and companionship. Will this put therapists out of business?

Tyler Cowen: A lot of people like the human therapist as a kind of placebo, even if they know it's not more effective than the AI. But I would guess this will cut the demand for therapists by a quarter, maybe a third.

Tyler Cowen • Tyler Cowen on AI and China

some studies have failed to find evidence of harm. One well-known study reported that the association of digital media use with harmful psychological outcomes was so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as the association of “eating potatoes” with such harms.[5] But when Jean Twenge and I reanalyzed the same data sets and zoomed in on th

Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The rise of trigger warnings and other forms of acquiescence behind which the left has zealously rallied for more than a decade has backfired spectacularly, by fostering a sense of harm that often does not exist. Richard Alan Friedman, a professor5 of clinical psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College, said in an interview that, beginning in 2016