Thanks for the idea that’s interesting, also, love that Sivers post!

This section of the podcast also reminded me of an article I read a while ago titled No Speed Limits by Derek Sivers: https://sive.rs/kimo Others have mentioned it in the comments, most recently on episode #336, and even further back on the comments for episodes 251, and 25.

When Jason was talking about conscientious kids, I’ve wondered how automated alerts and notifications will tamp down that ability for some folks the more they are exposed to it. I see it similar to how I basically can’t remember phone numbers anymore as it’s always a lookup in my contacts by name. About the only two numbers I remember are my own cell number and my house phone number because it’s used for so many store rewards programs that I have to say the number. Besides those, I’d be very hard pressed to pull a phone number out of my brain.

Another example is my wife’s usage of Duolingo for learning Spanish. When she first started she was burning through the lessons, but now, she only does a couple of lessons after getting a notification saying that the app will stop giving her notifications because it doesn’t look like she’s using the app. So she does a couple of lessons to keep the app thinking that she’s not given up just yet, but basically has until she gets that notification again.

@justin: you mentioned the ability to retroactively add a tag to content that you’ve scanned before. That is an interesting exercise. I don’t have any close recommendations, but a service that we use for web app analytics, Pendo, from what I understand, has the ability for us to tag certain elements in the app to track and after it has done some processing, it can tell us the activity related to that tagged item. Since they use CSS selectors (at least in part) to help determine which element to track, I assume that they store all of the click events on the page and also store the CSS selector to identify the clicked element, and when you add the element for tracking later they just search through all of the tracked events to see which match the newly added tracked element. I’m sure that it doesn’t work for every possible element being clicked, but it works well enough. So that got me thinking about when you’re doing the processing of text that your service consumes that you also add to the tracking other words/sentiments that the text contains in addition to what you may be specifically looking for. Anyway, just a thought.

FYI: this episode isn’t categorized as “podcast” so it’s not listed on the Podcasts page.

I’m a developer, but studied a chunk of biology at university and I can just about follow the science behind their normal talk in other episodes (which I’ve been following for about a year), as they’re good at boiling it down to a low-ish level. In general, I’d trust their opinion more than a lot of other people who turn up on TV talking about this sort of stuff, and I’m in the UK where there seems to be a lot less of this than the States.

Even more speculatively, on the UFO thread… I find it interesting to wonder what next on that. If there are UFOs, what does that mean?

If they’re aliens, does that mean they have faster than light travel? In that case, we know that’s possible and our understanding of physics could be way wrong. If not, are they very long lived or robots? Why spend the resources to come all the way here and study us in some way we can’t comprehend?

How did they know to come to this planet? OK, we’ve been broadcasting radio out for quite a while now, but that’s going to be very tenuous and difficult to pick up even from nearby stars. Does that mean they’ve sent probes or crews out to lots of exoplanets (from their point of view?) Or did they know we were here and how did they know that?

Much as it’s interesting to see something come out about UFOs, the amount of questions that are then unanswered is very frustrating.

It’s nothing new, though. Remember even the NYT, the US “paper of record”, pushed false stories about weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq war. Longer ago, they played a key part in Fidel Castro’s rise to power and before that, they even wrote that it was Poland that had invaded Germany! The Times bureau chief in Berlin, Guido Enderis, had been parroting Nazi propaganda right up through the start of the war.

This isn’t to say that the NYT is uniquely bad. Aside from possibly the
Atlantic, most its competition has fared even worse over the years. Every media outlet suffers from a lack of accuracy at times. It’s just that the most prestigious papers often pair that with a lack of epistemic humility and the power to essentially write the headlines around the world and even in Wikipedia.

I recently picked up a surprisingly engaging book about this history—The Gray Lady Winked.