Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
I want to let you know I've been reflecting on the reactive/proactive news consumption all week. It has really brought into focus a lot of my futile habits not just over news consumption, but idle reading and social media scrolling in general.[1] Why do I do it? I'm always hoping for that one piece of information, that "one simple trick" which will improve my decision making models, will solve my productivity problems, give me the tools to let me accomplish goals XY&Z. Which of course begs the question of why am I always operating on this abstracted, meta-level, distanced level from goals XY&Z and the simple answer is: if I knew how to solve them directly, I'd be actively working on the sets to solve them.
That's a lot of TMI but I just wanted to give you a sense of the affect this had on me.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Or those little "specials" at the Gas Station - buy one chocolate bar, get another free - the customer didn't save 100% of the price of the second chocolate bar, they lost 100% because they had no intention of buying a chocolate bar until they saw that impulse-hacking "offer".
On the flip side is the wasteful consumption that I don't read - my collection of books that I probably won't ever read. Why buy them? Seems as pointless as reading ephemeral news slop.
I think you're right. Although I'm having a hard time expressing where to draw the line between a simile and a analogy even after glancing at this article; https://www.grammarpalette.com/analogy-vs-simile-dont-be-confused/
Thank you for sharing that, it is interesting to see how others have arrived at similar ideas. Do you find yourself in a rhythm or momentum when sprinting and shooting?
Bad information can inform a decision that detracts from the received value. I suppose if it is perceived to be valuable it still is a useful term - do you think that would get the point across better?
I'm interested in how you can convert that information proactively?
I'm aware that, for example, keeping abreast of macro or geopolitical changes can influence things like investing in the stock-market. But I'd be lying if I'm aware of any other possibilities beyond that.
I think that, more than drinking from the propaganda trough makes me an NPC, protagonists in games do novel things, potentially unexpected (from the perspective of the game designers). NPCs are predictable and habitual. If I cannot extract utility from the news, macro or micro, then I fear I'm an NPC.
I'm not talking about post-rationalizations like "Oh I just read for entertainment" or "Well it helps me engage in conversation and make small talk" - because, again, those are NPCish predictable expected means of extracting utility.
I mean something which comes under the broad category of 'lateral thinking' or 'radical problem solving'.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard's Book - How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.
If I see a link come up on my social media feed "5 rationality techniques you can use today" and I don't click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it - making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice's Party and Bob's Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they'll see you at Alice's Party. You're a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him - and the suggestion that he'll be at Alice's Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice's Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or... not, you could go to Alice's Party, or Bob's party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice's friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II's Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe's discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I'm going to say "no".
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren't good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn't Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob's) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don't we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.
Informative Information isn't always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can't go to Alice's Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.
This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire - can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let's say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself "the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn't be helping anybody." - I've convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.[1]
Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of "okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?" and the current question of "which news should I consume" remains unanswered.
No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn't work because I personally don't believe in that goddess's power.
Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?
Or, if in your real life work you find something took a noticeably long time to figure out, or you were surprised about something you might have been able to notice.
Can you detail what kinds of problems "in your real life" you find might be better served or less appropriate to this exercise? Just off the top of my head, would forgetting who was the star of a movie you'd expect to remember and having the name on the tip of your tongue for an hour not be suitable? But what general code debugging, say of a fragment shader where you finally realize by flipping the x,y coordinates it starts to "look right" - is that more appropriate?
I often ask myself and others "okay, but how does that look in practice?" - this is usually when I have a vague idea about something I need to achieve a goal, but also when someone gives me some vague advice that I feel is leaving it to me to "draw the rest of the owl."
Is this the best phrasing of the question? I have my doubts.
Firstly, is it too generalized for different domains?
"I should really organize my dresser drawers more thematically" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
"I need to make more of an effort to promote my freelancing" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
"I wish I had more money" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) "It sounds like you could really use a (film) producer or someone to collaborate with" -> "okay, but how does finding such a person look in practice?"
(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) "You really need to put your portfolio out there to get more commissions" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
I'm always suspicious of "one simple trick" and I wonder if each of these requires a bespoke question-asking approach...
Secondly I am skeptical that merely changing the phrasing of the question actually changes the underlying framing of the problem or situation at all. It would be nice if using the right question would unlock a new framing, but I don't know how true that is.
Those doubts aside, what are the alternatives? What do you out there ask yourselves?
I'm looking at this not from a CompSci point of view by a rhetoric point of view: Isn't it much easier to make tenuous or even flat out wrong links between Climate Change and highly publicized Natural Disaster events that have lot's of dramatic, visceral footage than it is to ascribe danger to a machine that hasn't been invented yet, that we don't know the nature or inclinations of?
I don't know about nowadays but for me the two main pop-culture touchstones for me for "evil AI" are Skynet in Terminator, or HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and by inversion - the Butlerian Jihad in Dune). Wouldn't it be more expedient to leverage those? (Expedient - I didn't say accurate)