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Social media damages your brain and sabotages your potential (Jonathan Blow) | Blow Fan | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Social media damages your brain and sabotages your potential (Jonathan Blow)
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have I heard of carbon my response is
please stop bothering me about the Apple
about what is my opinion
about blubber blop Linux
drro so
guys the carbon question this is this is
triggering me
here not because of anything to do with
carbon at
all it is the following thing guys the
fact that multiple people have this question
question
is it's a product of the current
Internet environment that we have
built which is
about propagating
shallow news at very high speed and
things just sort
of you know go into and out of being vog
to talk
about what is the current thing this
week right and the thing that you should
realize is if you zoom out and see that
pattern ignore particular instances but
if you zoom out and look at that pattern
as a whole pattern and what comes from
it almost none of those things are very
important by
definition and therefore you know
because they only lasted a day or a
week therefore if this is a major source
of where you get your ideas from or what
you think about things or what you're
interested in you're preventing
yourself from having high quality
thoughts in a certain sense and this is
very serious to me I mean a little bit
of it's fine right but you know I'm here
on the twitch Channel and every time
there's a new thing people are asking me
about it so like in aggregate the twitch
chat brain is a brain that has a very
poor information diet as another way to
say it and that shouldn't be that
surprising but it is how it is right um
this will actually keep you from being a
really good programmer in the long term
because it's the wrong kind of thought
it is
not like we need people who are
competent who and who can solve hard
problems and building competence is not
a short attention span thing and solving
hard problems is not a short attention
span thing so
we're just really not handling ourselves
very well with where
we place our mental
attention and this could have very large
consequences in the short
term like even within the next year or
two so so it bothers me that's all I'm
saying all about the hot takes a 70
calories yeah but even like hot take
implies controversial right but like people
people
almost don't know or care
anymore that there's something to do
with your attention besides go on
Twitter and see or go on Hacker News or
Reddit and see what people are talking
about right this
second and the problem is done over
years that's going to damage your
brain not no exaggeration that's it may
have already damaged your
brain hopefully in a way that
recoverable but um damage absolutely and
I'm I'm speaking from experience from
both this phenomenon and previous ones
right so I was doing I do less Twitter
than a lot of people but I was doing a
fair amount of it and like it's just a
way you know if you're not feeling 100%
motivated and you want to just kind of
casually do some stuff while you work
today it's very easy to go on like
Twitter or whatever and read some stuff
and I was noticing that my attention
span was pretty short for a lot of
things it wasn't short for programming
still I was doing fine at programming
but I think that's because I built all
my programming
habits um but like I didn't want to read a
a
book right and in fact or I would claim
that I wanted to read a book and then
wouldn't read much for like a
year and
then you know like that has consequences
just on on your mental
development now that part I fixed um but
you know I grew up before the internet
so what happens to somebody who's like
10 year old 10 years old today right now
I did not grow up before television and
back during the television
days when people watch TV which I did a
lot there was this commonly thing like
oh don't watch too much television it'll
rot your brain right and we were kind of
sarcastic about it we said oh you know
whatever in retrospect that was totally
right it did rot all of our brains and
um I probably would actually be
measurably smarter today if I hadn't
spent so much time watching television
and I probably would have been able to
do more faster in life and I probably
would be a lot more competent at what I
do like in a major way not not in like a
barely noticeable way like in a major
way is very clear to me when I look at
how I spent all my time back then that
that's the
case being honest about these things is
important and so I don't see why you
know I think the
modern internet stuff is worse than
television was cuz at least if you're
watching a shitty you know episode of
Airwolf or something I forget if that
was a half hour show or an hour
show but it it at least had
a a consistent narrative for the length
of its
runtime which is not something you get
from a lot of other
things do I think it affected my
intelligence yes I think I'm less smart
been probably it certainly affected my
ability to exercise my intelligence um
and therefore it took me a lot longer to
get where I would have otherwise been
sense there's not that much of a
difference between being smart and
knowing how to use your intelligence
Like You could argue for you know
whatever the Baseline biological
capacity is or whatever but
like it it became very clear to me at
some point that knowing how to use your
intelligence is a thing and if you don't
know how to use it you might as well not
have it it's probably hard to know how
much it rotted my brain no well but I
can look at how I spent my time back
then versus how I spend it
today and what the outcomes are twitch
audience member most interactions can
basically only be very superficial and
very simple yeah I mean it's true
but I mean let's let's take another one
of my pet peeve questions
the how do I get started programming
question right I hate that one as as
frequent viewers to this channel know
but it's still better because it's not
asking about gossip it's ostensively
asking about an actual skill that
somebody could practice and that has an
intrinsic benefit where like did you
hear about carbon or what did you think
about the M1 or whatever is just gossip
which has a function I mean the reason
human beings gossip is because gossip
has a a function but like there is such
a thing as way too much of that and
we're we're way down the way too
much you get the how to get started
question it can be overwhelming no I
don't think so I think anyone to be very
honest most people asking the how to get
started question are not programmers and
won't be it's like it's a self-filtering
question it's like if you're asking that
programmer that's another reason why it annoys
annoys
me even though you deleted all your
Social Media stuff four years ago when
you're demotivated it's so easy to find
a way to waste your day on use of stuff
like lurking on Twitch even YouTube
recommended videos are like one minute
Clips um yeah I mean I understand I
understand that mode right there is this
mode where you're not that
motivated and it's just very easy to get
the very
small feeling of reward of or
distraction or whatever from watching
these small videos and stuff for
sure um but then you feel worse after
that because then you spent the whole
[ __ ] day doing that 30 days in a row
or whatever so you know the trick there
there's two things right so one trick is
just to notice that pattern just see it
just keep seeing
it you don't even have to do anything
about it at first just keep seeing it
and then after enough seeing it um maybe
you eventually
can uh can know what to do like often if
you just keep observing the pattern
it'll naturally give you the ability to
break out of it because you'll just it
lets your subconscious wrestle with
what's going
though is to understand like okay you're
feeling demotivated or kind of bad or
kind of down right now so what like who cares
like is that really that big of a deal
and if it's not then why shouldn't you
just do whatever you would normally do
if you weren't feeling down that's
actually a very powerful mindset to have
right just whatever you're feeling is
just what you're feeling right now it
doesn't it doesn't have a lot more um
depth or consequence than
that and that's weird because we're in
the society that's often feeling
fetishist right like we have we have this
this
entire industry that wants you to go
talk about your feelings for $70 an hour
so of course they tell you that that's
how to solve your problems but uh you
know it's really
not the right way to solve them is just
to realize your feelings are just your
feelings and
um you know it's nice to have happy
feelings but by
definition we don't have Happy Feelings
all the time and so
just you know accepting that is actually very
very
powerful in engineering you call it
admiring the problem yeah yeah that's a
good way to say it it's not hard to put
the phone down but it's hard to stop
yourself from picking up instinctively
but you could increase the amount of
work required so for example you could
just power your phone
off so that if you pick it up you have
to like wait through a boot of the phone
right and then you put a SIM password do
whatever you need to do to fix that you
think it's pretty normal to ask and not
a sign of the downfall of society okay
well here's the
thing here's the
thing look
around at any technology that is not
software even software is in Decline but
it's kind of invisible you can't see the
inside of a program look
at Construction
what amazing buildings were built lately
compared to what was built in the past
look at Transportation what
transportation systems were built lately
compared to what was built in the past
um look at engineering what new sources
of energy technology were invented
compared to what was invented in the past
past
um Material Science all this stuff um
sometimes like with Material Science you
may have limited knowledge of the field
but you know that's what your computer's
for you can look it
up um we kind of haven't been doing that
much for 30 or 40 years is what you
probably find with some notable outliers
right so one dude is responsible for
electric cars and [ __ ] rocket ships
okay um if that dude weren't
there you can imagine what the progress
of both of those fields would
it is very very obvious if you just look
all you have to do is just look we are
not building a lot of Hoover dams or
Golden Gate bridges or anything like
happened and it's it's
major we lost our ability to do certain
classes of things or lost the will to do
them and after enough not doing them the
ability goes away anyway because these
things are hard and you need to practice
them in order to know how to do them
dude we don't okay when was the last
time the USA actually won a war by the
way we spend more than any other Nation
on Earth on the military when was the
last time we actually succeeded
completely at a military
there
so here's what I'm saying
here's the thing is that has a
cause and the cause is what we or part
of the cause is what we as a culture
accept and decide is
okay and how we decide what to do right
and so when I say something like I don't
think it's a good idea to gossip about
new programming languages that nobody
knows anything about it's part of that
I'm saying this is part of who we are
now that is not
good like all these things that I
mentioned our inability to make progress
departments is not
orthogonal to how we decide to spend our
not and you have to fix what you can fix
right I'm not in charge of the federal
government I wouldn't know how to be in
charge of the federal government but you
have to fix what you can fix and so
that's where I'm coming
from also by the way so part of what's
feeding my distaste for the what do you
think about this new programming
language question is I know that people
have that about what I'm doing and I've
seen a little bit of it I try to stay
away from all of that but almost 100% of
the commentary is just
misinformed has a completely incorrect
idea of what I'm doing and why certainly
to the extent it's informed it tends to
be very old and out of date like
informed by those early videos which are
very very different compared to what the
language is today
um and agenda driven and but it's not a
mistake that this information is
inaccurate because people the the
utility for most people is not in
whether the information is true or false
the utility is in whether they can use
the information
as scoring for their team their
political team which for programmers is
often a programming language or
programming Paradigm thing um and or
just to boost their ego and so almost
all the information when people are
gossiping about what I do is complete
trash so
therefore there's no reason to expect
all the gossip about anything else not
to be complete trash as well that's what
I'm saying is like you're engaging in
swimming in
trash now there is such a thing as high
quality discussion about that sort of
thing but that would require you to go
program in this language for a year or
two and me to go program in this
language for a year or two and then we
conversation otherwise it's
pointless right isn't that how a lot of
information in news actually are you
mean the swimming in trash yes that's
part of my point
like even mainstream news is this thing
that I'm talking about now [Music]
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