My Reading Burden
Want some honesty about how I (mis)spend my time? These days, my daily routine includes reading all of the following:
- The comments on this blog (many of which I then answer)
- The Washington Post (“The Post Most” takes me about an hour a day, every day)
- The New York Times
- Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten
- Zvi Mowshowitz’s Don’t Worry About the Vase (Zvi is so superhumanly prolific that reading him easily takes 12 hours per week … but it’s all good stuff!)
- Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong (rarely updated anymore, thankfully for my reading time!)
- Quanta (how could I forget?)
- Quillette
- The Free Press
- Mosaic
- Tablet
- Commentary
- Paul Graham’s Twitter
- David Deutsch’s Twitter
- Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twitter
- Updates and comments from my Facebook friends (this can easily take a couple hours per day)
- The quant-ph arXiv (I scan maybe 50 titles and abstracts per day, and if any papers are relevant to me, read at least their introductions)
- The science fiction and fantasy novels I read with my kids
- Whichever other books I’m currently reading
Many of these materials contain lists of links to other articles, or tweet threads, some of which then take me hours to read in themselves. This is not counting podcasts or movies or TV shows.
While I read unusually quickly, I’d estimate that my reading burden is now at eight hours per day, seven days per week. I haven’t finished reading by the time my kids are back from school or day camp. Now let’s add in my actual job (or two jobs, although the OpenAI one is ending this month, and I start teaching again in two weeks). Add in answering emails (including from fans and advice-seekers), giving lectures, meeting grad students and undergrads, doing Zoom calls, filling out forms, consulting, going on podcasts, reviewing papers, taking care of my kids, eating, shopping, personal hygiene.
As often as not, when the day is done, it’s not just that I’ve achieved nothing of lasting value—it’s that I’ve never even started with research, writing, or any long-term projects. This contrasts with my twenties, when obsessively working on research problems and writing up the results could easily fill my day.
The solution seems obvious: stop reading so much. Cut back to a few hours per day, tops. But it’s hard. The rapid scale-up of AI is a once-in-the-history-of-civilization story that I feel astounded to be living through and compelled to follow, and just keeping up with the highlights is almost a full-time job in itself. The threat to democracy from Trump, Putin, Xi, Maduro, and the world’s other authoritarians is another story that I feel unable to look away from.
Since October 7, though, the once-again-precarious situation of Jews everywhere on earth has become, on top of everything else it is, the #1 drain on my time. It would be one thing if I limited myself to thoughtful analyses, but I can easily lose hours per day doomscrolling through the infinite firehose of strident anti-Zionism (and often, simple unconcealed Jew-hatred) that one finds for example on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment sections of Washington Post articles. Every time someone calls the “Zios” land-stealing baby-killers who deserve to die, my brain insists that they’re addressing me personally. So I stop to ponder the psychology of each individual commenter before moving on to the next, struggle to see the world from their eyes. Would explaining the complex realities of the conflict change this person’s mind? What about introducing them to my friends and relatives in Israel who never knew any other home and want nothing but peace, coexistence, and a two-state solution?
I naturally can’t say that all this compulsive reading makes me happy or fulfilled. Worse yet, I can’t even say it makes me feel more informed. What I suppose it does make me feel is … excused. If so much is being written daily about the biggest controversies in the world, then how can I be blamed for reading it rather than doing anything new?
At the risk of adding even more to the terrifying torrent of words, I’d like to hear from anyone who ever struggled with a similar reading addiction, and successfully overcame it. What worked for you?
Update (Aug. 15): Thanks so much for the advice, everyone! I figured this would be the perfect day to put some of your wisdom into practice, and finally go on a reading fast and embark on some serious work. So of course, this is the day that Tablet and The Free Press had to drop possibly the best pieces in their respective histories: namely, a gargantuan profile of the Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and an interview with an anonymous Palestinian who, against huge odds, landed a successful tech career and a group of friends in Israel, but who’s now being called “traitor” by other Palestinians for condemning the October 7 massacre and who fears for his life. Both of these articles could be made into big-budget feature films—I’m friggin serious. But the more immediate task is to get this anonymous Palestinian hero out of harm’s way while there’s still time.
And as for my reading fast, there’s always tomorrow.
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Comment #1 August 14th, 2024 at 2:48 pm
It’s relatively easy to block twitter off your devices (on both computer and phone – there’s apps, browser extensions, and you can modify your own DNS lookup to make it impossible), and I’ve found it incredibly helpful to avoid wasting time and fear on doomscrolling. I don’t think I lost anything useful by not being able to go on twitter, certainly nothing that was worth the cost of the doomscrolling temptation.
Comment #2 August 14th, 2024 at 2:52 pm
Why not cut everything out except books and (say) 50% of Scott Alexander’s blog?
Basic rule of life: reading online doesn’t count as reading, unless perhaps it’s on Project Gutenberg.
Comment #3 August 14th, 2024 at 2:54 pm
Harald #2: Has that worked for you? I see you on Facebook as often as I’m there, if not more… 😉
Comment #4 August 14th, 2024 at 2:58 pm
I have a lesser version of this addiction.
1. Develop a competing addiction. CrossFit is arguably healthier than weed for this.
2. Schedule blocks of time where you can’t read.
3. Work with a therapist (really)
Comment #5 August 14th, 2024 at 3:01 pm
Here’s one thing I do that lets me still read everything but saves a lot of time:
using read-it-later apps, which save articles to be read later
+
using text-to-speech on those apps, so that I can *listen* to articles while brushing teeth/commuting/etc
TTS has obviously gotten quite good, so this works extremely well if you can listen at 2x or 3x. The best in class app here IMO is Matter (getmatter.com), which is a bit pricey but 110% worth it.
Comment #6 August 14th, 2024 at 3:05 pm
Ha-ha. At least I am not on Twitter, and I am spending less time online (though I also follow Astral Codex Ten). I am also thinking of quitting Facebook.
One thing that I’ve found useful is to set one’s screen to black-and-white. Trivial on a cellphone, easy enough on a laptop (through a plug-in).
Comment #7 August 14th, 2024 at 3:09 pm
My earliest memories include reading the backs of cereal boxes and the labels of soup cans, when there was nothing else to read. When I got back to a motel after a long day at a power plant, I would read a paperback novel at least for a half hour before going to bed, no matter the time–on the grounds that life wasn’t worth living without at least a little reading.
However, when I was at a desk (and especially later on in life, when I had a computer there), there was enough interesting engineering work to do to keep me busy for 8-10 hours a day, many days. In retirement, I have some hobbies to spend time on, and I like to walk at least a few miles every day. (Never owned a car, never will now.)
But every time I go somewhere where there might be a wait, such as a doctor or dentist appointment, I have a Kindle in my pocket with access to 3000 books, and arrive 15 minutes early. After my last dental cleaning appointment there was a wait for the dentist to come and give me an annual checkup, so I pulled out the Kindle and read in the chair. (You can load PDF’s of papers into a Kindle, by the way.) I jerked a little when the dentist arrived and suddenly appeared at my shoulder. The world goes away when I am reading.
Comment #8 August 14th, 2024 at 3:26 pm
Some sites that I felt compelled to read but only disturbed me, I blocked by editing my /etc/hosts. Worked very well.
The more I post on Whatsapp groups, the more I feel compelled to check in. So, there’s that with an interactive blog, too, unfortunately.
Put all Israel/Palestine twitter posters that I read into a list and unfollowed the same posters. I check in when I want to.
Comment #9 August 14th, 2024 at 3:36 pm
exhaustion worked for me 😉
That in combination with old age and the realization that as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen. Reading the news, same.
Also the local Denver Post got hedge funded and private equitied, then they laid off the journalists and tripled subscription costs so I unsubscribed. Upon looking around for another source of news I found as Jeff Jarvis observed on Twitter –
What “press”? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?
Even after Musk’s best efforts, Twitter is a better source of news and information than any of those. My wife reads the NYT and tells me things, 30min on Twitter each morning gives me the gist of what is happening.
Never knew how much I read until like JimV, I got a Kindle. Now I can see that it adds up to over 200 books a year, doomscrolling not included, nor the constant reading required for work. Work reading is mostly log files and code so it’s not really reading at all but.
My Kindle goes where I do, waiting in line at the pharmacy, grocery checkout etc etc. But I’m not addicted, can quit any time, I am sure. Ha. At least we don’t have to read the cereal boxes at breakfast anymore.
Comment #10 August 14th, 2024 at 3:40 pm
In my case, failing reading in second grade (early 50’s) led to a couple years of after school reading lessions at CWRU (thnx parents!). I have been addicted to reading ever since.
As an old guy, it is difficult to avoid “junk food” reading as opposed to something requiring thinking. However, following current politics and events — what a wild ride! The Biden –> Harris plot twist might save civilization! Wow! Who writes this stuff?
Final thought: ignoring right wing nuts, left wing nuts, and other idiots will help your day.
Comment #11 August 14th, 2024 at 4:03 pm
The excuse of “being informed” is not enough to spend on Twitter or reading comments online on a daily basis. I have three strategies that helped me to manage my time better:
1) Imposing hard limits. Since the pandemics, I started to play online chess for more time than I could afford – and now I follow a limit of 7 games a day (~5-10 min each, 1 hour of leisure time).
2) Routine. I go to the gym at 9 PM mon-fri; so I have to eat one hour before, take a shower afterwards, work on some projects until midnight and then read a book for 30-60 min before sleeping (yes, I’m a night person).
3) Plan ahead the week. I write (or retrieve previously written) tasks from my annual goal spreadsheet, where I list the books I want to read, the pieces of music I need to play, the amount of language and gym I have to practice and the personal projects I would love to pursue.
And I would still benefit from the extra 37 minutes that Mars has compared to Earth. 🙂
Comment #12 August 14th, 2024 at 4:11 pm
I’ve struggled with compulsive reading. The most effective coping strategy I’ve found is keeping a well-organized bookmarks file with all the things I feel like I “should” read but don’t have time to. It’s currently ~10,000 URLs, dating back to when I started this practice in the early 2010s. iCloud bookmark syncing can’t even handle this many bookmarks apparently, so I’ve resorted to manually copying them between my laptop & phone when necessary.
Of course, this strategy requires a certain amount of self-deception. I know that when I bookmark something instead of reading it, that means there’s less than a 1% chance I’ll ever get around to reading it, but that small chance still makes it easier to let go.
If I actually do want to read something later, I use Safari’s reading list feature, but I have to periodically purge it of low-priority items.
Comment #13 August 14th, 2024 at 4:38 pm
You need to get a grip. This is clearly affecting your mental health. I wrote my own RSS feed reader, Temboz, with extensive filtering capabilities that cuts out 1/3 of my daily intake. I have zero interest in the Kardashians, Olympics or the latest antics of Trump and it gets rid of all.
A tactical solution like that won’t help you, though, as you’d likely subscribe to more feeds in an illustration of Parkinson’s Law, or perhaps Jevons’ Paradox. I’d suggest seeing a therapist to find out the root causes of your FOMO and address them.
Comment #14 August 14th, 2024 at 4:39 pm
I kicked my online reading habit by asserting that I would read nothing online at all for a few weeks, with the expectation that I would slowly add back only the good sources once the “fast” was over. It turned out that my standards for writing changed as a result of only reading books for a couple of months and I lost all interest in the screeds of overgeneralizing idiots on the internet – both the ones like you’re talking about and the ones who were “right” as a matter of luck but arrived there through reasoning of the same poor quality. Now I am like someone from a non-western country who won’t eat our body-wrecking foods because they taste too sweet. 🙂 The fast also ended up lasting a lot longer than I was planning, because once the self-reinforcing sense of urgency was gone I didn’t think about it at all.
As for world events, I think it’s wise to multiply their importance by our own ability to do anything to improve them… but implementing that obvious bit of wisdom took some outsmarting of my nature.
Comment #15 August 14th, 2024 at 4:44 pm
One way to handle it is to accept some other all-consuming objective and determine you’re going to see it through. Trying to help the marginalized can often do that, if you decide to actually walk side by side with them and follow through every step of the process instead of our normal thing of just donating money or providing advice and connections. Like, trying to help people facing deportation to navigate the legal system make all of the correct pleas, get resources they need while in detention, etc. Or like someone who’s trying to get out of poverty, trying to help them through job training, job applications, etc. I am explicitly not saying to try to set up some structured way to “help people” in a scalable way. I am saying you make an extravagant commitment to one or a few people that “I am going to treat this person like they are my brother or sister and I am going to personally take it on myself to do everything in my power to help them change their trajectory”.
It always ends up being 10X or 50X more difficult and convoluted that people like us would assume. I would not recommend it full-time, for the same reason social worker is not a job I would recommend. But sometimes it is good to make a multi-month or multi-year commitment like that because it really cuts out the chafe.
One other piece of advice about FOMO and fast-moving stuff. The fact that things change so rapidly is actually a good reason to not have FOMO. Everything changes so quickly that you could take two years off and only be 6 months behind when you come back. If you have good foundations, then much of what everyone else is hyperactively tending to will be obsolete while you’re away anyway.
Comment #16 August 14th, 2024 at 4:59 pm
Oh – by the way, if anything important happens a friend, colleague, coworker or taxi driver will tell you in person. All of the last month’s news is delivered to you in the context and implications of chit-chat, but you don’t notice information you already know. If you quit the internet you will find everybody around you a lot more interesting, because you will be plugging back in to the “natural” network, the one with healthy and normal emotional rewards.
Comment #17 August 14th, 2024 at 9:18 pm
This actually helped me to stop going down rabbit holes: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/make_your_own_b.html
Comment #18 August 14th, 2024 at 9:44 pm
Have you considered making AI summaries of some of these articles?
No, wait. Let me help you. Send me a couple articles. I’ll use an AI to make summaries of them. If a 5000 word article could be usefully condensed to 1000, is that a win? I could report back on what % of the information seems to have been preserved in the summary; or we could skip that part and you could just assess it for yourself.
Comment #19 August 14th, 2024 at 9:49 pm
I can tell you what didn’t work for me: scheduling lots of research meetings and then promising to do stuff for the next research meetings.
It seemed like such a promising strategy…
Comment #20 August 15th, 2024 at 12:30 am
(Wow- I get to be your roughly 20th comment instead of my usual 200th)
News is the biggest waste of time for reading since
a) not that much changes
b) Its very repeitive
c) There are things you read that are of absolutely no use to you.
Example:
I read to many article about who would be Trump’s VP. What did I gain from that? Nothing
For Harris’s VP I learned my lesson- I read one and only one article that went over the people on the short list (Walz was on it) and then nothing more.
Advice: Read the Washington Post and other such things once every three days. Or less.
Comment #21 August 15th, 2024 at 12:51 am
Serious answer:
Spend a week in the wilderness, with no internet and no cell service. (There’s still some such spots in e.g. Montana, but your best bet is probably Alaska).
I don’t remember who first said it, but I think a lot about the following quote:
“The internet is a strange place. If you’re away for a day you feel like you’ve missed everything, but if you’re away for a week you feel like you’ve missed nothing.”
Fear of Missing Out, like most fears, is most powerful when you never actually experience the thing you’re afraid of. If you force yourself to miss a week you’ll realize it’s actually quite alright and nothing you missed was really that vital. You might have to repeat the wilderness trip every couple years or so though, just so you still remember.
Comment #22 August 15th, 2024 at 1:36 am
I used to read Zvi’s posts (which are amazing but very long), now I’m listenting to https://dwatvpodcast.substack.com/ from askwhocasts.ai, and highly recommend it. Especially if you also have listened to planecrash podcast – it’s at places painful, but mostly hillarious.
Comment #23 August 15th, 2024 at 2:10 am
Take it from a 20-year veteran of the news industry (WSJ, Bloomberg): stop reading news media, use RSS feeds instead to keep track with the stuff you care about (even news media sections). Especially ditch the Post & Commentary yesterday.
Comment #24 August 15th, 2024 at 2:31 am
You are not reading https://www.mcsweeneys.net/ ?
You need somedhing less dour try them out.😀
Comment #25 August 15th, 2024 at 3:51 am
I found a couple of techniques that helped me avoid getting lost reading:
1) Only choose one main source for news. I use BBC as it is fairly neutral (by UK news standards) and gives me the information I want. Further, I only look at the top articles and some topics that I set. It allows to keep an eye on what’s going on but not dive too deep.
2) If using devices, I find setting a timeout for apps to be very helpful. I use this for news and social media. Do whatever time your comfortable with, but I found that I would slowly reduce the timeout every so often. I suggest 10-15 minutes to begin with. If there is an article I’m particularly interested in, I may go over the time limit to finish it.
3) I’m trying to read more books and, to achieve this, I am reading a couple of pages a night before going to bed. You may find this helpful by setting a specific time to read, and only reading a specific number of pages or for a set time.
The ideal is to get to a reading level that you feel is comfortable and so it is up to you to find that. It’s okay to go over some limits as long as your accept that.
Comment #26 August 15th, 2024 at 3:54 am
Dear Scott,
I know the problem you’re describing all too well. Russia invaded Ukraine during the third year of my PhD, and since then, I haven’t been able to reach the same level of concentration I had in the first two years (I’m a Ukrainian studying abroad). Like you, I became consumed by constantly checking a wide range of Telegram channels, Twitter accounts, and independent media—basically every five to fifteen minutes. And, like you, I’ve been bogged down (and still am) by constant mental debates with Putin Z supporters, trying to find the words that might expose the lies they are surrounded with and make them realize how criminal and evil this war is. In total, I think I’ve lost a year of my PhD to reading the news.
If I’m being honest, few things have actually helped with this; for me, it feels like an addiction, albeit not a physical one (though at some point, I could feel cortisol flooding my brain the moment I opened a news tab).
Yes, there were periods when I didn’t spend most of my working time reading the news (for example, during a summer internship; we had an open space office, and I felt guilty for doomscrolling while others were working). But then I would massively catch up every evening and on weekends.
I also tried editing /etc/hosts/ as some people suggested, and on a short time scale it does help; however, I find it doesn’t provide a long-lasting solution. I might maintain discipline for a week, or even two, but then either something “big” happens, or I get stressed due to some responsibility, and the easiest way for me to “unwind” is to check the news (at least that’s what my brain is used to). In those moments, it’s easy to edit /etc/hosts/ back or find some other websites I haven’t blocked yet and fall down the rabbit hole again.
However, I have to admit, it has gotten slightly better, and I think I can identify three (interrelated) components:
1. Accepting the situation and not punishing myself for opening Twitter again. On top of that, knowing that “This too shall pass.” It’s really hard to believe, but it cannot be any other way!
2. As cynical as it sounds, time also helps in another way: at some point, there’s less and less happening, and the information becomes repetitive. This allowed me to reevaluate the list of resources I check and unsubscribe from the least relevant ones. This creates a small positive feedback loop. Since I read less, I have a little more space for myself, which allows me to cut down even more irrelevant content in the next round (maybe in a couple of months).
3. Talking to a therapist (practicing CBT). Since my addiction is a long-standing problem, I believe only a sustainable solution can help. In my experience, this involves a) understanding what triggers my desire to check Twitter at a given moment; b) learning to notice this urge; and c) trying not to give in to it every time. Perhaps it’s possible to achieve the same results on one’s own, but I believe that talking it through with a specialist who can quickly identify destructive patterns and help address them might bring faster results.
With all that said, I’ll repeat myself: for me, this is a long-standing issue, and I haven’t found an easy way out. However, there is a way, and I believe that sooner or later, I will be able to get this under control.
P.S. Sometimes, I read the biographies of the Righteous Among the Nations, and that helps me find some hope.
P.P.S. Recently, when I feel dread at what others say or do, I’ve learned to focus on the fact that we still have much more in common than our disagreements. We are humans; we want to love and be loved, we want to feel safe and do our little things. However simple it may sound, this helps me see not an enemy, but rather a chance for dialogue. Once this “existential threat” is removed, everything else becomes much easier too.
P.P.P.S. And yes, your “My Prayer” helps too. I was really happy to see someone put my own creed into words so nicely!
Comment #27 August 15th, 2024 at 4:55 am
I read those too, but if those are the only worth mentioning I think your list is reactionary and edgy and “nerd bro” oriented compared to mine 🙂
It also explains so much of your writing and thinking. Thank you for sharing.
Comment #28 August 15th, 2024 at 5:34 am
MaxM #27: I don’t care if you think I’m an edgy nerdbro. What I care about is: you regularly read everything on my list and more? How many hours per day does that take you?
(FWIW: I used to regularly read Slate, Salon, The Nation, The New Republic. But at various points, all of them were ideologically captured by scolding schoolmarms to such an extreme degree that I was liberated from my addiction. I’m very grateful to them for that! 😀 )
Comment #29 August 15th, 2024 at 6:39 am
As a younger scientist, still on his way to be recognized as “someone who has made it” (and with some non-trivial chances/track record in that direction) I recognize the pattern you write here in several prominent people (who “have made it” or more generally that “believe to have made it”, which is a strictly bigger class). And perhaps the pattern stands out so visibly, precisely by means of comparison with my own situation. Namely, I see loads of prominent people dissipating their energy and scientific potential in tons of “intellectual hobbies”, wasting essentially their best chances to remain relevant by spreading their energies thin in many areas where they have no chance or not even the intention to make important contributions.
It seems to me that, in an Hansonian fashion, many of us are not moved really by the scientific curiosity, but by wanting to signal to the community to be “a prominent thinker”. The fear of not attaining such a recognition is a great push in your 20’s (as you wrote) to do great work. Then you make it, and then the drive for actively contributing to science with new insights is gone, because the needed fear is not there anymore, and you seem much more moved by your next signalling activity: let the world know how much you are a broad intellectual that is up to date with the big world developments. And the fear of missing out on the latest tweet seems to be greater than the fear to waste your potential and miss out on providing civilizations with new insights in fields where you have the ability to give one (most likely neither anti-Semitism, nor the ongoing increase of geopolitical instability and threats to democracies, won’t be one).
So it seems to me that you have a matter of identity that you need to sort first. Are you still motivated to produce top quality scientific work? If yes, then you have an obvious problem of lack of discipline, you should quit most of the activities that do not make you more likely to produce top quality work, and go back to the drawing board as in your 20’s.
If not, then I don’t see much of the problem, just enjoy the reading and give up the idea of being relevant again.
If you were a mediocre researcher, probably it wouldn’t make much of a difference. But you are a brilliant scientist. So you bear a responsibility and you have to acknowledge that eating your time as you do is preventing society to receive new ideas of yours, which are sadly substituted by many loud an un impactful social media material. If that’s OK with you and it brings you more happiness, then so be it. But given what you write, it doesn’t look like you are OK with it.
Comment #30 August 15th, 2024 at 6:48 am
I don’t necessarily think the amount of reading you do is excessive, but it’s hardly diverse. I tend to read less, but only because I bother with finding very diverse sources. This means I don’t need to read the same crap over and over again. I’d be less worried about your reading time and more about how you can extricate yourself from a serious case of confirmation bias.
Comment #31 August 15th, 2024 at 7:24 am
Kezia Mason #30: Every single day, I get the mainstream left perspective from NYT and WaPo, and then I get the classical liberal perspective from Quillette and The Free Press and so forth. That already gives me more than enough ideological conflict to make me feel anxious all day! As for hard-left and hard-right perspectives, I normally feel like I get all I can handle of both from Twitter and Facebook and comment sections, although I sometimes read long-form pieces as well. For example, there was a period when I actively sought out and read every Marxist essay I could find that celebrated October 7 as a heroic liberation struggle.
Comment #32 August 15th, 2024 at 7:42 am
Dear Scott,
What’s in the ‘other books’? Good books will inform you much more than the NYTimes. NYtimes is also not a left wing perspective… any academic in a social science will tell you as much.
And information quality? If you read e.g. Caro’s LBJ biographies, you’ll see that journalists of the time publish complete nonsense all the time and constantly get taken for a ride by politicians.
Why not read some history of the last few decades or centuries? Maybe some sociology or economics? Even just a book written by a journalist. I can make suggestions (Mariana Mazzucato, James Scott, Robert Caro, Vincent Bevins, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Timothy Mitchell, Robert Solow, Eric Hobsbawm, Jane Mayer, Edward Said, W.E.B. Dubois). Your current information diet looks like the analog of learning about quantum computing by reading Quanta (surface level, but ok) and following Deepak Chopra (nonsensical) on Twitter.
Comment #33 August 15th, 2024 at 8:24 am
This may not be feasible in Austin, but here’s what I do: choose one decent newspaper (e.g. WaPo) to be your main news source, sign up to get the print edition physically delivered to your home, and read it in print. No more endless rabbit holes of hyperlinks and tabs. Once you reach the end of that day’s print edition, you’re done for the day. And as a bonus, you get to take a break from staring at screens all day.
Comment #34 August 15th, 2024 at 8:29 am
I really appreciate your vulnerability here. I think a lot of us highly-online people feel a lot of shame for how we truly spend our time on the computer, but we don’t think we can talk to anyone about it.
Nothing wrong with a temporary detox to reset. Completely quitting news, blogs, and social media for 3 weeks does not mean that you have stopped caring about the issues, but it will probably help you stop caring about being “caught up” or being able to respond to every wrong person on the internet. (Speaking as someone who easily falls prey to internet duty à la xkcd #386, I’ve realized recently that my willingness to read all articles on an issue or debate anyone in any online forum is not the only way to prove my passion and concern for an issue.)
Comment #35 August 15th, 2024 at 9:35 am
Paul #32: I read many kinds of books. This summer, I read Sapiens by Harari (which I’d put off since its release), and am now finishing “2040,” a Silicon Valley satire by the computer scientist Pedro Domingos (Pedro sent me a review copy). I’ve also been told to read some fiction by Karl Capek (the guy who coined the word “robot”). And Nate Silver has a new book now.
I’m well-aware that, if you spent your life among Marxist revolutionaries in a social science department, the NYT would seem practically reactionary to you. But by the broader standards of the US, it’s obviously mainstream left, and never more so than in the past few years, when (famously) more heterodox writers and editors left or were forced out.
Comment #36 August 15th, 2024 at 9:50 am
Kyle #34
Right, as Blaise Pascal put it:
“Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne pas savoir demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.”
All of man’s misery stems from one thing only: his inability to rest alone, quietly, in a room.
Another good quote from him:
“D’où vient qu’un boiteux ne nous irrite pas et un esprit boiteux nous irrite ? A cause qu’un boiteux reconnait que nous allons droit et qu’un esprit boiteux dit que c’est nous qui boitons.”
How come we don’t get annoyed by someone who has a limp and can’t walk straight, but we’re annoyed by someone who can’t think straight?
Because someone who walks with a limp can recognize that we’re the one walking straight, but a limping mind will always claim that we’re the one who can’t think straight.
Comment #37 August 15th, 2024 at 10:21 am
What worked for me is gradually cutting down on topics that were of no direct relevance to my job or personal life , but felt good to have, just like comfort food. Basically those on which my actions have negligible impact, primarily news related to economy, stock market etc which I voraciously consumed, and on political front too…After more than 6 months, I have reduced 80-90% time spent on these categories, which has made surprising positive effect on my daily life, mainly from reduced stress. And of course the reduced distractions have allowed me to focus my attention on things that matter, thereby improving my results there
Comment #38 August 15th, 2024 at 10:33 am
It’s actually rather easy to stop wasting time with politics. Think about it probabilistically. What’s the probability that you being as knowledgeable about current politics as possible will have a tangible effect to the world? Unless you are an important decision maker, or close to one, rather small. So why bother?
Comment #39 August 15th, 2024 at 11:32 am
About the necessary uncluttering of the mind, as Alan Watts put it:
“But for the sanity of any Western person involved in this kind of civilization, it is very important for him indeed to be silent some of the time. And I mean silent inside the head. Just as you must stop talking occasionally if you want to hear what anybody else has to say. So you must stop thinking in order to find out what there is to think about. If you talk all the time, you will have nothing to talk about except talking. If you think all the time, you will have nothing to think about except thinking. And so you will exhaust yourself and come to a dead end, which is called psychosis. So, for health, it is very important to stop thinking—not always—so that you find that you get a non-thinking state as background to the thinking state. And this corresponds to floodlight awareness as background to spotlight awareness. “
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/transformation-of-consciousness
Comment #40 August 15th, 2024 at 11:37 am
There is a lot of good stuff already posted, but on the chance that additional perspectives might help you, I wanted to share my own experiences.
I suffered from this issue starting in 2016 and lasting about four years. Prior to 2016, I had sworn off all news; subsequent to that, I decided to be on high alert, which had a mix of upsides (I was conscious of COVID earlier than most people) and downsides (it was highly distracting). After observing that being on high alert made absolutely no difference in the world, or to myself, and instead meant that I had accomplished less and therefore the world was, at the margin, worse, I re-adjusted my approach.
My approach now is founded on a few principles:
* I want to find information that I believe is likely to be either highly actionable (ex: following news in my specific fields of interest [so, I actually do follow a decent amount of AI-related news]) or foundationally useful (ex: reading books, taking courses, etc)
* I weight avoiding negative information more highly than receiving positive information (ex: if a podcast is 90% useful and 10% triggering, into the trash bin it goes.) This is similar to Nassim Taleb’s observation that over short time horizons, most change is noise rather than signal, but we react emotionally to noise.
* Almost nothing requires an immediate response, so almost all sources of information should be boxed up because any reactive activity (email, texting, Slack) seems to turn on a ‘reactive’ mindset that can quickly ruin the day
* I try to ask “what am I concretely willing to do about this situation and how would additional information change my choice?” (Ex: rather than reading political news, I’d rather make a targeted donation and move on with my life.)
* Information about the world shouldn’t be treated as ‘entertainment’ because it doesn’t have the same shape where the good guys necessarily win, random events don’t necessarily have positive outcomes, etc
A few things that I found helpful in living by these principles:
* Recognizing that the downside of distraction is worse than the upside of some small additional amount of information I might take in
* Putting twitter in my /etc/hosts file – the bar to reading it is now high enough that I basically don’t
* Consciously noting that predictions made by news media were frequently wrong and/or overhyped – so I stopped reading all of them. I still find out about things that are really important because someone in my life usually will tell me, but I don’t seek it out. You could go as far as to track – “do the things this source implies will happen actually happen?” and see if it is better than chance. My experience of doing this casually is that the answer was “no”.
* Reading history (e.g. Robert Caro’s biographies of LBJ and Bob Moses, Active Measures: the Secret History of Disinformation, and Solutions to Polarization in America) gave me a useful historical perspective that things have always been corrupt and bad in many ways (but that the world somehow *still* kept getting better at the margin)
* Recently in talking to my partner, I observed that I had had a mediocre day even though I thought everything I *was* reading was interesting – she observed it probably was not *interesting enough*, and she was right. I then unsubscribed from a variety of sources I consider generally high quality (e.g. ACX/Scott Alexander, Matt Levine, The Diff) and it made my life immediately better even though all of those sources do generally publish content I *like* and *learn from*. I simply hadn’t raised the bar enough.
* Accepting that the world is neither good nor evil – it just *is* and that no amount of *reading* will move it from “bad” to “good”, but actions I take in the world can sometimes make a difference *at the margin* which is all anyone can reasonably hope to do anyway
* Blocking distracting website elements using tools like Brave’s built in ‘block element’ (so that I can read a targeted piece of content I want to read without getting sucked into whatever ‘related articles’ show up). I find this is a good way to avoid falling into rabbit holes. I also use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en to block recommended YouTube videos whenever I happen to land on that site.
* Trying to batch up most of my reading onto Kindle rather than the web, so as to limit distractions (and prioritize books over other sources)
* Trying to batch up handling of email, Slack, etc (though I am not that good at this, when I do it, I find my mood is almost always better; it’s much less important than avoiding infotainment type content though, and I also aggressively filter out email and Slack channels that I don’t regularly take action on)
My experience is that dealing with the modern flow of information is *incredibly hard* and I am constantly battling new sources of distraction because the human brain seems to be wired this way, and I think it is *particularly hard* when something hits really close to home or makes the world feel more unsafe than it once did. I have noticed that if I am able to create some distance for roughly 3-4 days from a topic that is highly distressing, rather than trying to sooth myself by reading more about it (which, while it feels good seems to never work) that the distance does help quite a bit.
I also found my friend Ben’s essays helpful for some additional tactical tips: https://www.benkuhn.net/focustools/
Comment #41 August 15th, 2024 at 11:50 am
I think I suffer from a similar doomscrolling addiction, although I don’t manage to read as much as you do or be 1/10th as productive as you are!
What I find strange is the satisfaction I derive from reading not only opinions that agree with mine or are otherwise polite and expressed in good faith (that would be sensible), but also non-informative opinions that disparage everything I value, or are openly hostile to me at a racial or cultural level. It’s some sort of literary masochism I think…
Comment #42 August 15th, 2024 at 1:18 pm
I ditched reading WaPO and NYT in favor of following Mo News, @mosheh on Instagram as well as a daily podcast + newsletter, depending on how you prefer to consume it. Really helps me stay sane as it pertains to news consumption. Mosh and his team are truly a gem. They also have great longer interviews about once every week or two.
Comment #43 August 15th, 2024 at 2:00 pm
Dear Scott,
Consider the following analogy problems
Current events blogging :: Scott Aaronson
Pop-stats :: A
grumpy tweeting :: B
Pop-history :: C
My answers would be A = Nate Silver, B = Pedros Domingos, C = Yuval Hariri. In other words, this is really staying within your bubble.
On the other hand, I’d be interested to get a link to one of these Marxist essays celebrating Oct 7 – your phrasing makes me a bit worried that this is a repeat of your time reading Andrea Dworkin as representative of feminism. Sadly, one is definitely at risk of reading something stupid when one goes looking on the Internet. Why not try Edward Said or Noam Chomsky’s writings on Palestine?
Comment #44 August 15th, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Eek! Good luck! Here are my thoughts:
1. I know you already know it but Scott Alexander’s post on the Psychopolitics of Trauma was eye-opening: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
2. Beeminder? (Both directions are possible: committing to spend less time on social media etc, as well as spending more time writing etc. The latter is more straightforward and maybe suffices if it crowds out the doomscrolling.)
3. Aaron Swartz was the first to convince me to avoid the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Or if you can’t bear the temptation to find out details of a news item everyone’s talking about, restrict your reading about it to Wikipedia. It does a great job of filtering out the speculation and sticking to facts. And, amazingly, when news is happening, the relevant Wikipedia page gets updated by the minute as the story unfolds. I’d mention the Wikipedia current events portal but I fear that might backfire and become yet another item on your terrifyingly long list!
PS: Yet another impressive person (the creator of Ruby on Rails) on his decision to break from the news: https://world.hey.com/dhh/breaking-from-the-news-bb599adf
Comment #45 August 15th, 2024 at 4:30 pm
Paul #43: You could start for example with this by Steve Salaita (he has lots more) or this by Salman Abu Sitta. I see no indication that these are marginal figures, or renounced by anyone else in the globalize-the-intifada movement. The view that October 7 was legitimate or even heroic resistance is a widespread one.
I’ve read both Chomsky and Said (nothing like comprehensively). I see them as two of the figures most responsible for the intellectual and moral dysfunction of modern academia.
Comment #46 August 15th, 2024 at 5:23 pm
Agree with those who suggest to replace one addiction with another. I used my doom-scrolling budget to search for everything Scott has said about quantum fidelity, Michio Kaku, what it would take to build a quantum computer that can break the RSA and verified that ChatGPT-4o is fully in agreement (including about Kaku’s book). Though I will never contribute to the field of quantum computing, I am fully prepared to argue with my brother-in-law and will consider it time well-spent.
Comment #47 August 15th, 2024 at 7:09 pm
Yikes Scott! That’s continuing 72-hour days. I’m glad you read fast. I have nowhere near as long a daily list, but still have had to cut down, because of eye strain.
Being old (75+) and hypertensive, I made the choice to eliminate those entries that I suspected raised my blood pressure the most. For example, in relation to your last paragraph, a whole swath of “progressive” readings, e.g., Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now and much of Michael Moore’s, now get the strikeout for their incessant Israel-bashing. I have also been able to dodge quickly any reading that has Donald Trump’s picture at the top of it, regardless of who is writing.
Now if I can just apply the blood-pressure argument to audio books, which I can listen to while exercising or driving…
Cheers
Comment #48 August 16th, 2024 at 7:36 am
I find reading less satisfying than writing. I recently finished a little book on entropy; it was a long time since I’d written a book, and while it’s intimidating to start one, it becomes addictive to keep tinkering with it, improving this and that until it’s done. My desire to read news and blogs really dropped.
When I’m busy writing I still read plenty, because research involves reading, but it’s goal-directed reading, which makes me happier than scrolling through news articles, tweets or blog comments. It’s like the difference between scuba diving for the purposes of archeology, and lying on a polluted beach as the tide rises, letting dirty water and trash wash over me.
Comment #49 August 16th, 2024 at 8:13 am
Hi Scott
Regarding the question of changing opinions of antizionists, especially those in academia, I think it would be difficult. To understand their position you have to go back to the ideological grandfather of critical theory etc., Foucault, who was very frank about the origins of his theories, explaining that he develops them to attract beautiful boys, literally, he was a privileged white male thinking with his dick. Being antizionist in an elite American/European campus affords at the moment similar advantages, of power, sex (dental dams in campus encampments), feeling part of a superior culture (sort of, woke is the solution, like islam is the solution) feeling loved, being part of a community of cool people, money and job opportunities without requiring lots of talent and so on. No amount of factual argumentation can compete with these basic needs which are currently served by an antizionist stand. Sorry, but thats where we stand.
Comment #50 August 16th, 2024 at 10:59 am
Dear Scott,
Thank you for the ‘Marxist’ links. I certainly wouldn’t endorse any position that fails to condemn the murder of civilians, and these people take that rather lightly. A similar opinion exists in some segments of Israel, I might add: I’ve been surprised to see friends declaring on social media that there is no such thing as a civilian Palestinian. Here’s to hoping that this will change on both sides.
Let me put one last question: What are some great right-leaning books that really nail something about (a) Palestine/Israel or (b) American society?
Comment #51 August 16th, 2024 at 11:57 am
I’ve easily tripled my productivity by reading one book on kindle while simultaneously listening to two other different books on Audible in my left and right ear.
Comment #52 August 16th, 2024 at 12:12 pm
I feel this very much. I will preface that I haven’t quite solved the issue myself, and I’m not quite the genius you are, but I feel these are the good directions for me:
1 – Convert what you can to audio format, and combine it with something else productive or fun. For example, cooking, or taking a walk, or exercise.
2 – Don’t Worry About the Vase is totally great. I mostly listen to it using the LessWrong audio button (it’s an AI voice). I miss a lot of the follow up links, and that is a missed opportunity, but I learn to live with it and just have a lossier grasp on it. If I am on a leisurely walk, I can occasionally pull out the phone if it seems like a really funny tidbit or image I’m missing.
3 – For politics, I switched to podcasts like the Ezra Klein show. At some point the arguments start to repeat so I eventually tune out.
4 – Sometimes I make the conscious choice to switch to a fictional sci-fi audiobook. I learn more from those than I do from pundits and current events.
5 – Unplug. I have kids too, though they’re getting older and I can make the time to get out and learn the Lindy Hop and the waltz. Not sure what it’s like in Texas but in the bay area, it’s full of nerdy folks of all ages and I don’t miss Ezra Klein one bit during.
Comment #53 August 16th, 2024 at 12:56 pm
I don’t frequent Twitter nor Facebook since both largely a compendium of ideological hyperbole immune to empiricism. I do believe that minimizing the difference between expectations and actual outcomes is a positive for society and civilization just as in science the purpose is to align expectations and measurements. Ideologically driven expectations tend to be dramatically dire so hyperbole. None of us can compensate for the failures of the US educational system by posting on the internet.
Off topic-I had to sign up for a temporary service and did so in a store with a sales rep beside me. He called the service line and of course the initial phase was presumably a low level AI. After a brief conversation the AI said in a frustrated tone of voice, “Awww F##k, I will transfer you to a person for further assistance.” Both of us laughed and I thought-how positively human.
Comment #54 August 16th, 2024 at 1:19 pm
I really don’t understand the Republican strategy in this campaign. In every country throughout the world, including the US, women outnumber men in age cohorts starting about age 25 (the curse of the singlet Y chromosome). In the last election the final official tally had Biden winning by 7 million votes and 10 million more women voted in the election than men. The old adage needs to change to, all politics are local and women in the majority pull the lever. Thus far I have seen nothing from the Republicans that recognizes this clear fact. Another triumph of ideology over empiricism I guess.
Comment #55 August 16th, 2024 at 1:20 pm
Paul #50:
What are some great right-leaning books that really nail something about (a) Palestine/Israel or (b) American society?
Err, anything by Eric Hoffer or Thomas Sowell? For Israel, the books by (say) Alan Dershowitz or George Gilder will at least tell you the standard responses to every standard anti-Israel talking point. (Note: This is decidedly not a general endorsement of anything these people have said on any subject.)
Comment #56 August 16th, 2024 at 1:39 pm
Well, thanks to this post, I now spend my 10h flight to Houston reading blogs you mention instead of working :p Funnily, I stumbled on something very nice and fitting:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/out-to-get-you
I also try to:
— think about whether the reading activity changes any future actions (for example, reading politics usually makes me angry, yet I won’t act on it)
— think about what I’m proud of, and think whether the reading activity works towards repeating it
— do 30sec mindfulness exercises.
I’m not very successful though.
Comment #57 August 16th, 2024 at 6:17 pm
Dim #38
Unfortunately for Scott, I think someone with a platform might have a good excuse for that. Unfortunately for us, anyone who can argue with someone with a platform has roughly the same excuse, and the two cover everyone these days.
Comment #58 August 16th, 2024 at 6:33 pm
OhMyGoodness #54
That’s at the tail end of a very ironic(?) phenomenon that has arose from our hyper-amoral analysis culture. On the base level, people want to have morals and to prove their enemies are morally wrong. On the next level, people want to be seen as objective. On the third level people want their morals to be objective, which didn’t work out, so in the rarefied air of the fourth level, morals are disguised in objective analysis. Now there’s a genre of “attack analysis” that asks, “why is their strategy to alienate dogs?” instead of stating that their actions are cruel to dogs. A lot of women vote on both sides of the isle, and the real miracle of strategy is that a certain cruelty has been recast, at least internally, in such a way that it does not alienate.
Comment #59 August 16th, 2024 at 8:09 pm
Concerned #58
Every exit poll I have seen from the 2020 election indicates that Biden won because of the female vote. Not only was the percentage share of female votes decidedly in favor of Biden but as I noted above the votes by females was decidedly larger than those of males. Of course women voted both sides of the aisle but far more voted for Dem side and more females voted than males.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184424/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-gender-us/
Comment #60 August 16th, 2024 at 9:07 pm
OhMyGoodness #59
The conservatives and liberals I have talked to express totally different pictures of what the candidates have said throughout their campaigns. I think if that wasn’t the case, and there was one definitive and fairly balanced list of quotes that everyone read, that gap would be twice, maybe three times as extreme – or not present at all because the primary would have had a different outcome.
Comment #61 August 17th, 2024 at 8:45 am
OhMyGoodness #54
A correction-the age cohort of female majority is materially delayed in those countries widely practicing gender based selective abortion.
Comment #62 August 17th, 2024 at 11:28 am
It might help to read some works and/or modern interpretations of Stoic philosophy, particularly the stuff about Dichotomy of Control (just Googling “dichotomy of control” gives interesting results).
The idea is, most of the stuff you are reading is about events outside of your control and/or influence. Reading about it only agitates you without actually being productive.
At least, thinking about this stuff helped me enforce a system where I only read politics/news/etc. on Friday evenings and on weekends, and for the rest of the week I cut these off entirely.
Other ideas:
Read the sources when logged off, so that when an article is paywalled, you can ignore it and save time.
Delete any twitter and facebook accounts that you have, and only look at the feeds of people you admire and respect. Random social media ideologues deserve 0% of your attention.
Per comment #31: why on Earth are you reading Marxist drivel about how great the October 7 massacres were? Why treat far-left sources with any sort of respect at all? You probably don’t read Nazi race theorists or the manifestos of Islamic jihadist ideologues, so why not put the far-left in the same “no need to read this” category as those other two?
Comment #63 August 17th, 2024 at 11:47 am
AF #62:
why on Earth are you reading Marxist drivel about how great the October 7 massacres were? Why treat far-left sources with any sort of respect at all?
The simplest answer is that I spend my life in American academia, where probably half or more of my colleagues in humanities and social sciences are sympathetic to those views. So the precise nature of the intellectual or moral errors they’re making is a subject of boundless fascination for me.
Comment #64 August 17th, 2024 at 12:27 pm
Scott #63:
I don’t think these people deserve your respect any more than the random social media ideologues do. Just because they have degrees, robes, and academic titles does not mean that they are sane.
I think that most of these departments were captured by far-left ideologues decades ago, and that advancement within them is determined more by adherence to far-left doctrines than to producing good research. Especially since, as far as my impressions go, the more a field subjects itself to discipline via empirical verification (or similar things like proofs in the case of math), the smaller the proportion of its members are Marxists/postmodernists/etc. Without such discipline, entryists can infiltrate the field and enforce their dominance by scratching each others’ backs (citation rings, placing members in hiring committees, etc.).
Also, even in the case of brilliant researchers who had nutty ideas, how much time do you spend wondering what is wrong with them? (ie, Linus Pauling and vitamin C) Maybe the far-left stuff is for Chomsky what vitamin C was for Pauling.
Comment #65 August 17th, 2024 at 12:28 pm
Dear Scott,
Almost 10 year lurker, first time commenting. First I just wanted to say I support and thank you for all you do and write scientifically and otherwise. I came across you in undergrad (math) when I caught the QI bug and tried to learn it with your Democritus notes. I emailed you some questions back then and you replied very kindly. Now I’m in my postdoc and just recently bought a physical copy of the book out of nostalgia:)
Anyways, my two cents fwiw.
1.First, on this one, John Baez basically already said what I was going to but let me put it in my own words. It seems like a big part of the problem is the inherent passivity of the whole 8 hours of reading.
The obvious antidote to this is writing more and asking your own questions. You will still read plenty (other people’s answers) but it will certainly be higher quality stuff, if only because you made a deliberate choice to seek that topic and ask for further clarification.
I recall once you said something along the lines of being a stage in your career where “you just care to see the cool problems you like be resolved rather than getting credit for it”. From a younger less established person, let me remind you how desirable a position this is. You get to use your blog as your personal MathOverflow. And you have the freedom to ask whatever questions *you* find interesting without worrying too much if they sound relatively naive or low status.
Plus, you have a large enough & high quality audience that even if any of your readers can’t help, I’m sure we can find a friend of a friend. If you get in the habit of writing “effortposts” or a dedicated “series of deep dives” on selected research topics of your interest, I am sure you will gain a reputation as the go to place for open discussion. This is not to suggest that you don’t already put effort into your blog or that your blog doesn’t already have this sort of reputation. What I mean is you should make these hypothetical “effortposts” *completely explicit*.
Like naive example…effortpost series 1: P vs NP….You start by writing a “mini-monograph review” of the relevant background and setting, remind everyone why you think P is likely not equal to NP & why the problem is hard, pose simpler questions/ideas/conjectures that you feel are the future moving forward for P vs NP….and make an explicity invitation/advertisement to have come experts opine in the comment sections.
Again, it would be like a series of highly upvoted great questions in Mathoverflow. BTW, I don’t mean to suggest that MO/SE is bad or should be avoided (you could do this there for the scientific topics). But just from a younger person, humble reminder that this is such a cool perk of your blog and notoriety. One that over the years you might have come to take for granted but is very salient to someone like me.
Incidentally, I have a topic suggestion for a blog post like this. If that’s ok, I will write you an email explaining my suggestion in detail. It would be basically a sequel to your posts and paper circa 2022 on holography, QI, complexity etc. I am thinking of these:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6457
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6599
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15601#
I am not in “this field” (whatever it may be….QI\(\cap\) HEP?) but I follow it with a very strong spectator’s interest and I see many recent developments that warrant excitement. At the risk of adding to your reading load, I do look forward to telling you about this over email some time. My making such a suggestion is ironically using your blog precisely in the way I advise albeit by proxy. I’m well meaning tho I promise;)
2. This one is also relatively obvious but perhaps worth reminding. A lot of this “brain fog from doom-scrollin” has purely biochemical origins ( your body controls your mind more than vicecersa). It’s like a suboptimal steady state you arrive at over time, trust me I know the feeling well.
The upshot of this, is that you can jolt yourself out of this local minimum with some willpower. I realize it’s cliche but going out for walks and getting some sunlight really is the solution here. I don’t advise vigorous exercise. But I do advise routine casual activity outdoors. In the evolutionary grand scheme of things…..sitting indoors for hours reading (even books) is highly unnatural and not what the body expects to be doing in some very raw sense. And I think even if one is of a great rabinnical pedigree;) the hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherer’s surely must count more. I’m sure you know your own body better, but I would take (and prioritize!) any such opportunity for quality outdoors time. It will put you in a much better more calm mood. It’s easier to have better ideas like that.
It’s like how in airplanes we are told to put masks on before doing anything else in case of decompression. You do it before anything lest you lose your mind literally. I very much believe in “mens sana in corpore sano”. In that sense, the reading fast is a wonderful idea. In the interim you optimize your health habits and personal biochemistry and then you revisit your reading/blog with a clearer mind.
So my second suggestion is basically the same as the first one in a sense. Ditch passivity for activity. Actually, humanity at its best is basically combining 1 and 2. I’m thinking of things such as the Einstein-Godel walks. You get to go for a stroll in Nature with your buddy who is one of the smartest person’s in the world and gives you personalized answers to your naive questions about the topics you hold most dear. That’s surely peak human existence.
All the best wishes & good luck!
Comment #66 August 17th, 2024 at 12:31 pm
Hi Scott,
I see you have not commented on CA SB-1047. What do you think about it? Should it be passed, should Gavin Newsom veto it, or should an amended version of the bill be passed?
Also what is your take on “Pause AI” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter?
Shouldn’t we be more invested in “Pausing AI Regulation” instead of “Pausing AI”?
Comment #67 August 18th, 2024 at 12:56 pm
Anirudh #66: I haven’t followed the intricacies of the SB1047 debate nearly as well as I should. But Zvi Mowshowitz has, and I generally find his judgment on AI policy to be excellent, and he comes down strongly in favor of the bill. Crucially, as I understand it, this bill would apply only to the very largest models, as quantified by the cost of training them. So small AI startups could basically do as they wished. Only the big players, like OpenAI and DeepMind, would be constrained (and not much), mostly in the form of liability if they failed to take “reasonable” safety precautions before release. In general, regulating the biggest frontier models (the ones whose capabilities we don’t yet understand), while maximizing freedom to innovate with smaller models, feels like the right approach to me.
Comment #68 August 19th, 2024 at 6:30 pm
It’s ok to lose interest in research, especially after you’ve been doing it for 20 years and successfully. And especially if you are sensitive to things going on in the world. For me the lockdowns and staying at home spending too much time online made me completely lose interest in research and it hasn’t come back. But I’m okay with it just wait it out till the earliest date I can retire.
Comment #69 August 19th, 2024 at 7:18 pm
[…] Scott Aaronson’s daily reading list is to reading what I am to writing. I am honored that he spends 12 hours a week on my blog, one does not have many of those bullets. He also reads WaPO and NYT, ACX, Not Even Wrong (although this one rarely updates anymore), Quanta, Quillette, The Free Press, Mosaic, Tablet, Commentary, several Twitter accounts (Graham, Yudkowsky, Deutsch), many Facebook updates and comments that he says in total often take hours a day, ~50 arXiv abstracts per day plus books. […]
Comment #70 August 20th, 2024 at 5:43 pm
Wow, Thanks for the words scott, I started getting really deep into studying AI and the different platforms the last few months. After a few classes and understanding how the language model works and how the inputs and outputs could be controlled my feelings too became jaded…
The last 2 months have been crazy for me, I went from having read less than 2 books a year to reading 3 a week. I came across some very amazing words about you from Ryan Ginard in Future Philanthropy. Thank you for sharing some great information and ideas online with us.
And do take a few days to focus on other areas, I’ve been reading The Republic by Plato the last few days, a great book and your writings remind me of the same philosophical dilemmas.
Comment #71 August 20th, 2024 at 10:23 pm
I agree with comment #23 about using RSS. If you’re not using it yet, consider trying Fraidycat [https://fraidyc.at/] or Inoreader [https://www.inoreader.com/].
Comment #72 August 22nd, 2024 at 5:26 am
Two recommendations, if I may. First, I don’t know if you are familiar with Contrapoints, but I would highly recommend her video on incels. Beside the fact that, as I take it, the main topic of this video is somewhat inside your interests cloud, and Contrapoints provides a rare perspective of someone who used to date both sexes, both as male and as female, it contains a valuable tangent on the mechanism of internet-mediated self-harm. TLDR, the Contrapoints’ point is that obsessively reading haters and even provoking them to target you more is a result of a cognitive bias that makes you believe “whatever hurts”, because “a truth must be hard”. And in her case the effective solution was (as was already suggested by others above) to block yourself access to resources you use for self-harm.
The second advice of a similar kind is from a Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin, who was recently exchanged (alongside other Russian opposition activists and certain American citizens, including Evan Gershkovich) for some Kremlin killers and spies, after spending two years in prison for “discrediting the Russian armed forces”. A few days after the exchange Yashin gave an interview to a prominent Russian journalist Yuri Dud’, where he revealed that during his time in the Russian prison, he deliberately asked his advocates and supporters not to send him anything from Twitter, in order to escape the toxic atmosphere (!), and that he doesn’t plan to return to Twitter for the same reason. He also named the absence of Twitter one of the key factors that helped him remain sane and relatively healthy during his imprisonment. Let that sink in (C).
Comment #73 August 22nd, 2024 at 7:08 am
Schopenhauer already warned against too much reading.
“Solches aber ist der Fall sehr vieler Gelehrten: sie haben sich dumm gelesen. Denn beständiges, in jedem freien Augenblicke sogleich wieder aufgenommenes Lesen ist noch geisteslähmender, als beständige Handarbeit; da man bei dieser doch den eigenen Gedanken nachhängen kann.”
“This, however, is the case with very many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For continuous reading, picked up at once in every spare moment, is even more mentally crippling than continuous manual labor; because the latter at least allows you to pursue your own thoughts.” [my translation]
Comment #74 August 22nd, 2024 at 3:09 pm
If you’re spending half of your waking time on reading junk online every day you should acknowledge that this is a mental condition that should be taken seriously and fixed. I’ve had it myself. The best solution is go cold turkey and focus on work, family and wholesome activities – sports, art, reading actual books and not online junk, whatever rocks your boat.
If you find yourself unable to quit reading online junk you need to talk to a therapist, there’s no shame in that and they may suggest efficient strategies to deal with the problem.
Comment #75 August 23rd, 2024 at 1:49 pm
Dear Scott,
I hope this post is on-topic, as you’ve opened this thread to discussion about the presidential election.
I am very concerned about Kamala Harris’ anti-American rhetoric (and the mainstream Democratic party more generally). Her campaigns’ messaging is reminiscent of fascist and communist leaders of the past.
One example is the “weirdness” message. The Democrats are calling Republicans “weird” and saying it’s bad to be “weird.”
Firstly, on a personal level, as an eccentric person who was bullied and rejected at various moments in his life for being “weird,” it’s painful for me to hear that message. I’m sure it’s painful for many other people like me.
More importantly, the “anti-weirdness campaign” is a profoundly anti-American message. If there’s one thing that makes America unique in history, it’s the weirdness of our people. The founding fathers were weird. Their ideas were very weird for their time. The greatest American inventors were eccentric personalities with weird and crazy ideas. Many of our heroes were weirdos who were willing to do crazy things that no one else would. America accepted rejects and weirdos from all over the world—misfits cast out by other countries. As long as you don’t hurt other people, we’ll let upu be weird and do crazy things. That’s the American way. That’s what makes us who we are. That’s what makes America great.
The fascists and communists hates weirdness and weird people. They wanted total conformity of thought and expression and personality. The Nazis targeted Jews, in no small part, because they were “weird” and didn’t conform to society in various ways. Being “weird” or refusing to conform made you a target in Nazi Germany. It sent you to a gulag in Stalin’s soviet union. Weirdness is a threat to collectivist authoritarians—in those societies, weirdness must be quashed.
So I am concerned about the Democrats’ “anti-weirdness” message. In particular, I’d like you to read this article as an example of what disturbs me:
https://www.cip.uw.edu/2024/08/12/weird-checking-new-fact-checking/
What do you think about “anti-weirdness checking?” Isn’t that fascist and un-american?
From my perspective, the Democrats now value social conformity above all else. Do you see where I’m coming from?
Comment #76 August 23rd, 2024 at 3:05 pm
Cole #75: If by “weird” they meant “autism-spectrum” or “nerdy” or “STEM-obsessed” or “romantically unattractive,” then I’d completely agree with you. And a few leftists, including Amanda Marcotte, really do seem to mean precisely those things. But Kamala and other Democratic leaders have tied the “weird” label extremely tightly to Vance’s and other Republicans’ obsession with controlling other people’s reproductive choices (e.g. to get IVF or abortion, how many children to have), and that I’m completely fine with.
Comment #77 August 23rd, 2024 at 3:16 pm
So, look: even if we concede that the specific policy proposals (e.g. Project 2025 or pro-life or whatever) are bad for the country (I don’t think they’re bad for the country, but let’s say they are just for the sake of argument), to *use* the word “weird” as an insult in the first place implies that there’s something disqualifying or invalidating or wrong about being “weird,” or having “weird” ideas.
By analogy: if I call a guy “fat” and “gay” as an insult, even if he richly deserved to be insulted, *using those words* as insults implies that there’s something wrong with fat people and/or gay people. Same with “weirdness.”
My issue is that the whole “weirdness” message is working from the assumption that weird or unconventional or unpopular ideas are wrong by virtue of being weird. It also implies that weird ideas should be condemned. I can’t separate this from the Democrats’ policy of censoring weird ideas (“misinformation”) on the internet.
Also, what’s your take on the article I linked? Think it’s highly relevant to this discussion.
Comment #78 August 23rd, 2024 at 3:57 pm
Scott: do you find The New York Times coverage (in particular of the Middle East and the presidential election) more objective than that of The Wall Street Journal?
Comment #79 August 23rd, 2024 at 4:23 pm
My question is from the perspective of someone who is a far less sophisticated consumer/processor of the news than you are: with, say, circa 45 minutes to allocate a day, my personal sense is that “the newspaper of record” remains the simplest available option. The New York Times used to do it for me … but over the months past (in particular since October 7) I fear it gradually ceased being the beacon of objectivity (ditto NPR).
Comment #80 August 24th, 2024 at 12:46 am
I’ll second multiple RSS recommendations. It REALLY helps with saving time. You will spend less time consuming from multiple information sources (down to one). It allows for controlling when to consume. It makes easier to see who writes a lot of information but not much of it is really useful. A lot of room for optimization, a must have.
I personally use Feedbro extension for Firefox, but it is limited to one device only (which might be a win, if you want to not consume information on e.g. phone). I plan to eventually move to something else.
Comment #81 August 24th, 2024 at 12:56 am
Oh, almost forgot the best part about RSS: they allow for fighting FOMO, since all information from your sources will be saved to feed reader, which will be really easy to consume anytime later. It will also light up statistics on your information sources, and will make it easy to see interesting sources who write rarely (best one) and boring sources who write a lot (time consumers). Very-very good if you plan to stay away from news for long periods of time or just would like to only read news once-in-a-week (I do this).
Comment #82 August 24th, 2024 at 6:08 am
Re comment #79:
Scott reads Tablet magazine. There’s a news outlet associated with Tablet called The Scroll: https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/
According to The Scroll’s About page (https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/about):
“The Scroll is Tablet magazine’s daily news report covering events around the world, from health policy in Jerusalem to developments in the cryptocurrency markets, sized to read over a cup of coffee or afternoon commute. And it’s free, you can’t beat that.”
This might be a good alternative to the outlets you mentioned.
Comment #83 August 25th, 2024 at 1:25 pm
You’re a hero, Scott. Thanks for being so vulnerable. I respect your courage and your heart for those suffering around the world.
Comment #84 August 25th, 2024 at 8:47 pm
Did you consider this might be contagious prior to posting your list with the oh so convenient links? We are all doomed.
Comment #85 August 27th, 2024 at 3:30 pm
About Peter Woit, checked his blog and for instance https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770, dissing this discussion on string theory by proponents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjDxk9ZnYJQ. Not a physicist, but I found the discussion entertaining and likeable (and string theory research to be valuable). Found Woit‘s attitude puzzling, am I in the wrong?