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Category Archives: Psychology

Reprogram Your Relationship To Content

Like many people you may be aware of the terrifying concept of an omniscient Algorithm that controls what you see on the internet. And like many people you may think that you’ll never actually understand it, let alone defeat it. It’s too complex.

It’s not. It’s actually incredibly simple and once you understand one basic concept you’ll have all you need to start releasing its control over you.

That concept is: Tailored Content vs. Curated Content.

Curated content is when someone/something is deciding what to show you based on what it likes/thinks is popular.

Tailored content is when content is presented to you based on what you actually like/want to see.

Content on the internet used to be almost entirely tailored. If you wanted to find out about obscure occult books you’d subscribe to alt.books.occult If someone jumped into your tailored content stream with generalized or popular content it was marked as SPAM and ignored.

Now everything presented to us is heavily mixed with content unrelated to what we actually want to see. Try to get YouTube to just show you videos about obscure occult books. You can’t. It will show some related content for a bit and then start showing you completely unrelated popular videos. Why? The goal of the curation engine on YouTube (the Great and Powerful Algorithm) is simply to take whatever you search for and funnel you from there to popular monetized content. The key is monetized. The more popular a video, the more money it makes, the more it will be presented to you.

Taking control back requires a change in perspective. Consider that there are two major models of education: The Generalist and The Specialist. The Generalist believes that a good education must be well rounded. We must seek to learn as much as we can about as many things as we can. The Specialist believes that a good education focuses on one thing completely. We must learn as much as we can about than one thing, and become an expert.

Does The Specialist end up knowing less about the world than The Generalist? No. The more you learn about a single thing, the more you’ll find it connected to all other things. The more you learn about Chess the more you realize how Chess relates to math, psychology, history, and art.

The people who tell you that you must learn a little bit about everything have exactly the same goal as the YouTube Algorithm. They are trying to funnel you to the most popular and most expensive ways of thinking. They are training you to become a consumer of knowledge, not a producer of it.

You need to become The Specialist. Focus on one thing that really interests you. Learn as much as you can about it. Find all the corners of the internet where others who share that interest gather: chat rooms, forums, email lists, blogs. When the fear of missing out comes creeping into your mind, know that is a residual echo of the bad programming you were given by the consumer algorithm. Know that you are doing the work to rewrite that programming.

The last step is to become a producer of content. Take everything you are learning and add to the conversation. Post on the forums, create a blog, support the community in any way you can. This is how you reprogram your relationship to content and in doing so inoculate your mind against the algorithms that seek to control it.

Communicating in E-Prime

The way we talk can have profound affects on the way we see the world and, in turn, the way the world sees and interacts with us. One of the easiest ways of eliminating poor, irrational, upsetting, and alienating communication (ie. to increase your general likability) is to stop stating opinions as facts.

I recently came across a simple hack for this called E-Prime. The basic idea is to eliminate the verb “to be” from your vocabulary. For example, “She is an annoying person” becomes “She annoys me sometimes” or “I find her annoying”. This shifts your statements from making a judgement to stating a fact. I have found that paying attention to how I state facts and opinions has made me more aware of how I judge my self and others. See REBT if you want more information on the benefits of that.

If you want more more information on E-Prime, check out the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Small World Experiment

We know it today as “six degrees of separation”, but did you know that number is actually loosely based on the results of an actual experiment?

In the 1960s Stanly Milgram (you know Stanly Milgram he’s the one that tricked subjects in to thinking they were torturing people for science) set out the answer the question of how connected we all really are.

Here’s the general method:

1. Though the experiment went through several variations, Milgram typically chose individuals in the U.S. cities of Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas to be the starting points and Boston, Massachusetts to be the end point of a chain of correspondence. These cities were selected because they were thought to represent a great distance in the United States, both socially and geographically.

2. Information packets were initially sent to “randomly” selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study’s purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in Boston. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to Harvard.

3. Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone “personally” was defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.

4. In the more likely case that the person did not personally know the target, then the person was to think of a friend or relative he knew personally who was more likely to know the target. He was then directed to sign his name on the roster and forward the packet to that person. A postcard was also mailed to the researchers at Harvard so that they could track the chain’s progression toward the target.

5. When and if the package eventually reached the contact person in Boston, the researchers could examine the roster to count the number of times it had been forwarded from person to person. Additionally, for packages that never reached the destination, the incoming postcards helped identify the break point in the chain.

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment

When Milgram did this with 300 people trying to contact one man in Boston, the results where that the man received about 100 letters from people he knew. Milgram found that the average number of links was 6.

Milgram never actually used the phrase “6 degrees of separation” and if you are following along you may notice that this experiment has some flaws. However, after a Psychology Today article (go figure) was eventually written about the Small World Experiment, the “6 degrees” was legitimized and now the phrase is sometimes falsely attributed to Milgram.