Use social media to - amplify motivation & be more empathatic
Daniel Gross' blog and a work of art showing how easy it is to spread false information today
Hey there,
Last week I decided to finally anounce the Good Surfer newsletter to my close contacts. So, a lot of new subscribers this week!
Welcome you all! :)
You know when someone sends you a link to something cool and you have the urge to know how they came across this lovely and brilliant and sweet and strange thing on the Internet.
This is a line that I used to introduce the newsletter over Whatsapp announcement that I made last week. I love how the adjectives “lovely and brilliant and sweet and strange” combine to capture the exact emotion that I feel whenever I discover a new wonderful thing over the Internet. The urge to share that emotion is what made me start Good Surfer.
I hope the things that I put in here can make you feel just as strongly.
Cool surfing stories from last week:
A lot of the deep thinkers believe in building their own personal website for the longform content and articles. The idea behind it is that you shouldn’t risk giving control of something as personal and important as your blog articles to some central aggregator like Medium.
What this does is it creates small islands of great content on the Internet when a vast majority of the world’s population lives on continents like Facebook, Twitter, Medium etc. It is these small, independent islands that you need to visit every once a while in order to get a refreshing take on your world view.
I explored one such personal blog last week and I'm glad that I did.
I came across it when I was looking through Pioneer’s blog. Pioneer, started by Daniel Gross, is a website that wants to bring the network effects of Stanford or other Ivy League colleges to the world at large.
Daniel Gross is an original thinker.
Just look at what he writes here about falling in love before you start doing something—
I recently wanted to start weightlifting. This is a new area for me. I wasn’t interested in it. I didn’t have a bank of positive memories to rely on when considering the activity, so my mind always rejected doing it. As an experiment I downloaded Instagram and followed only weightlifting athletes. I found myself watching a lot of CrossFit and weightlifting and aspiring to do it. Suddenly I was interested in weightlifting. When I thought of the activity, it conjured aspirational thoughts instead of anxiety. You might be able to use this technique to “reprogram yourself” in other domains.
(I have more to say on this kind of a “hacking” of social media in the next section below - and yes, that’s what the title of this newsletter is about.)
Or the idea that other people want to help you.. if only you make it easy for them to do so.
Or a list of qualities that give him an edge over others - personal moats:
Read long-form content, Write frequently, a healthy body, get lucky (my favourite), get busy, know your mind and developing an inspiring environment.Why you should dive deeper:
* His hidden friction theory as being one of the root areas for possible future improvements. “There’s a lot of human productivity to be unlocked in lowering hidden friction cost. People would do a lot more of all things, if it was easier to get to the fun part of the thing.”
* For the China-paranoids (:p) - He believes that China can’t win in the tech sector even though its doing so well (XoXo)
[An Aside] On “hacking” social media to your advantage
We are all basically aware of the disadvantages of social media, right? Its bad not simply because it a huge time dump but because organisations are using it to, literally, brainwash the populations (!) —
the newsfeeds are run by recommendation systems that are hungry for your attention and are being designed by some of the smartest people in the world
As a side note, this is why products like Google search, Gmail, iOS, Android are beneficial while the Facebook newsfeed is destructive. The former are active, they empower users to do more, to know more. The latter manipulates your worldview and seeks to maximally waste your timeWho knows what will be next. It is quite striking that Facebook has been investing enormous amounts in AI research and development, with the explicit goal of becoming a leader in the field. What does that tell you? What do you use AI/RL for when your product is a newsfeed?and how bad actors - very smart people, groups of smart people, even the fucking governments - try to spread disinformation using it. I think that the public came to know about it with the 2016 presedential election and then lately, China has been using it to influence the world’s opinion about the Hong Kong protests.
To me this kindof feels like a part of the script to some movie about a hopeless world with a few controlling groups/organisations.
But then there are still a few ways to use social media to fuel your personal growth:
Hack #1: Daniel Gross’ hack of using Instagram to fall in love with the idea of something that you need to do but don’t want to - like excercising. This reminded me of this other article where the author explains how (and why) she uses Twitter to learn Data Science and go all in on it. They both created a separate account on these social media platforms and in turn, created their separate identities as people who were interested in exercising and Data Science respectively. So now, the algorithms running these platforms try their best to grab their attention!
Hack #2: This is something I designed - I make Twitter lists of smart people who take the opposite stand as I do in a heated argument like anti-Trump vs pro-Trump, India vs. Pakistan, etc. So, when some trending media divide takes place (like the Kashmir issue), I just go and look at what the other side has to say before I completely paint my mind with strong opinions. This allows me to, not only, be more empathatic but also helps me identify the fake news (Here’s my PakistaniTwitter list).
A work of art by a comedian showing how easy it is to spread false information
(How One Guy Sold The World on an $80 Used Tissue)Oh and while we are on the subject of spread of disinformation, let me tell you about this comedian who created
a fake company
whose product was used tissues
and sold it as an alternative medicine company to a lot of major media outlets
using just $1000
in a week
sitting in a hotel room
Mekki Leeper, the comedian, describes it all in this video:
I found out about first through The Ken’s weekly newsletter and then when a cousin shared it on Whatsapp.
Why you should dive deep:
* This video is a work of art.
Mekki played an elaborate practical joke on the whole world and showed how vulnerable we are to disinformation. The importance of this video is definitely underrated.* Try to Google for the query “Vaev tissue”. You should see results showing articles from real news websites that published detailed articles on this company - Time, NDTV, CNET, The Guardian and more.
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