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by syl_sau 1265 days ago
Yes, there's in fact an incentive mismatch here between the creator and the media. But it doesn't mean it wasn't there before to some extent. There are still great resources out there. So how do you spot them?

Information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. What I would aim for is focus. This is the big difference I think. If the content is selected for its quality, I'm in. And quality almost always mean quantity. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level.

Replace Twitter with internet forums, replace articles with books, instructional videos with real documentaries, etc. All these things call for your full attention, and that is, I believe, the most important. Paradoxically, I've found that the best "content producers" instinctively know this and don't spend much time on YT/social media.

1 comments

To be fair, I think the signal to noise ratio of your local branch library is a lot higher than what you’d find digitally these days
True but there is less signal available. It was much more effort and time consuming to learn. Now the effort is spent in filtering out the noise but it still seems like a net gain. Things like learning to cook or fix a bicycle, or find books and music are so much easier, despite the overwhelming amount of garbage/noise. At least that's my take as an adult who has lived in both worlds.
Yeah but turn your signal producer into one that has less noise and find out that the world is noisy and entropy wins in the end and that people are just other systems inside the system and all of it has it's own goals.

And so why bother? Embrace correlation, seed the world with noise, burn yourself up as you and all of it burns down and we wait for the telomeres to do the inevitable.