infatium

“It is critically important to filter your information sources so you don't become a hostage of a news feed built by AI algorithms. You end up consuming the same content as everyone else. You need to be proactive. Nobody else is doing this, they have no competitive advantage.

“Even if all your windows are closed and notifications are off, but every five or six minutes you quickly check an inbox or your phone, that initiates a context shift in your brain. There's a neurological cascade. Your ability to think clearly just goes really down.

“Social media algorithms only catch the more dramatic responses: fight-or-flight. You get scared or pissed off or aggressive. These are the lizard brain circuits. When you're engaged using those, you start to get incrementally more paranoid, aggressive. You get a little stupid, and you become a jerk.

“When we exit stimulus-reaction mode and spend time in the silence of our thoughts, we gain access to the unconscious, revealing who we truly are and what we want. 10-15 minutes a day. But most often we remain in stimulus-reaction mode and miss these important signals.

“We don't have to just make a better copy of Google search. We can find a fundamentally new way to interact with information. The key question is how do you help someone get the right answer: by creating it, synthesizing it, or directing them to it?

“George Orwell wasn't right. We will not be taken over by an authoritarian regime. Aldous Huxley was right in Brave New World. He posited that we will give away our freedom for cheap dopamine.

“Social media really is a drug and it's engineered to be a drug. Potency, quantity, variety, the bottomless scroll, the likes, all of it. We need to be as thoughtful about using it as we would be about using any drug.

“The worst thing about me in my relationship with my wife and kids was that I had been on Twitter in the previous hour. After deleting my 2-million-follower account: life became much less noisy. That's 100% better.

“Social media is great for adults who want to pursue projects. The problem is when social media companies start pursuing you. The algorithm selects content by how extreme the behavior is, not by its value to the reader.

“You hear news about something horrifically depressing and feel a little bit more helpless, with less of a sense of control over the world. This is the same neurobiology as fear conditioning. A sense of control is physiologically protective against stress.