I think investing in [shortform] mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it’s not too annoying to write out :)
if you have in mind content like the highest-quality video essays on YouTube
Yep, that’s one of the things I’d be super excited about!!
To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :)
It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we’ve only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it’s worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)
My much belated reply! On why I think short-form social media like Twitter and TikTok are good money chasing after bad, i.e., the medium is so broken and ill-designed in these cases, I think the best option is to just quit these platforms and focus on long-form stuff like YouTube, podcasts, blogs/newsletters (e.g. Medium, Substack), or what-have-you.
The most eloquent critic of Twitter is Ezra Klein. An from a transcript of his podcast, an episode recorded in December 2022:
OK, Elon Musk and Twitter. Elon Musk — let me start with the part of this that I know and get to the part I don’t know. We’re talking in the aftermath of Musk tweeting that my pronouns are prosecute and Fauci. I wrote a piece when Musk announced that he was going to acquire Twitter that was all about the idea that it was going to be a more profound change and upheaval for that service to have it run by someone who liked what was worst about it than people realized. And I think that has proven true.
The thing — and this gets to the question that I have really been — I mean, I stopped tweeting back in April. I think I’ve tweeted a couple of times since then and then once a month or something occasionally. I think my last actual tweet was in maybe October, something like that. So I don’t really use Twitter anymore. And that’s been good for me.
But I go back and forth on this question as people have been looking for an alternative, and there isn’t really one. Mastodon, which people talk about, that’s not a Twitter alternative. It’s something very different. Should we want that? Should we want a thing that does what Twitter does, but is not Twitter or is not run by Elon Musk or something of that nature? And I’m not sure that we should.
I think it is worth people really reflecting on this idea that in a matter of roughly two decades, social media has gone from being barely a thing at all to something used by billions and billions of people around the world. I mean, it has become a civilizational fact faster than almost anything in human history. And something operating that macro of a scale should show some civilizational effect.
If it is good, we should be able to say, well, this is what has gotten better. GDP is growing faster because we’re sharing so many more ideas, and so innovation is sped up. Or we’re more humane and gentle and compassionate towards one another because we’re able to see each other across boundary and faction and country and generation. We’re kinder because we’re sharing so much more. We’re happier because we’re so much more connected.
Something, something should have gotten better. And I would say — and I think the evidence is very clear — nothing has. You cannot point to one macro indicator that has gotten substantially better, faster, anything, in the time since social media came on the scene. And I’m not saying that is 100 percent the fault of social media, but I am saying that it implies, at least, there is not some gigantic value here, that before it was offered to us, we were really struggling.
So that’s one thing. I think it’s really worth asking, why hasn’t something been better? And my answer to this, which I’ve kind of played with for a long time and finally wrote up, is that the flip side of all of this information and connection has been distraction and irritation.
That we have more that we can know and more that we can see and more content to consume, but what we don’t have is a space for reflection. What we don’t have are the habits of mind that tend to help us absorb a difficult question in the best way and come to a good view on it. What we don’t have are the sort of temperaments and virtues, something that is helping us have the virtues of how we live small D democratically or civically with one another.
Twitter is one of many things that are not good for that. It’s not the only one, and I don’t think this should only be a conversation about Twitter, though I do think Twitter is unusually central to politics and media and technology. And honestly, if you just want to look at everything I am saying in miniature, look at Elon Musk. You can go back in time and watch his interviews and look at the things he’s done.
And I have not, over time, been a Musk hater. There’s many things he’s said that have annoyed me over the years, things he’s done that have annoyed me, ways in which I don’t think he’s a great person. But he also did very important things, built very important things, rockets and cars and solar panels and so on. Does he seem to anybody like he’s more focused on the important questions in life and more able to hear things from people he disagrees with and able to absorb in a space of generosity and focus that his attention span is doing really well right now?
I mean, you can watch the effect it has had solely on him. And I think just generalize that out, I think a real tragedy of Twitter is that Musk is a man with many failings and many strengths. And it has amplified his failings and obsessed him with things that it is not good for him to be obsessed with, like the amount of social feedback he gets.
And that is going to completely overwhelm many of his strengths and many of the good effects he could have had on the world, or was even having on the world. This is not going to be good and has not been good for Tesla. And I think Tesla is and was an important company making electric vehicles cooler, more widely acceptable, and hastening a transition to them. But he’s making Tesla poisoned among many of the people who should be most excited to buy a Tesla.
So, all that said, I wonder a lot if it is good to have a Twitter. I think a lot of us are now so used to it that you think, well, what we need is something else like it, but a bit better. Maybe we don’t need something like it. Maybe a platform that condenses everybody’s thoughts down to bumper sticker bluntness is actually just not a good thing. Its structural build is a bad build, that the idea that we should come to expect thoughts to be that short, that we should train our minds for that kind of novelty.
I mean, back in the day, I was always amazed at how easy it was for me to waste time on the internet or on my phone. I would read articles on newspapers and so on. And then as each successive social media network got better, I enjoyed wasting time reading articles. And now I look at single images, and I don’t really do TikTok, but in theory, TikToks or tweets or whatever, and that habituation of the brain to novelty and to simplicity, I don’t think is a good thing for me, and I don’t think a good thing, broadly.
So I would like to imagine things that are valuable in part and are widely used in part, not because they are so good at grabbing our attention from us, but in some way, they feed our attention back to us. They help center us a little bit, that the habits of mind they encourage or habits of mind that we want. And maybe nothing staring at your phone is really like that. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s at least a question I want to play with.
Maybe if you’re going to insist on distracting yourself while you’re standing in line at the grocery by staring at your phone, there’s no habit of mind that I think is a great one that is going to be encouraged by that. And the fact that I constantly do it is the problem and asking somebody to fix it for me without me changing my fundamental behavior is also the problem. But I think what has happened in social media at this point is a little bit tragic.
And it’s most tragic because so few people seem willing to say that even though I don’t like how this looks, my being here is what sustains it in its current form. And I think until people get over the collective action problem, that you have to leave before everybody else has left in order for it to be OK for everybody else to leave. We’re a little bit stuck, but I don’t think we’re going to be stuck forever. I’m a little surprised by how long we have been stuck for, though.
My life immediately improved after I quit Twitter in early 2021. In retrospect, I see Twitter as a harmful addiction. On the extremely rare few occasions where I’ve dipped into looking at Twitter since then, it’s always made me feel really yucky and frazzled afterward. But I still feel why it’s addictive.
The same overall critique can be applied to TikTok without many modifications. Serious discourse on TikTok suffers in the same ways as on Twitter, for the same reasons.
And any Twitter copycat, such as Bluesky, or TikTok copycat, such as Instagram Reels, has the same problems, since they’ve deliberately copied those platforms as closely as possible, including what makes them bad.
I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it’s not too annoying to write out :)
Yep, that’s one of the things I’d be super excited about!!
To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :)
It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we’ve only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it’s worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)
My much belated reply! On why I think short-form social media like Twitter and TikTok are good money chasing after bad, i.e., the medium is so broken and ill-designed in these cases, I think the best option is to just quit these platforms and focus on long-form stuff like YouTube, podcasts, blogs/newsletters (e.g. Medium, Substack), or what-have-you.
The most eloquent critic of Twitter is Ezra Klein. An from a transcript of his podcast, an episode recorded in December 2022:
My life immediately improved after I quit Twitter in early 2021. In retrospect, I see Twitter as a harmful addiction. On the extremely rare few occasions where I’ve dipped into looking at Twitter since then, it’s always made me feel really yucky and frazzled afterward. But I still feel why it’s addictive.
The same overall critique can be applied to TikTok without many modifications. Serious discourse on TikTok suffers in the same ways as on Twitter, for the same reasons.
And any Twitter copycat, such as Bluesky, or TikTok copycat, such as Instagram Reels, has the same problems, since they’ve deliberately copied those platforms as closely as possible, including what makes them bad.
I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.