The Ezra Klein Show

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1]

He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is.

The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.

Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.

1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...

If you want to get your life back, read Stolen Focus. It has all these tips and tricks but it does a lot more - it explains why our focus is shot, and dissects the forces behind it.

It's much more sinister than most people suspect.

https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Focus-Attention-Think-Deeply/d...

I was spending hours per day on Twitter, and then I learned that overusing social media rewires your brain, and you essentially unlearn to digest information in bigger chunks. This book will horrify you, and that's exactly what needs to be done.

And if a book (to listen to) is too much for you to focus on - listen to Ezra Klein's interview with the author, at least: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/its-not-your-fault-you...

The likeliest outcome is the one described in Ezra Klein's recent pod episode on AI - most vocations will be helped by AI, but it will still require an operator to QA the results and solve the bigger problem at hand. AI is not magic. You don't just build it once and walk away. It requires constant effort in care and feeding.

In our case, let's not pretend that React will be around forever. Once the new Hotness in the JS world shows up (and i't very easily distracted by shiny things and cool names), you will need to train the models, all over again.

The pod: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-a-i-the-problem-or-...