self_made_human's profile

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 15m ago

You're a clinician, what does a person who always thinks they are the greatest, and is always correct about everything, and reacts aggressively when their ego is challenged sound like?

I know perfectly well what that person is. The problem is that I resent your implication that that's a fair description of me. You don't have to go digging very far to find examples of me admitting that I'm wrong about something, really. Here, I'll make it super easy for myself and kill two birds with one stone:

@Brainwavez @sarker

The recent shakeup at Google, with the departure of Jeff Dean, puts them out of the running as a frontier lab. I'm not saying they don't have a hope at all, I'm saying that regaining the lead is going to be even more of an uphill struggle. In other words, I was wrong.

Now, back to you, Coil:

Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no answers only, please. I'm too old for these games.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3hr ago

He'll either get humbled in a few more years and give what you said a second thought, or turn into one of those monsters in management who's "never wrong" and lashes out at people, destroying the institution from within.

I admire the confidence with which you present these as the only possible outcomes. I hope I do end up with that much epistemic humility.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3hr ago

I'm amazed at how many people don't cough up even the $20 required for the full-fat experience. At least OpenAI has recently announced that they're making unlimited usage of a newer model, 5.6 Luna, available to the masses for free. It is still several steps down from Sol, which continues to genuinely impress me.

Google's "free AI" is an incredibly imprecise term. It can mean Gemini 3.5 (Flash? Lite?) when used through the Gemini app. It can be the search-specific Gemini 1.5, IIRC, used if you just "Google" something. As you can imagine, not even Google can afford to use the best of the best when serving so many people at such scale, with the majority being trivial queries.

I would pay a great deal more than $20 for an AI plan, but luckily, I don't have to. I've got tons of Claude Max, because I decided to accept payment in that form instead of figuring out intercontinental financial transfers after my participation in Unslop.

I remember when a Dutch junior of mine was consulting another senior for advice when working on a meta-analysis meant for a big name journal. I could have clapped like a seal when the latter mentioned Claude, in addition to ChatGPT, for help with the stats scutwork. Then I asked, and confirmed, that she only had a free plan. I was so dismayed that I immediately offered to share my Max, and walk her through things. It didn't hurt that she's a pretty girl, and it would have provided an opportunity to go out with her (that ended up happening anyway), but I am beyond annoyed when other doctors use free-tier LLMs for clinical work. They still function adequately, but anyone who can afford better should use better. $20 is really not an onerous ask for a significant amount of intelligence on tap.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr ago · Edited 3hr ago

Hahahaha. I can't even be particularly mad, this loops right around into hilarious. When I worry I'm too self-aware for my own good, I can do with a reminder of what its absence looks like.

Aight buddy. I'm sure you've got a proper Big Boy job. I know a handful of Big 4 "consultants". Probably pays the bills well, doesn't it?

I do wonder just how common it would be for an error you've made while under stress to lead to someone dying. Do you have any idea what doctors do? Been to a hospital since you were (presumably) birthed in one?

My man, last time you skimmed this story you got the sex of every crying person in it wrong, then built a thesis about British civilizational decline on top of your own lacking literacy. Now you've skimmed again and built a theory of my employment. I'm starting to see what passes for your workflow: read 30% of the text, hallucinate the blanks, invoice for the full engagement. I wish I could get away with that, I seem to have to work for the money.

In other words: knock it off.

I am sure you have perspective to share. I sample plenty, and I've heard more informed opinions from the floridly psychotic.

Based on that experience, I suspect we’re only hearing one side of the story.

It's a first-person anecdote on a forum; of course you are. I presume Deloitte or PWC pays you for such cutting edge insight.

The difference is that my side comes with documents, and yours comes with hot takes about a profession you've never worked in a country you probably don't live in.

With all due respect (guess how much), the last man who guessed at my workplace from his armchair was you, one comment ago, and every checkable claim you made was wrong.

Let me see if bullet points help:

I had repeatedly tried to obtain the assessments.
The ward had been severely overloaded.
My supervisor had been away and had not spoken to the people working alongside me.
He cited supposed clinical errors without specifics.
The one specific error he did cite was demonstrably committed by somebody else.
He told me to obtain broader formal feedback.
I did exactly that.
The feedback, including from people outside my immediate peer group, has so far been uniformly good.
He then actively facilitated me obtaining still more of it.

This is a strange way to “agitate with staff.” Apparently I have been so disruptive that nurses, pharmacists, ward administrators, junior doctors and senior doctors keep volunteering to say nice things about me when formally asked, and have said it before, without asking, and my boss's response to my campaign of terror has been to tell his colleagues to make time to assess me.

Perhaps the inevitable reckoning is merely taking the scenic route.

And to spell it out, my male peers, which includes the senior reg, and most of the consultants? They like me too.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 9hr ago

A flattering type of audience to strive for, surely.

Not my target audience at all, unfortunately. They just form a substantial portion when you write on the open internet, without pay-walls. I do this, at present, for free. And that means I do not have a particularly strong reason to care.

Less charitably, my point is that contra your response to Bartender, you evidently don't see any objections as helpful; you are committed to not noticing the problem and dismissing nooticers, in whatever form - Bartender's clipped remark and my more detailed objection get the same dismissive response, in spirit if not in word count.

Completely factually incorrect. You want a citation?

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/5FyqfDLX2L

Please review that thread, which includes correspondence with Gwern.

I give as much heed to this feedback as I think it is due. Which is not nil, clearly, or I wouldn't bother to respond at all. I am merely pointing out that I am not open to not using LLMs simply because people ask me to. I have yet to take Prima's money, which would enforce a commitment to never touching them while on this platform. You are free to complain, I am just as free to say that I've read the complaint and don't intend to act on it. I would have been more likely to be polite if you had been polite, but let's have reasonable expectations here.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 9hr ago

Thanks. But I still want to note that what you chose to quote as an LLMism was human written. It is easy enough to identify entirely LLM written work. It is feasible to identify LLM-modified work. It is much harder to identify specific aphorisms, sentences or phrases. Even the makers of Pangram acknowledge this.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 9hr ago

Is that sarcasm? Doesn't matter if it is, because it's true. I find that it's very helpful in my like of work to appear and act like the kind of person who is open to handling emotional dumps, and then be the guy who takes care of it. I don't have to put on some kind of suit to make it happen, it's just how I've been my whole life.

It explains why patients, stressed colleagues, IRL/online friends, and random people at the pub find me to vent. It makes me a good psychiatrist.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 9hr ago

Everyone crying in this story is a woman. Which is unsurprising, because the overwhelming majority of doctors under 35 in this ward are women, and because I have conspicuously used "she" as a pronoun to describe them. Only time I've ever cried in this ward, in the loo, is from sheer relief, when I heard I passed an important exam despite giving it at a time my brain was riddled with holes from acute stress, a depressive relapse, and regular migraines. I did very well, which was only somewhat surprising.
My boss did not just have "mean words", he implied I was lazy and hadn't gotten important assessments done prior to a performance review due in a week or so. I hadn't gotten them done, but only because the whole ward was catching fire from the strain. I had asked my seniors to make the time to assess me half a dozen times, and they simply couldn't do it. He was unwilling to accept this, but he had been on his own vacation, and hadn't even had the opportunity to talk to said colleagues of his to confirm this. He said exactly as much, which was honest, but he spends 90% of his time away from the ward and does not have a clue as to what's going on at the ground level.
A requirement of being a doctor in the NHS, at pretty much every level, is canvassing formal written feedback from a diverse sample of coworkers on a regular basis. Junior, senior, anything in between. The nurses, non-medical staff, anyone who has interacted with me is also fair game. And no, why the fuck would I stand over their shoulder? I handed them the forms, went away, and collected them later en-masse. The only pressure involved was simply confirming, later, that they'd finished it. They then, voluntarily, told me what they'd put in writing. I do not have any meaningful leverage over people who are quite literally on their last day at work here. I have minimal leverage on the seniors who did theirs too. The only reason I got glowing feedback is because my colleagues are very fond of me. They've seen me work hard, including at periods where I've been popping painkillers like candy so I don't get laid out with severe pain. They've seen me make time and regularly stay back late just to reassure patients and their family. They've also seen me being more supportive than you can imagine, when the new baby doctors come in and start shaking in their scrubs.
My boss had asked me to get these assessments done, as well as several others. He was not wrong in doing this, because I am required to do them for career progression. They are read by higher-ups in the training program as well as himself. He had been annoyed that I hadn't gotten them done earlier, and had not believed it when I said this hadn't been for a lack of trying.
I get along well with my boss, most of the time. I have no interest in making his life harder for the sake of it, but he gets paid extra to be my named supervisor and this comes with additional workload. I've been inundating him with this stuff because he's asked for it, and also because it completely undermines any concerns he's raised about me. He's a good guy, but he can be clueless, and this time he was. He has also not done several important things I've repeatedly asked him to do, and which he is obliged to do. People are complicated.

But that’s all besides the point I’m trying to make. Is it normal for Scottish/British men to weep at work or get emotionally flustered when they’re having a bad day? Is it normal for them to passive aggressively confront their bosses about it? Is it normal for them to stir the pot with the other staff?

None of the above buddy, and in part because none of that happened. If you have the time to write all of that, you have the time to do more than skim. You just have no idea what the workload can be like, this isn't a profession you opt for in the hopes of excellent work-life balance, and this particular department is on the hellish end of the spectrum.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 21hr ago

A quick sort of your profile by top shows me you have a lot to contribute. I would not notice you if you were gone, because I don't think I ever notice you while you're here.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 21hr ago

I don't have anything new to say that I haven't already said in that thread. If you continue to disagree with my approach, then I am happy to accept your "silent sigh and scroll". It's the end of the world, I will use every tool at my disposal till it makes me obsolete.

I will concede that you did better than Bartender, because he is completely incorrect here. Kudos for that, genuinely.

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Please consult Pangram. I burned 16 credits checking, and it was not worth it, you can do it yourself and see if the accusation holds. It would be helpful if the people accusing me of using too much AI would be accurate about which part (if any) is actually LLM-written or rewritten.

-5

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I'm good at smut, but I also would feel a degree of embarrassment writing it at length. My last novel had plenty of gore, but I always had myself fading to black without being constrained by RoyalRoad's content restrictions. It's best saved for texting, where it gets me laid.

Now, I can't say if the bots have me beat, but I was wasting my time talking to LLMs, and challenged them to flirt with me (I was bored as hell, and this was part of a longer, more practical conversation where they were well equipped to know me).

GPT 5.5 High was ridiculously bad. I was laughing till I cried. Earnest cringe. The only way it's getting laid is pity sex.

5.6 Sol? Better, but that's a low margin to clear. I would not let it do my texting for me.

Fable, on the other hand? Alarmingly good. I was put off by the sheer idea of flirting with a chatbot, but it made me understand the appeal. I have too much dignity to ever resort to this, but Claude models are the equivalent of dudes in silk shirts, or women in slinky dresses.

2

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

More Rimworld. But I just haven't been able to scratch the itch. For a good while, I've been craving a proper base-defense/siege kinda playthrough, a fortress against overwhelming odds. This hasn't worked very well:

Raids are regularly derailed by the appearance of ridiculously overtuned enemies. Some modders make overtuned factions, which could be borne if it wasn't for the fact that the internal "cost" of the gear was set too low. Two dudes with god-tier equipment should not be considered equivalent in difficulty to five tribals with spears. It's comical how bad it can get, and I had to sort the problem by driving them over with my car. It's a bit more dignified than using dev mode to delete them, which is what I usually do.
My mod list is surprisingly stable, but not performant. My 9800x3d only manages to run the modlist at 50% higher TPS than the default maximum game speed, despite several good performance optimization mods. Something is eating up a lot of compute, and I need to use Dubs Performance Analzyer to find it, it's not trivially automated by an LLM.
This is worsened by the fact that I wanted to play on large maps. One of the most annoying aspects of Rimworld is that enemies spawn on what's effectively your front door. You need a massive array of turrets or a ton of traps/terrain blockers to slow things down enough for your pawns to get to their defenses, unless you have a very compact base. Large maps fix this, but come at a noticeable tax on your TPS.

3

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

If you want to leave the object level argument there, I'm happy to.

I will, however, note that you have previously told me that you dislike how I am less polite than you would prefer. I would ask that you reflect on your approach here, and that what you have accused me of is factually incorrect. I make an effort to not be prissy when talking to you, and I sincerely ask that you make it easier on me.

1

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Character development updates (mine):

Remember the Model? Yeah, that one.

Right before I left India again, she told me that the guy she'd been dicking around while getting dicked down by the first gentleman had finally dumped her. I offered condolences calibrated to approximately the level of sincerity the situation deserved, which is to say I made the appropriate noises and thought about dinner.

Then, about a while back, she called. I'd had a shite day at work (base rate in this placement: high), and my entire evening's accomplishment to that point had been stripping down to my knickers and lying in bed marinating in my own sweat. I picked up anyway.

I asked if she was calling about the latest jackass. She denied it. I told her she wasn't fooling anyone, and certainly not me, because there is exactly one genre of call she makes and this was it. She pretended to care about my day; I told her it was awful, and to get to the point.

She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said yes. She demanded photographic evidence, which I supplied with rather more glee than was strictly dignified. Her oh was a small and satisfying thing to hear, as was her independent confirmation that I was dating a looker. I added that the lady in question also had a great personality and a proper career, ostensibly in the interest of thoroughness, actually because I wanted to watch the last of the air go out. And it did. I could hear her deflating down the line, whatever residual fantasy she'd been keeping on life support about me eventually coming home to marry her escaping like air from a punctured balloon.

She then spent fifteen minutes briefing me on the ridiculous new motherfucker: verbally and physically abusive, likely sleeping with his new boss to get ahead. I observed that these revelations really had me doing some soul-searching about what, exactly, had ever made her think I was her type. This was a joke, but only mostly. If your exes keep selecting for men who treat them like furniture, and I'm in the sample, at some point the question asks itself. The answer is I barely knew her, and I was decent enough to her anyway.

And then I finally snapped. I had been unkind to her the last time she pushed me past breaking point, but I hadn't washed my hands of her. I had even apologized and tried to help. I was past that.

I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was not her dad. I was not her boyfriend. I was not her shrink. They were the appropriate gentlemen who deserved her as a headache. I had no further interest in her problems. I was exhausted, I was done with her bullshit, and her absolute lack of taste, sensibility and judgement was beyond my ability to fix. And that even if I could fix it, I wouldn't. She asked if she could call me later. I said I'd call her back.

Reader, I did not. I suspect she got the message. Whether the message survives contact with the next crisis is a separate empirical question, but it can ring a phone that doesn't answer.

I told the (real) lady about all of this, and was asked, not unreasonably, why I'd spent twenty minutes on the phone with an ex. Fair question. Better question than she knew. The honest answer is that these headaches historically ran an hour or two, and a mere twenty minutes represented me slamming the door in her face and then throwing the lock, which is what I said, and which had the advantage of being true. The less flattering answer is the one flagged above: I picked up. There was some part of me that still wanted to be the man whose approval she was calling to lose. That part got twenty minutes of airtime and then got fired. I also mentioned that a professional model had concluded she was out of her league. This mollifed her appropriately, and is also true.

More recently: my boss, who I can usually count on to be supportive, implied that I'd been slacking on getting assessments done while he was away on vacation. This could not have been further from the truth. I had been overloaded to hell and back, other junior colleagues were telling me they'd been breaking down and crying in the loo, and I had said as much in an email he hadn't read. He then accused me of an error I was mostly confident wasn't mine.

I left the room devastated and about one provocation short of detonating. A colleague on her way out saw my face, put two and twenty-seven together, and found us a room so I could vent. She ended up doing all of the crying while I did most of the comforting, which was not the planned division of labor. I was amused by how this was the second time I'd had to reassure someone breaking down in that room, the last person had been the Dutch doctor, and she had been trying to console me first too. Both are moving to a better place, this one's an intern heading out to Australia soon; I'm the actual trainee and this skill is what makes me good at my job.*

I do appreciate the effort, and I say that without sarcasm. Mostly it reminded me that my boss was the one woefully out of touch with reality.

Now. The old me would have been genuinely broken by something like this. Not because the accusation was true, but because he would have needed it to be false in someone else's eyes before he could believe it himself. The current me skipped that step and went on the warpath, which looks superficially similar (both involve collecting a great deal of other people's opinions of me) and is not the same thing at all. The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.

I canvassed my juniors for feedback forms, amassed a fat stack, and dumped it on my boss's desk. I investigated the alleged error and found that a new intern had made the fuck up in question and I'd had no involvement at all, then went back and told my boss so while protecting said junior, because I know what it's like being three days into doctoring, even if it was five years ago for me. I documented, in exacting detail and impeccable NHS-speak, how our meeting had gone, and sent it to him "for input and corrections." He had none to offer. If you have never received a scrupulously polite email that is also a loaded weapon, I recommend the experience from the sending end only.

He emailed the next day to tell me the feedback was uniformly positive. I knew that already, and knew he was understating how good it was, because my colleagues had offered to show me what they'd written. He asked for more, from the rest of the ward, senior clinicians and non-medical staff included. I did ask he asked. The ones I saw could glow in the dark. I then did my best pitbull impression, cornered a senior reg, and did a clinical case with him. It was more difficult than I had anticipated when opting for it, but I decided that if this didn't demonstrate my clinical acumen, nothing would. I had overprepared so hard the poor bastard ran out of questions to ask me.

When I left work today, I handed in another stack of forms. My boss, looking remarkably harassed and overworked (see how that feels?), admitted he hadn't read the last batch. I asked him to ensure he did before reporting up the chain. He sighed and said he would.

He has only himself to blame. He told me to jump; I didn't ask how high, I put a dent in the ceiling. I suspect he's wincing at how the thing he implied about me (which I documented) compares to what the people who actually work with me every day chose to put in writing. He's not a bad person, and I suspect he does feel bad about it. He later came by to say he'd told his colleagues to expect me and to make time for me. That is quite literally all I've ever asked for, and thanks to us being temporarily overstaffed, I'm making so much hay during the local sunshine that I'm crashing the market.

The only person who gets to call me lazy is me, because it's not true. I intend to keep this up until he throws up his hands and tells me I can stop, he's gotten the memo.

*One of the feedback forms noted that patients had approached this doctor and told them that just talking to me had made them feel better. I know this, but it's good that others see it too.

-3

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

My point is that the pumps can be disabled while preserving whatever they were distracting someone from (on the phone). And that this should be attempted before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Lack of willpower is still a skill issue (some people simply lack the aptitude for certain skills too), but it's one I am partially guilty of. I am all for winding ways to minimize the requirement of willpower to get what you want, I just advise people be sensible about how they go about it.

1

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

I send my prayers to anyone who engages in a battle of bureaucracy against you. You're well equipped, you don't need me to wish you well, this is to even the playing field a little.

2

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.

I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.

I have said, rather clearly:

For most people reading this, and possibly @FtttG, the negative consequences of their phone use is overstated, and compared against an ideal world that won't exist. And the positive benefits are, in turn, understated.
That this advice is tailored to the people reading it here, though I am willing to say much the same to most PMCs. I would not say the same thing to another large fraction of the human population.
And I have specifically noted that it's not a fault of FtttG's character.
There are intermediate steps worth considering before literally locking your phone away. I'm not sure if @FtttG has tried them, if he has, it's not mentioned here. If that hasn't worked for him, oh well, I'm happy to concede different strokes for different folk.

And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.

Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.

It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.

0

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

I'm not sure why you're being so obtuse about this point.

Not obtuse, just unconvinced. I'll try to be clearer about my stance:

I concede the design point entirely. The devices are adversarial. There's a building full of people in Menlo Park whose comp package depends on my thumb continuing to move, and I don't flatter myself that I'm immune. It is just, in my experience, a milder disease than most people think. A lot of innate dysfunction is blamed on the phones. That's why my recommendation was blockers rather than raw willpower. I'm not telling anyone to git gud in the face of a slot machine. I just wish to point out that it's not just a slot machine. It's like avoiding a city just because it has a few casinos in it.

Where I get off the bus is here:

When you remove the super stimuli, the phone is not that useful

My phone with Instagram, Twitter and Reddit stripped out is still:

My library
My notes
My calendar
My camera, and a good one
My personal executive assistant
A professional resource
My bank

I haven't used my laptop in six months, which is a shame, because I paid like £1200 for it. I only game on my PC because... the reasons are obvious.

It's the only way I speak to my parents from several thousand kilometres away. Calling that "not that useful" is a claim about your usage patterns being generalised into a claim about the hardware. Yours might genuinely be a Meta machine with a phone app bolted on, in which case locking it in a box costs you nothing and I withdraw my objection in your particular case. Mine isn't. And it is clear to me that's true for most people reading this.

I do almost all my reading on my phone. I genuinely can't remember the last time I bought a dead tree book. I acknowledge this puts me in a minority.

But the armchair with book in hand isn't what the phone is competing with. It's competing with eleven minutes in a queue at Tesco, a bus ride, the dead twenty minutes between clinics, and 3am when I'm awake on a night shift. I do not carry a Penguin Classic into the toilet. The realistic counterfactual for most of my reading time is not a better reading experience, it's worse, or none.

Which brings me to the actual disagreement, which is about the counterfactual rather than about superstimuli. Your model says the phone is a plug in the drain and pulling it lets the good stuff flow back. That is a well established vibe consensus but the evidence for that is thinner than people assume.

When English schools banned phones for the school day, the students didn't use their phones less overall or score better on wellbeing, sleep or attainment; they just shifted the usage till they got outside.

(That makes the whole "phones in school are bad for you" rather moot)

Meanwhile an RCT explicitly designed to teach goal-directed use rather than reduction performed about as well as a standard digital detox condition on problematic use). That is what I'm advocating.

Removing access and improving allocation seem to land in roughly the same place, which is what you'd expect if the binding constraint is what the person wants to do with their attention rather than where their attention is physically able to go.

A blocker is a scalpel: I lose the slop and keep the library. I don't need this, but I could do it.

A lock box is a tourniquet: it works, at the cost of the limb.

My on-call registrar cannot ring a box. I appreciate that FtttG's box has a timer and that this is a solved problem for most evenings, and honestly if it's working for him he should keep doing it. I am just concerned about he hasn't tried something... less extra.

My gripe is with the version of this that treats total removal as the obviously superior intervention because the intermediate one requires trusting yourself a bit.

And I stand by the mythologising point. The man who locks his phone away for an hour and reads a novel is real and I salute him, he must be, we've got plenty of people on the planet. He is also, in my experience, wildly outnumbered by the man who locks his phone away and then watches telly, or reorganises a drawer, or lies on the sofa contemplating the middle distance in a way he will later describe to himself as restorative. If it turns out that what you actually wanted was a book, you could also have just opened the book.

3

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I don't think you're being unreasonable. I just think I still like women more. Both in theory and practice. Case in point, I wouldn't particularly feel inclined to write on gender-war adjacent topics, even if I appreciate the ones you do put out.

They tend to be softer, kinder, and more empathetic than the average man. Less likely to be an emotional brick than us, but not me I suppose. It makes me a good psychiatrist, even if I'm perfectly masculine in other respects. They are both more interested in, and better at, the emotional and daily logistics. I play to my strengths, and they cover my weaknesses, and I appreciate that greatly.

3

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I am perfectly aware of the difference, courtesy of ADHD and varying degrees of depression.

I'd say my willpower is as spiky as a porcupine. Herculean levels when it comes to work and professional advancement, if you know what I've had to suffer through, you'd get it. Ridiculously low in other places. I have that iron in me, I've survived things that would make many people quit or die. It just happens to be pig-iron.

The majority of people here would do better than me in the domains where I confess weakness, and those domains are the ones relevant here.

If you have a stash of superstimuli you can't resist staring you in the face, close your eyes, or get them out of the way. Installing an app that specifically gates the usage of the other apps of concern. Block websites. Locking your phone away is like locking yourself in the shitter so you don't go for the fridge.

More importantly, people consistently mythologize what they'd do without the all consuming specter of "phones." Yeah, I'm sure you're going to learn Latin, take up gardening and run that half marathon. Or call their mom, oh wait, no phone. Grand projects of self-improvement aside, even the marginal effect is likely minimal. I'd say it's both easier and less ridiculous to simply figure out better ways to spend the time on the phone doing better things on the phone.

-1

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I can't cure stupidity, susceptibility to hyper-stimuli, and the CEO of someone's executive function jumping out a window. Those are the most innate of skill issues.

But I do not think @FtttG is dumb. I don't think he has executive dysfunction to that degree either, and if I have ADHD and manage professionally and personally, so can he. I dare say that his current approach is proof of high neuroticism and conscientiousness, but a failure of framing/perspective. Particularly in light of objective evidence accrued in a systematic manner.

This applies to most people on this forum, to varying degrees. I'm not going to tell my typical patient to spend more time on their phone, and I won't tell the average teenager to put in a few more hours of TikTok. I do expect the population here to be selected for the ability to read things at length, which correlates with intelligence. There are exceptions. We won't be naming them.

Something I've genuinely believed for a long time: half the fucking point of being intelligent is getting to do things that would wreck someone dumber than you. And if you're intelligent enough, you become acutely aware of how far that extends, which is why I advise everyone, myself very much included, against being too smart for their own good. Is this elitist? Possibly. It's also true, and I've made my peace with the combination.

So the advice is aimed squarely at the people who'd benefit from it, and it amounts to this: stop generating angst over a benign practice, and if you can't manage that, at least decouple the dozen different activities that have been reduced into one number on a settings screen.

There are of course people here genuinely wasting their time on their phones, or using them in ways they'd regret on any sober reflection. That fraction is much smaller than the fraction who believe it of themselves. The gap between those two numbers is doing more damage than the phones are.

0

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I feel like consuming double the usual amount of food and alcoholic beverage isn't going to help. Idk, I'm not a doctor.

3

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

I still consider people obsessed about minimizing their screen time to have a minor to major skill issue.

A computer, especially a handheld one, is a convenient portal to the sum of human knowledge. Some of my friends live in there. Like, do something useful with it.

I have had days of 12-14 hour screen-on times, and I managed 8 hours 45 minutes today, as of the time of writing before bed. That represents a less than maximally busy day at work followed by a lazy evening. Apparently I used my phone while walking for 1 hour and 44 minutes.

I do not consider this wasted time. Were there things I could have done instead that could, theoretically, have benefited me more? Yes. But I wasn't going to do them just because I didn't have a phone. You try preparing case based discussions and reading NICE guidelines all day. I wrote important emails, used AI to make my life easier, used AI to make other people's lives harder, entertained myself, and got things done, in general.

Nobody in 1995 would have looked at a person spending two hours reading, an hour writing letters, an hour listening to music, an hour navigating around town, an hour talking to friends and three hours using a computer and concluded: nine hours of device time, catastrophic. The figure sounds alarming only because we've collapsed a dozen activities into one dogshit metric based on the substrate they happen on. By the same logic you could work yourself into a panic about somebody's "paper time".

I also have strong doubts about the nominal harmfulness of "screen time" for children. I spent my childhood reading like my life depended on it, because I was bored to fuck. I spend my adulthood reading because I'm often bored to fuck too, except it's on my phone. I also write essays on the bus and in the loo, put on tunes, do useful work, and maintain social relationships with it. The only reason your kids won't end up doing the same is because we might end up with something better.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0506-1

The association we find between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. Taking the broader context of the data into account suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change.

My recommendation:

Don't optimise children's screen minutes. Optimise what they're doing, what they're not doing because of it, and whether they can disengage from it.

I'd say that phones have made my life considerably better. Getting absolutely bored in the year of someone's lord 2026 is the biggest skill issue there is. And God knows I do a lot more IRL than I often used to. They're not mutually exclusive.

2

Context

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 2d ago

If you're on the internet this often, you should know you're supposed to pull things out of your ass.

Sigh. It's amazing what insane stress levels can do to you. I've had this feeling that there's something wrong with a calf, in the sense that it feels off, and I worry it'll cramp badly or give out. It's been on and off for weeks, and it hasn't caused me any actual problems. A back injury, a probably-not-a-fracture in my thumb from a wild night out, a bad sprain? All reminders that the human organism can break under sustained load. Or that I should exercise more.

1

Context

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

self_made_human

self_made_human