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I tend to think of myself as immune to rage-baiting/click-baiting/general toxicity from social media and politics. I generally don't engage in arguments on classic culture war topics on the internet, and I knowingly avoid consuming much news on the grounds that it will make me feel worse without inducing meaningful change.
But I recently realized that the phenomenon has slightly broader implications: presumably in any medium, outrage is just more attractive to the human brain, and conflicts are entertaining, especially ones where you can take a side or criticize both sides.
This made me realize that this issue isn't constrained to just the forms of media I'm more explicitly cynical about. In particular, some of the content I read about culture, even if it is more nuanced, and even if it reads as following a debate, is still essentially to me about observing conflict for entertainment.
Entertainment for entertainment's sake is fine, but I doubt if doing this kind of reading is on the Pareto frontier of "enjoy myself" and "inform myself about things in an actionable way".
On the far end of the spectrum, I am not sure if it's sensible to attempt to fully avoid engaging in any form of social derision/feeling outrage, even unproductive outrage. It does feel like some forms of outrage arise organically as a natural consequence of valuing things.
I think you are correct on a general level, but some conflicts are pure zero-sum waste of resources, and the more nuanced ones maybe are not? Like, if we debate about whether object-oriented programming is better than functional, perhaps as a result both sides get better at writing software. Or at least the observers get better at writing software, regardless of which style they choose.
I agree that there are internet conflicts worth participating in, for sure. This site contains a large number of them!
But the original post was mostly about the value of passively reading certain things vs certain other things for entertainment. (In the first paragraph, I separate out "arguments on classic culture war topics" as an example of the sorts of conflicts that are most likely a waste of resources.)
Is anyone else noticing that Claude (Sonnet 3.5 new, the default on claude.ai) is a lot worse at reasoning recently? In the past five days or so its rate of completely elementary reasoning mistakes, which persist despite repeated clarification in different ways, seems to have skyrocketed for me.
Maybe they are preparing for switching from merely encouraging their main model to do CoT (old technique) to a full RL-based reasoning model. I recently saw this, before the GUI aborted and said the model was over capacity:
Then it wouldn't make sense anymore to have the non-reasoning model attempt to do CoT.