Social media damages your brain and sabotages your potential (Jonathan Blow)

Jonathan Blow explains how social media is bad for you. The way we decide to spend our time every day has consequences.

[SkullsForSale]

"Information diet" is a good term. You are what you eat, and you think what you know.

[shaurz]

> someone asks about a new programming language
> goes on a 15 minute rant about the collapse of civilization

I love ya Blow

[Unigma]

I'll say it now, I followed this advice about a month ago and have seen drastic boost in my productivity. I swear, if I ever accomplish something huge it will be because of this advice. Thank you, this is truly a blessing of a video!

[AlexanderDumb]

I spend all day watching Jonathan Blow videos instead of doing something productive

[..]

The problem with social media is that it encourages shallow and transient thinking, stopping for deep thought doesn't give you the dopamine drip.
That's gradual conditioning.

[BlowFan]

I probably shouldn't talk about my personal issues here but for everyone who saw my latest community post, yes, I'm still struggling with tinnitus. I kind of forced myself to make this video because I have no choice but keep going. I just hope I will feel better in the future one way or another. Mild tinnitus is nothing but there's no limit how bad it can get. I'm trying to not make it any worse. Hey Blow, could Musk cure this BS with Neuralink or something?

[fiendishhhhh]

I hate the feeling I get after going on social media, especially watching reels and shorts. Brain rot is real.

[hri]

“What do you think about carbon?”
“Programmers that have short attention spans have brain damage”

[secretsoda]

> Anyone who asks how to get started in programming are not programmers

Makes sense lol

[FlorisDVijfde]

I have given in too much to my hunger for distractions. Time not for a diet but a permanent change! This video motivated me to think about structurally changing my pattern. Thanks Jon.

[mloskot]

The thoughts from around 10:00 on the feeling and moods nail it soo well.
It reminds me The Untethered Soull book
"If you watch it objectively, you’ll come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it. It’s like sitting down at night and deciding whether you want the sun to come up in the morning. The bottom line is, the sun will come up and the sun will go down. Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening."

[gordonfreeman-gw]

Even when people hear the answer to their problems they still want someone else to do it for them. At the root of those questions is an implication where they expect their teacher to show do it in a matter of 30 seconds, not realizing it takes fucking years and even decades to be even considered "good" at something. They can't stand sucking at something not realizing that's where everyone begins unless you're someone who's been practicing a particular skill set since childhood.

[JohnDoeCook]

Seems to me 1970's was a civilizational turning point where the neoliberal/neoclassical economics took really hold of the society and everything is seen through that ideology, which is basically short-term quarterly profit thinking.

[Optimus]

That's why I keep watching Blow Fan. To divert myself from actually closing youtube and start coding, it's a momentary feel-good before it ends and I have to do the actual work :P

[inkolore]

Really needed this, thanks for this video.

[MduPwnn]

Completely disagree with him about the "how to get started" question, and the fact that he says "it means you're not a programmer" is probably one of the most thoughtless things I've heard him say.

He himself, frequently, laments about how bad pretty much all software ecosystems are these days. It is enormously hard to know how to get started.

As a kid, I wanted to get started. I had written some really simple scripting for a couple of things and some HTML, and I didn't know where to go next (this was before JavaScript was at all common). All I could figure out was that C++ was one of the big languages at the time, so I got my parents to buy me a giant C++ book, and it was just impossible to understand for a beginner. Even just to compile a Hello World was a nightmare, and it immediately jumped into talking about all sorts of high-level concepts I was not remotely prepared to understand - largely because object-oriented BS was really at its absolute zenith.

It took several years for me to finally find resources I could actually understand - years I could have spent learning to program. And as Blow is so fond of pointing out, capability has exponential growth. It is a huge problem that I had no guidance through the jungle of bullshit and had to stumble around until finally running into something that was barely non-terrible enough for me to get a foothold. Many years later, it still sucks that I lost those years of potential.

I think it is really unfortunate that he both realizes what a complete disaster modern software and modern programming are, and yet when people ask him "so where should I start to minimize all of that stuff you're complaining about? All the stuff that would obviously make it harder to learn?", he sneers "you'll never be a programmer!".

[iantaylor]

i remember seeing this talk-rant live, and damn it's brutal. thanks for these videos!

[weiss]

once a month i need to rewatch this video

[googIesux]

This video damaged my brain and sabotaged my potential

[radscorpion]

Mr. Blow is clearly a very deep thinker, but its kind of funny, because he sometimes goes so deep he forgets common sense. One person asking someone else what their thoughts are on a new processor, does not mean they they are incapable of thinking deeply or long-term about anything, or that its indicative of a shallow mind. People can have a mixture of interests. We can read the news headlines AND we can read books! We can work for long hours on hard problems at work AND enjoy TV shows! These are not mutually exclusive propositions. This idea that you must be entirely in one category or the other ends up placing Blow's ideas in a position of self-ridicule, sort of like the academics who come up with really far flung notions that seem obviously wrong to the common person.

However, are there damaging impacts to ingesting too much social media every day, to the point where maybe your brain is just incapable of handling sustained thought on any given subject, of solving complex problems? That's definitely an interesting hypothesis, but its probably something we'd have to see studies on. Its not really clear exactly how malleable the brain is. I would like to see him actually cite studies instead of formulating "its plausible that" ideas in his head. A lot of people think this way, and that's how you get crazy old people who think climate change can't possibly be real, because "there's no way" humans can have such an immense impact on the climate. Ultimately evidence has to lead all of your thoughts. We can't just make bold proclamations because you feel one way or the other. We have enough of that already in some areas of social science, and I think there is evidence that its screwing up society pretty badly.

But yes, we should definitely be cautious about overuse of social media, and there likely are a few preliminary studies to look at justifying restricted use, and I think Jonathan Haidt is a good source on those studies..