why are you letting algorithms pick your news, love, beliefs, image etc etc etc?

The year is 2026. Today you can do almost anything if you have grown up in America. At any moment you can wake up and completely change your life. You can drop everything and move to the desert and become a rancher, or you can move to Alaska and wrangle bears and evade taxes or do whatever it is that people truly do out there. or you can simply just go to a small nice town and have a regular nice life and go to the movies with your friends.

What is the thing that you probably spend the most time doing? Statistically speaking, it will be on your phone.

Where are you getting most of your information about the world these days? The thing that changes your perception on how you view society, geopolitics, religion, culture, race, almost everything and everything? Would you also say that is on your phone? Most Americans would and spend upwards of 7 hours a day on their phone or computer. It is the fastest most accessible way to get information, I do not blame you at all that it is on your phone.

Right now every single platform that is online has a team of over 100 people (except for x but we will get to that), designed to make you stay on there longer, look at it longer, and push the narrative of exactly who is paying them or organizing them to make you think what you think. There are not really traditional papers in the same sense there were years ago because even if they exist, they aren’t really getting funding as much anymore and aren’t reporting on the same type of content. People simply are not reading it anymore, so why write the super hard hitting serious stuff if it will just be later than the online publications and therefore almost useless by the time it prints (this also is to soft launch a new article on my research blog about transmission regulation of ideas on the internet and how I think that could work going forward better etc etc (see that self promo wasn’t so bad now was it?)).

If you are not going to do a custom rss feed let me plug ground news here not promo-ed but it showed the same article and blindspots and then shows how it was covered differently from the different media sources i like it anyway.

We are optimizing everything for the headlines, fast quick punchy things to grab and keep attention, because that is how we keep advertising dollars and that is how we keep money coming in. We take money from politicians and big corporations, who invest because they have something that they want people to believe, or see. A story to tell. Not to sound overly cynical about it because there obviously are some people who are just journalists for the sake of it and are doing great work and I commend these people. I am just saying that the system no longer incentives truth.

More than just news now lets talk about social media, where most people in America are getting their news. These work the exact same way but are often even worse and gamify it. They are blending the line between online and offline reality. Especially targeting children and vulnerable groups.

In a world in which this is the case; why the heck would I be reading mainstream news and calling that a day? The idea that anyone does not have a custom rss feed pulling from sources that they believe in is crazy to me. I like things like ground news to get general headlines and compare across parties to see what people are hearing but for other topics are pulling categories I want to hear about and research and ideas from people I care about. The idea that I can change everything about my life but am wholeheartedly allowing a company to optimize the algorithm for what I care about is so crazy. Because their incentive is their profit they actually have no obligation at all to try to provide any value to me. I should do that.

Danielle found this and was making fun of me because for topics I will just put all of the things I am interested in and then people like Danielle Egan to see when she comes up in a the news so there is a combinations of things like mrna research, new bci papers, Danielle Egan, etc..

Mine is a fun combination of some evergreen topics I like to see; new bio news, spacex launches, when the next meteor shower is, cool places to road trip from california, art residencies and grants to apply to near me and then some new random ones, like chess, oceanography, camping, general random stuff I probably don’t need to know about but would like to. Clearly I prioritized the function over the UI like every single other thing on here and is also the reason I am better at writing and prototyping than seeing an idea through all of the way (but now I have posted consistently every week for a year so progress?) (for there are so many ideas and so little time).

This is the same case I will make for hitting on the people you are interested in, why in the world would I be letting an algorithm hinge, raya etc try to decide who to pair me with. Sure I would potentially be open to it but to leave this as the only way to do it is crazy, I would like to have some input into one of the few couple big choices I get in this world. I know what I like why would I not just try to see and go for it? Then I would be getting the best of the best options because they are ones I am interested in and have selected versus just getting inbound that you select from so the best of other peoples options. I talk too much about agency on here but I think many people do not think about it enough.

You are going to be sick of me but again with workout routines. The idea people follow a workout routine from the internet is crazy to me too. Like its your body you know what works and everything and I do not want my body to look exactly like anyone else’s either like I will watch a routine and will do a class but every single day of the week I have came up with something that works for me. I know if I follow the correct set of actions and do the thing I set up how I will look and how I will feel and any other person that even followed the exact same thing as me wouldn’t feel the same or look the same. Why the heck would I be taking some plug and play thing and treating that as the end all be all? A jumping off point sure, but my point stands. Personal training increasingly makes sense to me as I realize how different everyones body and goals are.

Truly you have to adapt every single situation to what works best for you and your goals and your target outcomes I believe wholeheartedly. Not to be like a dick about switching up everyones routine Bryan Johnson style because that is a little extreme, but be principled, do things that work for you and only you and make sense to you and only you (as long as you can reasonably back up the opinion).

TLDR; make an RSS feed, customize your workout routine, customize your entire life for that matter it’s much too short to just spawn somewhere and take the things you don’t like as facts to be accepted rather than finding the place that you can flourish and has things that are important to you that you care about, search long and far for your love, and anything for that matter that you care about and is important to you. and please god (whichever you believe in or if you are just hedging them all) do some resource reading and funding reading behind some of your favourite news sources.