mentwire.

Information diet affecting a persons mental health should be taken seriously in the same way that actual diet can affect our physical health.

I'm quite confident 51% of Americans couldn't describe what the federal budget deficit was if their lives depended on it. Taken literally, this sounds like an amazing game show idea. Squid Game sequel?

I have often sensed that a really easy math CAPTCHA would improve conversations about economic inequality.

What's a social app that doesn't exist yet but you wish existed? Doesn't need to get to 100m or 1b users, but should attract the most intellectual 10m users in the world.

An important kind of social network will be one where no bots whatsoever are allowed.

Potential feature for a Twitter replacement: Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet.

how long until we'll need to give an app or website keyboard access and use FaceID for "proof of human" commenting, purchasing, and form completion?

I used to think Twitter/X was a public forum where people could debate honestly and openly. Now it's become painfully clear it's a place where narratives outweigh facts. Do 60 seconds of research before forming an opinion. Seek to break through the narrative.

Pretty soon your iPhone will be using FaceID to make sure it's actually you using your device while scrolling, engaging and posting. The next step would be letting an app know it's actually you, or simply that it's a real human using the device, and not a bot.

Interesting thing to meditate on: The Internet was born as Arpanet for the million or so smartest people in the world. The protocols and culture were set for and by smart people, mainly a form of priestly researcher class.

Whitepill #27: The rise of 2, 3, even 4/5/6 hour podcasts and Youtube discussions. It turns out a lot of people were starved for serious intellectual discourse and are eating it up.

If I could impose one test before people were allowed to use Twitter, it might be whether they understood the distinction between p → q and p = q.

It seems like there still isn't a really great community platform. Slack and Discord are meant for frequent/real-time messaging, and Slack is outrageously expensive or feature-poor for communities. Forums seem OK, but just OK.

Private/small - mostly solved, group chat and/or private forum.
Public/small - best solution is a group on top of a larger platform, eg FB group.
Private/large - no good solutions available off the shelf. Bookface is a good custom solution.
Public/large - subreddits / discords.

I think there will be a second wave of social networks that are explicitly designed to suppress trolls instead of treating this problem as an afterthought, just as there was a second wave of operating systems that were explicitly designed to be secure.

the amount of completely wrong utterly worthless falsehoods on twitter/X is really astonishing, and it's even more astonishing watching sitting senators and CEOs fall for it. Postman's Information Glut every day. despite grok and community notes it's never been worse.

Come to think of it, part of the solution might be simply to make it hard to figure out how to do a qt. A sort of intellectual captcha.

LinkedIn feels antiquated and ripe for disruption. Fascinating that there has been no real effective competition to LinkedIn while SnapChat, Instagram, TikTok have all emerged as competitors to Facebook.

One possibility is that the elite will lead the way. If there was an alternative to Twitter that wasn't optimized for fights, most smart people would switch to it. The alternative then has so much prestige that everyone else switches too.

Information diet affecting a persons mental health should be taken seriously in the same way that actual diet can affect our physical health.

I'm quite confident 51% of Americans couldn't describe what the federal budget deficit was if their lives depended on it. Taken literally, this sounds like an amazing game show idea. Squid Game sequel?

I have often sensed that a really easy math CAPTCHA would improve conversations about economic inequality.

What's a social app that doesn't exist yet but you wish existed? Doesn't need to get to 100m or 1b users, but should attract the most intellectual 10m users in the world.

An important kind of social network will be one where no bots whatsoever are allowed.

Potential feature for a Twitter replacement: Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet.

how long until we'll need to give an app or website keyboard access and use FaceID for "proof of human" commenting, purchasing, and form completion?

I used to think Twitter/X was a public forum where people could debate honestly and openly. Now it's become painfully clear it's a place where narratives outweigh facts. Do 60 seconds of research before forming an opinion. Seek to break through the narrative.

Pretty soon your iPhone will be using FaceID to make sure it's actually you using your device while scrolling, engaging and posting. The next step would be letting an app know it's actually you, or simply that it's a real human using the device, and not a bot.

Interesting thing to meditate on: The Internet was born as Arpanet for the million or so smartest people in the world. The protocols and culture were set for and by smart people, mainly a form of priestly researcher class.

Whitepill #27: The rise of 2, 3, even 4/5/6 hour podcasts and Youtube discussions. It turns out a lot of people were starved for serious intellectual discourse and are eating it up.

If I could impose one test before people were allowed to use Twitter, it might be whether they understood the distinction between p → q and p = q.

It seems like there still isn't a really great community platform. Slack and Discord are meant for frequent/real-time messaging, and Slack is outrageously expensive or feature-poor for communities. Forums seem OK, but just OK.

Private/small - mostly solved, group chat and/or private forum.
Public/small - best solution is a group on top of a larger platform, eg FB group.
Private/large - no good solutions available off the shelf. Bookface is a good custom solution.
Public/large - subreddits / discords.

I think there will be a second wave of social networks that are explicitly designed to suppress trolls instead of treating this problem as an afterthought, just as there was a second wave of operating systems that were explicitly designed to be secure.

the amount of completely wrong utterly worthless falsehoods on twitter/X is really astonishing, and it's even more astonishing watching sitting senators and CEOs fall for it. Postman's Information Glut every day. despite grok and community notes it's never been worse.

Come to think of it, part of the solution might be simply to make it hard to figure out how to do a qt. A sort of intellectual captcha.

LinkedIn feels antiquated and ripe for disruption. Fascinating that there has been no real effective competition to LinkedIn while SnapChat, Instagram, TikTok have all emerged as competitors to Facebook.

One possibility is that the elite will lead the way. If there was an alternative to Twitter that wasn't optimized for fights, most smart people would switch to it. The alternative then has so much prestige that everyone else switches too.