Ep. 327: Would Kant Use TikTok?
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I'm town new port. And this is deep question, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So i'm here. My deep work hq joined is always by my producer, Jessie, are just two announcements before we get in IT today.

Uh, number one, I had mentioned a few weeks ago that my book's slow productivity have been nominated for this business book awards, the S A B E W. I actually have a here on my phone that stands for the society for advancing business editing and writing. So they have this a awards for the best business books of the year.

They have three categories, business reporting, career development and leadership and management. All right, so I have been nominated for the career development category. They just announced the other day that slow productivity has won the category.

The S A P, E W says is the best create development book of the year. The two finalists, the two runners up in that category where Charles do hick's book super communicators and bonne hamers book fifteen lives women are told at work. I'm excited about that quick quote, the judges said.

Slow productivity should be on the fast track for every business manager to read. IT offers A A tonic that is sorely needed in our overwork burned out society. Taking longer to do less seems kind of productive, but when the result is a top quality product that makes IT all worthwhile, the author is out his argument clearly and simply creating a compelling read that should help shift your mindset about work.

So there you go. Ja, congratulating this business book of the year, amazon released its best business books of the year as well. I don't know why they do this in november. I guess like what if your book comes out in december because they want .

you to buy on a black friday?

Probably I think you're right. That's absolutely right. So probably when they say the best books of the year, they probably just measure in november, in november. So if you came out in december, you'd be anyways, social productivity was also named to their list of the best business books of twenty twenty four.

The cool thing about this S B E W award, I didn't realize this, but I heard from one of the people who works, my publicity team and said, oh, they need your addresses in your cash prize. So get some money, work out of cash. I believe the first place Price for the best career development book for the S P E W business book awards in six hundred thousand dollars.

I know you're going to say like ten .

million or with sixty dollars, i'm not quite sure. I'll see, i'll see that goes anyway, breath into the year. It's good to see a year out. You know half year often spoke in out that has been recognized as one the best business spoke the year. So please, you should read that are other other announcement.

Other thing I am excited about, long time listers know what I mean when I say thrilla december is approaching my long standing routine for the month of december, is I read really fun technos rollers. I like to eat em with a snack by the fire. Maybe put on some Christmas records on the whatever I growing up, I had always loved the fantastical nature of, like that season, that Christmas sees IT, as I really like sana laws movies, except the sort of fantastic called the the sort of escape ism of the season.

So now is an adult, I reactions that by reading really fun technosis illes, I really try to find this baLance between, I have to be good enough writing that is not painful to read, but IT has to have a topic that i'm really interested in, like a cool hock or interesting, like technology topic it's in. And i've already purchased the first three thrillers. I think i'm going to think i'm going to read anyways.

You should get excited about rilla of symbol. You don't have to read thrillers, by the way. It's whatever your sort of guilty pleasure book is that I don't care if this is like summer romance novels or maybe you're really in the hard side five or really, really like sports, not fiction.

This is not a month to impress people with your books. It's a month or just enjoying how books can be found. Now here's my decree.

Justice is why I ordered my first books already. I think it's been to kind of a stressful season. The election was stressful for a lot of us.

Escape ism is on our mind. I'm starting in a week early this year. I think thanksgiving week, that final week, november is when i'm starting to rely.

December, did you already finish you know, every .

books on the last one? Yeah so so I I am reading Peter t as book and that's my fifth. So yeah, i'll find set up soon and get started on my filter. December, i'm kind of I don't want to get into IT.

My book timing window has shifted in this weird way that my months, instead of going from the beginning of a month to the end of the month, now have shifted to various contingent reasons to be like the fifteen of the month in the fifteen of the next month. So no, I don't know how that happened. But now, like I typically, I will finish my november books, for example, around the fifteen or sixteen to november.

And then my december books, i'll probably finish you around. I don't know how got shifted. Not so important.

But the point being is unexcited of a thrilly december and you should be too will talk about IT more is opposed us. We will get closer. But today, in contrast to the guilty pleasures through the december, just say we're going to get smart.

We have ourselves a pretty intellectual deep dive. We've got a tech corner segment at the end might be talking a little bit about optimization algorithms. I'll make IT all accessible um but we are putting on our thinking caps today.

We are going to be sophisticated and smart and impress everyone with how are you died. We are. So I think we've got a smart episode of the show to due today.

So why don't we get started with our deep dive today? I want to give you an argument about why you feel uneasy about your smart phone that you've likely never heard before. IT is, however, I think, an important argument to hear why, because IT drawls from a source that far predates these modern digital technologies.

I'm going to make you an argument about why you're uneasy about your smartphone. IT goes back to the foundation tional moral philosophy of a manual count. We're talking about a philosopher from the seventeen and hundreds who is arguably the most influential source of moral ideas since the bible.

And IT turns out, if you read count correctly, he has a lot to say, decidedly modern inventions such as twitter and tiktok. I'm going to ask you to stick with me here. We're going to get little bit technical, but i'm going to walk you through.

We're not going to get two technical. All these ideas will be accessible and we're onna come out on the other end of this exploration with a Better understanding of the role technology plays in your life right now, why that makes you an easy and changes you can make. So it's a cool thing to add to the argument, right?

So i'm going to be drawing today entirely from a single academic paper from twenty twenty one. I'll pull IT up on the screen here. I have a preprint version here that I could access, which has a link to the official final version I put on the screen here for people who are watching, instead of just listening, the paper we're going to be drawing from is titled, is very duty to be a digital minimal alist.

This was published in the journal of applied philosophy back in the summer of twenty twenty one. For those of you who are tracking at home, that's volume thirty eight. Number four, the authors are Timothy elles worth and clinton cost.

These are philosophers from florida international university, right? So I am going to jump through this paper somewhat selectively to pull out what I think the important parts are. So i'm actually gonna start by jumping ahead here a little bit.

I'll sort of keep up with this on the screen, I suppose, for those who are watching. But i'm going to read everything. I don't worry if you're just listening. Okay, i'm going to jump ahead here. They're talking here about digital minimalism.

Let me read from the paper authors like cow new port, who coined the term digital minimalism, argue that we would be Better off if we restructured our relationships with technology on our own terms. He understands digital minimalism as, quote, a philosophy of technology use, in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else. A philosopher of technology use is a personal philosophy that covers which digital tools we allow into our lives for what reasons and under what constraint.

Newport definition outlines a novel ideal, but we are happy to adopt the less demanded understanding of this notion. And jumping ahead here a little bit, we understand a digital minimalist as one whose interactions with digital technology are intentional, such that they do not conflict with their ends. For most, being a minimalist will involve a serious reduction, in some cases, to the point of elimination of interactions with smartphones, smartphone apps and social media sites.

For some, IT may even require living up to new parts, ideal and job ahead. One more time here, new port may very well be right that we have potential reasons to reduce our smartphone usage. Perhaps most people will be Better off if they became digital minimal.

But if the company argument that follows this sound that we might have even more compelling reasons to adopt the end of visual minimalism, we may have moral reasons. So let's make sense of what has happened there. They introduced my idea of digital minimalism.

They simplify a little bit to make a little bit more general. But they say, basically, yes, this idea that new port introduced this one of being very intentional about how you use your technology so that IT supports, instead of repeating what you values. That is the great idea of my book, digital minimalism.

It's at the core, my personal technology, physical. Hy, the key thing they say this is setting up the argument that we're going to explore as they say, look, cow in his book has what they call uh, potential reasons for why should be this little minimal. What that means, like practical reasons I go through, like when you let technology um get in the way of your values, is like all the stuff that you don't do that you would otherwise like to do and I think you're going to like your life Better.

Sort of pragmatic, practical, direct argument to your experiences, intuition. They are saying, yes, that might all be true, but we are going to make an argument that draws from contents says there is also a moral reason that we can draw from moral philosophy that says, whether you want to or not, you are obliged to be a digital minimalist. That now is the argument that is made in this paper, that we are going to draw out a moral argument for being a digital mimmo st.

right? I'm going to jump back to the beginning. here. They set up a quick example, which they used to explore some of the issues with modern technology.

So they begin by drawing from a quote from a comedian. So let me read this to you. I wish I could read.

I really do this comedian, ester poverty sky. I tried to read, I buy books, I open books, and then I black out and i'm on instagram. And I don't know what happened. To many of us, this is a familiar occurrence. All too often we set out the complete task, but we are intercepted subsequently the railed by our wireless mobile devices.

Incidents of this kind might involve a moral failure, or in so far as we are morally required to cultivate and protect our autonomy, we failed to meet this requirement by falling prey to mobile phone addiction. okay. So the first link in the chain they're going to make in this moral argument is that are issues with smartphone usage, as captured by this anecdote of this comedian, and say, I tried to read, but I can't.

I'm going to read this book by end up on instagram. They say this could be seen as impacting our autonomy. And if IT impacts our autonomy, we might be able to find a moral reason why this is bad.

First, however, they have to establish, is the way we use things like smartphones actually affecting our autonomy. And what they do here they go through three different ways that other thinkers have thought about autonomy. And for each of these says, it's basically self evident that the behavior were thinking about the behavior we observed, that comedian poverty sky is violating these definitions of autonomy.

All right? So let's go through these real quick. They say, in order to substantiate the claim that smartphone addiction undermines autonomy, we must say more about the concept that issue.

Personal autonomy has been defined in a variety of ways, but we believe that a minimal definition of self governance is sufficient for our purposes here. So they're going to go through some examples here of definitions of autonomy. They say, let's return to poetique case from the beginning.

According to what they call the Frank for dorking model A K A poverty skies are first order desire to check instagram while reading is inconsistent with her higher order desire. I to want to read, right? So the Frankford dork in model talks about first orter and higher order desires, the things that actually direct in your activities right now, verse is what you want to be the case.

And if these are out of think, you have an autonomy problem. So like by that model, look at an instagram when you want to read as an autonomy issue, because you're hired to desire is, I want to read. But your first order desire that's actually directing your activities is looking at instagram, right?

Here's another model due to Watson on what since characterization, what is distinctive about compulsive behavior is that the desires and emotions and questions are more less radical, independent of the evaluation systems of these agents. Poetically, smartphone use is inconsistent with her evaluation judgments about what he ought to be doing and the behavior or is compulsive, right? So Watson says, if you're doing something that you would evaluate to be not good or less good than something else than the behavior must be compulsive, by the way.

That connects to the way psychologists think about behavior addiction, the persistence in an activity even though it's, you know, it's not valuable or is in the way of things, you know, to be more valuable. Finally, they have a model of autonomy due to a man. Bat man defends a model of autonomy that requires harmony between what the agent does and more and her more or less long term plans.

Surely poverty ski's behavior fails on discount as well. We can suppose that poverty sky, like many of us, would like to read mini books over the course of her life and to develop a disposition of being able to sit and enjoy reading for long stretches. The action of looking at her phone compulsively is not consistent with her long term plans, right? So to summarize, no matter which model one adopts, the result is likely to be the same.

Polikey is not autonomists with respect to a smart phone usage, right? So we've established this first link in our argument of chain. The way we use smartphones today seems to be hurt in our autonomy.

We can look at several official definitions of autonomy and see that smartphone usage of the type that we think of a type in that example is breaking those models. Okay, so why is that bad? This is the next link in their moral argument chain.

This is where we turn our attention to a manual count. Although some ethicists reject the very notion of duties to oneself, can't makes them a central component of his moral theory fact. I'll turn to this in the in the article here.

For those who are watching on at home, i'm just scrolling is a section team. He says that they take first place and are the most important of all. He goes so far as to suggest that duties to oneself are the foundation of duties to others, making them the precondition of all more duties.

But he worried they have not been properly understood and claims that no part of morals has been more effectively treated than this of the duties to want self. He thinks that they have been misunderstood as a mere elevation of self interest of duty to promote one's own happiness, which he dismisses as an absurdity rather than grounding such duties. And egis's can't argue that humanity, I E rational nature, as an absolute inherent value.

And this generate self fa guardian obligations in, so far as the agent is morally required to respect humanity in our own person. The duties to one self are derived from the humanity formulation of the category imperative. We've been smart here, just which tells us that we must always treat humanity, even in our own person, as an in, never merely as a means.

All right? So kant is arguing we have a duty to ourselves as much as we have a duty to other people and we have a moral duty, in particular for self governing what is, uh, most important about our humanity. Okay, so what is that? Jump ahead.

Briefly, count famously claims that human beings and virtue of their rational agency have a uniquely elevated status, which he calls dig dd. So the idea that we are rational beans, and no other creatures or objects are gives us this sort of special value. And preserving the what he calls the dignity of ourselves as rational beans is sort of the highest good we have an obligation to help protect this in ourselves and others.

Moving on here, on this view, our actions can either express or fail to express the kinder respect that is becoming of human dignity. So he's saying, our actions need to be focused on respecting our human dignity. And our human dignity is based on the idea that we are rational.

Beans are. So we're really in the weeds here, Jessie. We're deep and moral reasoning.

But out of this and bunch of other words that i'm kind of skipping, we get to an actual argument form here, alright. So they end up with three propositions that lead to conclusion. Humanity is proposition one.

Humanity I E rational agency has an objective, unconditional, non fungible value, which is dignity. Proposition to anything that has dignity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means. Proposition three, if humanity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means, then we have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency.

Therefore, the conclusion of these three propositions, we have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency. We're getting in the weeds here. Logical, philosophy, morality all pulled together.

They then put these together. They get to their core argument. We have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency. If we have an imperfect duty to cultivate, protect our rational agency, then we ought to adopt the end of digital minimalism. Therefore, we ought to adopt the end of digital minimalism.

If you take my discrete mathematics course at Georgetown, where we study propositional logic, you will actually recognize this argument and could probably turn IT into the corresponding argument form. So basically, we have just done a lot of reasoning based on counts ideas that lead end up with the conclusion we ought to adopt the end of digital minimalism. If we simplify all of this, we're basically saying IT is important to respect our own dignity as rational beans the way that we use smartphones, when were unintentional, robs, robs us of our ability to do this, because IT robs us of autonomy.

And autonomy is at the core of respecting the dignity of the international tional bean, because at the core of the international tional bean is the ability to make decisions about what you do rationally. The county and framework is seeing this court tension between we need to respect the fact that we are rational beans and smart phones take away our ability to make national decisions about what we want to do with our life in our time. Therefore, in approach, the life that reduces smartphones ability of taking away autonomy is justified.

Digital minimalism is sort the definition of such a life is it's an a person of digital technology, IT says. We want to be intentional, not be rob of our autonomy. Therefore, there's a sort of fundamental county moral argument that we should be very intensive about our technology used using something like digital minimalism.

Let me read the conclusion of this paper because I think they summed this up very nicely. Ep, there little appear on the screen for those who are watching at home. So here's the conclusion of the authors in this paper.

We have argued that there is a moral obligation to be intentional about our use of smart phones and other addi devices. We have the duty because we are required to protect the most valuable commodity we possess. autonomy. Can't believe that the proper exercise of our autonomy is the only thing that is good without qualification, something that shines like a jew having its full worth in itself to wanting for fit some of our agency by falling prey. The technological peony y is to demonstrate a failure to respect this precious capacity as a treasure that IT is alright.

So why are we geek out on like a technical academic argument for the type of things we talk about here on the show and actually not just the type of things specifically what we talk about on the show? Because, of course, they're talking about my specific digital minimum ism philosophy. It's because I think IT is easy.

And thinking about technology and human flourishing, the fall back on arguments such as, look, kids these days, for example, they're always using different technology. We get worried about IT, but that's just the the the wheels of progress are we fall back on an argument that says every new technology creates moral panics, right? And then we get over IT.

We worried about the car, but now we describe cars. We worried about TV. Now we don't worried about TV as much. It's easy to fall back on these arguments of status, good thinking.

What's critical about this particular argument is that says, no, there's justifications for our concerns about these technology that are much more fundamental than thinking about specific technologies. Our uneasiness about these technologies is not just a naive reaction to the latest techno disruption in the long line of techno disruptions that ultimately end up being not so bad. We are actually reflecting a specific ARM denial of autonomy.

And we can go back to counter before to see that this is at the core of the human experience, is at the core of what we value us humans. And so yes, we're uneasy not because we're not if we're uneasy because something basic or humanity is at stake. So this continued argument is pointing towards to the exceptional nature of the issue we face with things like smart phones.

We cannot just ontologically speaking and put in the same categories like any other type of technosphere. IT is a specific technical fear, which requires analysis on his own terms. And when we do that, we see there are specific harms here that cannot be ignored.

So if someone's giving you a lot of trouble about your digital minimalism, if they are making fun of you, or, after trying to sell, justify their own heavy phone use, you can now throw a lot of sort of annoying technical philological terms at them. You can say things like heteronomy heeran omy sorry, even I can get that right. You can say things like heterogeneity and ontological.

You can mention the category goral imperative. Keep dropping the word country in and they will just have to be quiet. Every O A nerd argument for a very real issue. So I actually found that article at Jesses.

There's a follow up article that said, if that's true, there's also an obligation others have to protect your autonomy three digits technology as well that there's like a moral imperative not to distract other people to a whole interesting argument, right? But tough for that. nervous.

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I ve been recommended mobile to a lot of people recently because my son is in the dle school. We know of other midd school parents. They're going through the thought process of my kid needs a phone for X, Y, Z, taking the public transportation, getting picked up from practice.

I don't want you a smart phone. What do we do? I ve been telling them, just hate.

Buy a flip phone on amazon and give them the fifteen box amount planned for that. Mobile is cheap. It's easy and they'll have access.

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First questions from person from missouri. I just ordered digital minali m to help me stop wasting time. I tried without success to use some distraction free apps. Can these apps actually work?

Well, let me back up a little bit because IT looks like you're thinking about digital minimalism as a collection of tips for trying to stop with in time or to be less distracted. That's the standard cultural paradigm we often has for thinking about advice, especially for things like digital distraction. Give me some tips I want to read like the five ways to save your attention in some sort of magazine article.

And let me put a couple of those in the play. IT looks like you heard about the destruction for apps. I do talk about them in the back OK.

I tried them in in a workplace. So the first thing I want you to understand is that digital minimalism is not a collection that tips, but a philosophy. It's a philosophy of technology.

Use a consistent way of thinking about the role of technology in your life and how you curate and engage with technologies in your life. A bit of a binary proposition. You either need to adopt the philosophy or not.

You can just pick, choose specific things to show up in the philosopher itself. The metaphor I like to use as cleaning out a closet that's overstuff ed with junk. So you have a classes is over stuff, ed with junk, what you were doing.

So the equivalent in the closet metaphor of, like, hey, I am going to try to help my online distraction because I heard, like, apps might help that's equivalent in our closet metaphor of going to the container store but like, I bought some organizers and then you return to you're overstuff closet and you like, okay, I have a few organized your bins here that I put some of the stuff in your closet is still a nightmare what works Better for the closet while the american do approach of i'm going to empty the whole thing out, emptied to zero, put everything that was in the closed, in the piles i'm going to go through and say, which is the stuff do I really, really need and that stuff I will put back into the closet very carefully if I don't really need IT IT doesn't go back in. That's how you organize your closet. It's not zero budget.

You start from zero and add back in the stuff you need carefully, not just trying to throw organization bins at the junk is arty in there? So that's what digital minimalism is, right? Instead of just throwing a particular piece of advice at your digital distraction, you're onna reinvent your digital life from scratch, taking everything out reflecting for a month and then only adding back in what matters with rules about how you're going to to use IT.

Okay, they get to your specific point about distraction free apps in this process, they can have a use. Typically, they're useful training tools. If there is a particular technology that you need to use, but only use in a limited way, and you have a very strong urge to keep going back to IT distraction, free apps can help you train to resist that urge because that makes IT very difficult, the access of technologies and times you don't want to.

Typically, what happens with people is after a few months of using distraction free apps, they lose the urge to go use that technology compulsively because they've gotten that, grew out of their mind, the reward circuit weekends, and then they don't use anymore. So you might use a distraction free APP as part of your efforts to recreate your digital life. But typically, they're uses on our temporary there are training tool, not a permanent feature of your digital landscape.

I love that can do advice, how you get rid of something and you express grad to do IT, and then you like.

buy tiktok. I express gratitude to the role you play IT in my life. Now our journeys have, our journeys have crossed.

Our journeys have parted. Yes, she's very calm. I hope we got next.

next questions from jp. I get stressed with my goals due to fear of failure. I keep everything my head and can't distinguish, urgent and not urgent, pretty much never finish what I start.

Well, luck. You can't. In the modern world, you can't organize your life just in your head.

Just try to remember what you want to do, all the things you have to do, your priorities somehow. Use this all to make a decision about what to do next. The human brain can do that.

It's like trying to teach a bear to drive a car. IT might be funny and or terrifying, but it's probably not going to work very well. The human brain cat on its own, organize a modern life. So what you need to do instead, well, you can need something like multi scale planning.

That is a system that can get all of the stuff you need to do in your plan for how you're going to tackle IT out of your head and in to a sort of trusted permanent system that you can frequently access. You basically have to extend your mind like a cyborg with other tools to make this complicated task of organizing your life much more tractable. So multiplayer scanning, which I talked about a lot in the show, has you planning things on multiple scales, each which have their own systems to go with IT at the highest scale.

You have a plan for the current season or corda where you're making sense of your bigger priorities. You reference that quarterly, your seasonal plan every week. When you make a weekly plan, you physically write out your weekly plan.

Also, when you do your weekly plan, you confront your calendar, you make adjustments. You add your calendar appointments with yourself to work on particularly important priorities from your cordially, your seasonal plans. So I have a writing weekly plan in a calendar that's been updated and corrected for the week.

And then every day you look at your calendar, your weekly plan, when you make a time black plan for that day where you give every minute of your work at a job. So you're not just trying to decide on the fly. What do I want to work on next?

You've made a plan for the time that remains in your day between meetings and appointments, what you want to do at that time so you can baLance your energy with your need, you can batch, you can be efficient, you can avoid excessive context, watched ta. So each of these levels, you have different tools. All this is going to be supported by a task system.

We're going to keep track of all the obligations you have to do. You're look at that task system when you're doing your weekly plans. You'll reference IT during adman blocks in your daily plans.

All of these are external systems with structure around them that you use so that your brain doesn't have to be responsible on its zone for keeping track of what you have to do and making decisions. An ad hockey. So you need something like mult scale planning if you're going to keep track your life.

So you shouldn't be worried. I would say that you're struggling to do this in your head. That's a bear drive in a car that is pretty impossible, actually.

true. Point about bara thriving car. Jesse, really hard to get insurance. A really high insurance rate.

especially if you live in west coast florida.

If you live in the west coast of florida, yeah, get a bear to drive a car. My insurance rate. What we have .

got next questions from Joseph. I am a teacher looking to improve my efficiency with admin task. When I have a quiz in two different subjects, to greater record is a tax task. Context switching effect. Less if I were to grade and record one class than the other, or if I were aggravated, then record both as blocks.

Well, it's good question because i'm glad you're thinking about context shifting as more or less the number one productivity poisons and you want to be worry about long time listers know this IT takes time to switch your target of your attention from one target to another.

So if you're moving in your attention back and forth rapidly, you're going to put your mind into the state of continuous partial attention, which is a self imposed cognitive deficit you make yourself quite literally dummer. Um in this case, recording grades into a great book is mechanical and largely non cognitive. In other words, you don't have to do difficult thinking.

You're just taking numbers mash into a name right in the name that you difficult inking. You don't have to load up complicated cognitive context. You don't have to make decisions or or pull from complicated memories.

So i'm not too super worried about the context shift Price when you go to just entering grades because again, mechanical thing, it's almost like you're working hard on something like riding a hard bookshop. Ter, if you get up and go make a cup of tea and then come back, that's not actually gonna a big hit. That contact does not going be a big hit on your primary test because it's mechanical and not cognitive.

So this is all the say IT doesn't really matter where you put the grade recording. It's whatever your preference for. So you could grade one thing, then grade the other thing and then have a long block of just mechanically entering grades.

Or you could grade one thing into the grades, great. Another thing into the grades. It's not going to make a difference cognitively is this can be a matter of what's going to feel Better for you. I would suspect the difference would come down to how demanding the grading is.

So if the grading is really hard and if the subjects between the two things you're creating, the two questions is separate, like it's not the same cognitive context, I would enter the grades right after grading to give your mind a breathe right. I would also consider, let's get advanced here, talking advanced. Consider creating the first thing before you into those grades, go look at the second thing.

And maybe like read one of the quiz to try to start loading that cogito context, greater single quiz of the the next thing. This is gonna slow at first, right? Because you now have colliding cognitive context as you look at the the second quiz for the first time, that's a separate context from the quiz you just graded.

And so this can be a collision as your brain is trying to shut down the context of the first grading block and load the context of the second. So grading that first quiz of the second the first assignment of the the first quiz, I don't have to say this, just it's a quiz and he has multiple quiz es degrade and there's two different quiz es that makes sense. Yeah right.

So you're in the second type of quiz and you grade the first quiz from the second type of quiz. And that's very hard because it's a new context. great. Just one from the second typic quiz. Then here's my advances advice.

Go back and into the grades from your first quiz because here's what's happening while you are entering the grades from the first type of quiz, your brain is continuing in the background. The process of switching context over the second type quiz. You initiated that by looking at a single quiz of that second type.

And now you go back and just mechanical into grades. Your brain is going to continue making the switch. So now when you're done into in those grades and you return to the second type quiz, your context has more thoroughly shifted and your grading is going to get up to speed much quicker.

This is kind of an advanced way of thinking about IT but this what you probably would see this effect um if instead you grade the first type quiz you into the grades, then you turn to the second type quiz IT might take you might have to grade five or six students quizzes before you get that moment on going of your brain completely shifting wears with my tactic, you create the first epic is grade one of the second type into the grades didn't return to the rest of the second type. You'll probably get up to speed much quicker. This is just at this point, like attention hacking.

The differences might be minor, but I do like the type of thinking this induces, which is to think about cognitive context, like one of the most important properties of modern work, and is the property that we think almost nothing about in modern office productivity, we completely disregard IT. We put low friction as a priority, we put information velocity as a priority, we put access to tools and data a priority, and we completely disregard the cost to contact shifting. So I love any discussion like this that gets us in the weeds on IT, this sort of psychologically aware productivity is really where we should be. So, know, appreciate the chance to sort of nerd out on that.

What have Joseph respond and see, see how goes?

Yeah, he should so Josephe hear that. Let us know if that technique works. right?

Where are we? Next questions from french swap a professor and also have a french podcast. My university has agreed to include IT in my facial duties. I haven't accept the offer yet. However, if I do accept IT, how should I think about org organizing my podcast with the traditional academic framework of research, teaching and service? Should this be included in my academic task?

It's a good question. France warm. I had a french pod caster well and if you know this.

yeah a pipe and a .

hat and a pipe and a hat and and I just did my french exit um long story short, I am no longer welcome in the republican ds been banned. I have been banned from setting foot france after they heard my awesome accent. Friends work is a good question.

I don't know the front system super wells. I'm going to answer this from the perspective of the american academy adem c system, which I think is like roughly can grow in, right? So in the american academic uh system, by far the most important thing for promotion and recognized as research, you have to do service.

You need to be a good teacher, but there is a loan ckt you promoted to recognize. That has be the quality of your research. So if your university is going to allow you to count your podcasts an official academic task, I would recommend that you were very clear about which of the three major task, research, service and teaching.

That account says, and I would try to make IT count as service. When you counter service, what this means is you can reduce the amount of other service you do, let the podcast take the place of other service obligations. So you're not increasing your time obligations.

And critically, you're not reducing the time you spend on research, right? Because when IT comes to service and promotion, it's a little bit more binary. Was this person a good citizen of the institution and his community? not? How good of a service person were they? right? So if you can use your podcast as a way to reduce other types of service or you're overall time footprints the same, that's great.

Do not let IT, however, in pinch on the time you spend doing research. That's ultimately what matters most. Trust me, i've gone through um two promotions.

I'm done with the promotions now, but I went to both my promotions from assistant to associates in year and from associate continued to fall. Both of those promotions, I had large portfolios of more public facing work, and I had to deal with them carefully, promoted to associate. I didn't mention my books was all computer science research.

When I went to fall, I did mention them because, as we just saw in the deep dive, some of the work, public basing work I did also has a very big academic footprint, right? We just did a whole paper from the journal of applied philosophy in the deep five that was responding to my digital minimalism book. My book, deep work has been cited in academic articles close to eight hundred times.

Now is looking about the other day. So I did sort account that more. But I don't mean in the my podcast, even though I was past a ten million download at that point because I didn't quite fit clearly into its not research and I didn't have an agreement like yours that this counter is service.

I sort of had IT is I sort of on the side. So I know this world well, ultimately promotions matter. Are you doing work that's influencing the academic culture? So that's what you're going to be careful about.

So yeah, you can use your podcast to that reduce other service loads. I think that's great because your podcasts will probably have higher impact in the other service you're replacing. Just don't let you get in the way of research.

So either your football pressure to you self the right as many papers.

um it's more flexible and it's more flexible um right now focusing more on like technology and digital ethics and in computer science and that's the type of thing you can explore. It's it's sort of the advantage of the professor to maintain years like you can make those explorations. And if you don't like the way it's going, you can switch back to something else.

One of the things that made a big difference for me is that you, so google scholar is a quick way, can keep up on people's publications, what if they published, how much if they've incited? What are their statistics, like their age index, their itn index? What are their total accounts?

What are their total station counts by years, once google scholar figured out, because I I write under two different names, my academic computer science papers are typically written under calvin newport. And of course, my public facing writings of the calling port. When IT figured out, oh, calvin news and calm port of the same person, um IT really changed my statistics. So where you saw a sort of bit of a fall off insight tails in recent years now shows a steady high level associations because the public facing work on technology to come newport get cited a lot academically. So um IT shows a sort of smooth transition from less computer science, more diode thick, and the impact is measure by citations as sort of state steady.

I thought you were saying the other name is going to be your french name.

Yeah, well, yeah, there's called new port. There's called new port. And this P R P R the important actually do have a french do my french heritage, the my.

Eternal grandmother was A A level, the level family. And the level family goes all the way back to the french hugon ott that came over here, prerequisites. And they used to be levelled as french, french hugon blood back in there. What we got next.

we have our corner with slow productivity corner.

Let's hear that the music.

For those who are new, slow productivity corner is the question we do. One question each week related to my most recent book, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplished without burnout. Want to amazon I consist and want to amazon's s best business spooks at twenty twenty four and the winner of best business book of the year from the s something, something, something sap.

Ew, IT has those letters in IT. There's a huge cash prize. guys. This is an important award somewhere between sixty and six hundred thousand dollar reward. My award winning books, slow productivity, we tried to a question each week that comes from that book. If you haven't read the book yet to come on, get the book, have the stuff we talk about comes from IT, right? What's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

It's from maDonna's gold tooth. Next.

what do you think about the .

slow living craze on the internet? And do you think it's just a fat or will be permanent, right?

So do you know what this is?

Just there's a youtube video.

You have a youtube video. It'll explain what slow living is because I don't actually notice this is aren't. Let's low this up.

Let's listen here. We're going to be to learning this together. Lets slow living is. And then I can answer this question. But Donald's golf truth of the things I am most scared .

of in my life is looking back with regret, looking back at all the little moments that I missed in pursuit of more. This year, i've been really working on slowing down and trying to be present for the little moments that make up most of our lives, and making sure that i'm actually building a life by design and not just by default. To these are some simple, tiny habits that I have implemented that really helps me slow down.

minutes. nothing. This is literally a block that I have on my calendar every day. Just have five minutes of nothing happening. Doesn't sound like a lot, but when you don't have any music, no podcast, no work that you're thinking, a work that you're doing, a book you're reading for just five minutes and you sit there, you start to walk, not trying to mediate, but you just like your brain, kind of do its thing and you observe IT. It's a beautiful time for me to just kind of reset and make sure that there's actually breaks in my life, to remember that my life is not online, is not a computer screen, and sometimes need physical breaks to make that happen. Zones for me this is my sona, my cold .

point. Um well, first of all, for those who are just this is that of watching the video had like a full graininess while they played like really relaxing music and he washed eggs from the chickens that he just started that I think with that type of music I .

like the music.

Yeah, I think almost anything seems, almost anything .

seems profound every three thousand years yeah.

I mean, almost anything. I think we will sound sort of important and meaningful and somber. You could have a video of someone earn esty trying and fAiling to life threatening in the life threatening way to get a bear into the car to drive.

IT played to that music. Good for him. Good for him. Now, the bears moma, he's trying get him into a chevy and power play to that music and cut to some scenes of someone washing eggs if life is like a barry trying to get into a car.

drive the insurance agents and get the age card.

just him at the insurance agency just face ripped up and bandages, trying to get the insurance guys just shaking his headache but get play that music you like that profound um so no slow living in slow productivity are different. So only tell you how. And then i'm going to tell you what living seems to be like connected to are what some other stuff we talk about, slow productivity about work.

It's about knowledge work. It's about how to to find what productivity means. The knowledge work. The core argument of that book is that we have a bad implicit definition that we tend to fall back on, which is super productivity, which is to use visible effort as a proxy for useful activity. Slow for activity is a alternative, is as our goal.

And knowledge ork should not be to be as busy as possible, we should set focus on not doing too many things to the same time, keeping our pace to work very natural, but then really obsessing over quality. And this is a Better, more sustainable definition of productivity. This is about work.

Slow living seems to be about life outside of work. And a lot to do with like distraction, especially digital distraction. So it's probably closer to digital minimalism when IT comes to the things I talk and right about and anything else, I think if you're a digital minimalist, your life will seem slower.

In the way that has been talked about in this video is a digital minimalist works backwards from their values to dictate or technology use. And so you know, if you value your chickens and washing your eggs or whatever, you are going to be careful about crafting your technological use so that you're not always looking at your phone and you can enjoy doing that. In general, digital minimalists do feel like their lives is slower and richer.

There is a neurological reason for this, right? Your life is what you pay attention to. So if you're costly, pay attention to your phone, you perceive your life is very or like fast paste, emotionally activated, sort of this like really sort of shaky, jittery world that's always rolling past.

Because when you looking at your phone, everything's moving fast. Swipe, wipe, swipe, tap, tap, tap, like this. Look at that.

Jump over there. Time moves fast because you're moving fast on your phone. Also, time moves fast because you're doing the sort of homogeneous behavior.

So when you're doing sort of the same thing, you don't have a really good sense of how long time is. Time can just sort of unfold when you're not on your phone and engaged in specific behaviors. IT is just by definition, slower because everything is slower than using your phone.

And because those behaviors are novel, they're different specific things and novel specific locations. Your perception time is that have been much slower. Your day seems longer, your experiences richer.

So I think digital minimising will probably lead you do something like slow or living. Start with the digital minimum ism and in deputy slower living, right? It's sort of a consequence of an intentional about your life in technology.

But IT is quite separate from slow productivity. They share the same word slow, but they're only connected by this idea of sort of intentionality slow proactiv ties about your work at your desk. Slow living is about your life outside of work that seem reasonable justice.

Yeah, maybe have chickens in here. I like that video. We should do.

We should do more than me that we have kind of music cooler muser like, like that for the indepth episodes. Yeah, there's a little more like a mediated music. All right. Do you ever call this week we do now .

to hear this hi, co. I've noticed, struggled with tireless and a lack of focus on the afternoons, especially during my schedule, deeper blocks after lunch. My mind doesn't finish sharp, and I helped find myself ripped off and daydreaming. Do you have any strategies to help maintain focus and mental clarity during these times? thanks.

Well, first of all, we have to keep in mind that there's a limit capacity to do deep work in a given day. So if you're talking you about like highly demanding focus activities, things that require you to use your full cognitive capacity, probably do those in the morning, do those first thing before you've had a lot of context shifts. Your mind is still clear.

B, O, K, I got in a good, hard early session. I'm okay not having to return to this cautionary demanded activities in the afternoon because i'm just not going to have enough cognitive gas if it's more just no, I I have administrative stuff to do, have to take notes after this, send emails. It's not calgary to many, but I just sort of lose focus and drift and lose energy in the afternoon.

Well, that's very common as well. And a couple things that helps is time blocking. So instead of having to constantly have an argument with yourself, like what should I do next? Should I keep doing this, should I take a break time blocks afternoons and just make the single commitment to stick to your time block schedule the best you can?

So you get rid of a lot of that decisional friction that comes from being more free, forming your approach to your afternoon second in that time, like schedule batch. okay. So I mean, do a lot of similar test together, because even if minor, sticking within the same cognate of context makes IT easier.

This can apply even to cleaning out your email inbox. I recommend if you have like a super stuffing box and it's like three o'clock and you're exhausted, but you can have to get through IT, create a folder or label for the current messages or answering and then go through and grab a bunch of mesage of the same type. So they're all relevant to the same cognitive context.

They are all scheduled messages there, all messages related to like an upcoming event, move those out to that label or folder and then tackle those just by themselves. So now you're doing messages without having to change your context. They go grab another type of messages and do the same.

What happens is if you follow the alternative of just sort of doing your emails in the order they exist in your inbox, you're switching potentially your cognitive context for message to message to message. And that's exhAusting. So that can help as well.

Third, injure day earlier and i'm exhausted by three or four that maybe like stop your day between three and four time block your day. If you're doing multi scale planning, you have a good weekly plan. Weekly plan in touch with your your a quarterly plan.

This is a key idea for my books, slow productivity. The second principal, which says work at a natural pace, which says this idea that, like the perfect calibration for humans that do cognate of work is nine to five all out every day, is preposterous. Why would that just happen to be optimal for everyone? You might find out work until three or three thirty.

This is really what's optimal. al. Ah your time block you're on IT and then when you're done be done or maybe four, maybe two IT could be different for different people.

But don't don't feel like you're too stuck with that has to be this exact eight hour day. Some people just run out of gas earlier than others. Your work might be harder than others, so you need to end earlier.

I talk about in I don't know, this is a slow productivity. I think this is in my book, a world without email. I talk about this type of programming called extreme programming, and its pair based and super intense, and a produce fantastic code, but super intense.

And I report the companies that do this type of coating, they produce really cool stuff. But they have to let people go home by like two, thirty or three is just too exhAusting. You can't do IT till five people at first have to go home and take nap.

So so don't assume that everyone has perfectly calibrated to work all out till five, figure out what works for you. If you're organized and on the ball, you'll produce good work. So I would vary IT that way as well, right? Let's see here we have a case study.

This is where we had people right in, where they talk about their personal experience, putting the type of things we talk about the show in the practice in their own lives, right? So today's case study comes from zack, who was access recently. I've made a monumental life change for the Better, in no small part due to cow's books, poddar, ast and newsletter.

I graduated march of twenty twenty. While my classes went online, I decided to get my real state license and pursue my interest in real state investments because of the high autonomy market activity due to the interest rate environment. At the time I was successful, I specializing commercial investment sales and became proficient in my field because my implementation of deep board principles.

The only problem was that I was miserable at work. My days mostly consisted of cold calling and driving all over the state for client meeting. So even though I was making decent money and had full autonomy, my lifestyle was in great, and I was trending in the wrong direction.

On top of that, I was working mostly solo while i'm a very team oriented person. After listen to your podcast religious ly on my long drives, my mindset began to shift. I realized that I was optimizing for autonomy and money without much thought to lifestyle and long term life design.

So I saved up some money and quit. Believe me, this was tough. Leveraging cows principles got me far relatively quickly. So I had a promising career trajectory. But when I looked at guys way further down the road, they had a lot of material success without intentional design.

After hunting interview with jobs at a line with my long term lifestyle vision for a few months, a successfully landed a job at a tech start up that provides me a much Better day. Today is a short, beautiful commute to an office on my favor, part of town. My work is varied, chAllenging and interesting.

And most importantly, i'm working with, I like, mind the team who are all just as obsessive about productivity systems as I am. I just finish my first weekend. I'm blown away at what a difference is.

Intentional change has made in my life. For the first time in years, i'm bursting with excitement to go to work. So I have applied for jobs while working properly. But I was so burnout bt that I had a burn the ship's mindset. I'm early awaiting your next book nearly as much as I am awaiting Brandon sAnderson's, the author of name of the wind.

I don't do that.

Leave out there. Brandon's Anderson, I still want to go down. Tells you I have an invitation later. Yeah, I have to do that. My wife is going on a trip down there. The well, not sure that would be weird, just like i'm going on a trip and will be spending a week and brand and Sanders, sam dunn, I would be worried about that. SHE is going to that part of the country.

And all I could think it's like if that was me going on that trip, I would be able to see sensors layer yeah be interesting in if I get there and half of this just the sex tension probably not think is a pretty straight less mormon, but you never know the least least popular pornographic beauty of all time is titled Brandon sAnderson, sex danger six views um that's a great zack. I appreciate that. Two things I want to point out about that case study one lifetime le centric planning.

That's the way to think about your career. It's one of the most important dials you have to turn and trying to construct your lifestyle. But what matters is the target lifestyle.

What do you want to data date of your life to be like? You worked backwards from that vision. That's how you help figure out what work to do or not do.

This is much more effective than either following your passion or just blindly following like a clear metric like money, and just hoping by happenstance that will lead you being happy. The other thing I want to point about this example, though, is, okay, zx started one job, didn't work out, he switched. Is that a failure? No, it's very common figuring out the components of your lives.

Ideal lifestyle is difficult, and IT evolves with experience. So he had a hypothesis, I think, built an autonomy and financial security at a hypothesis of a lifestyle vision that he thought would be a ideal for him, that pursuit, a job that masa hypothesis, and then learned through real life experience. Oh, there are these other things I care about.

I didn't realize them until I had them not be present in my life. Um I didn't realize like autonomy without X, Y and z wasn't so good. The money thing I don't care so much about through life experience updated his priors, his vision of the ideal lifestyle evolved.

He said, great, let me now leverage my car cap. I will make a shift. It's gonna me closer to that lifestyle. Now in this case, the career capital he leverage was literal capital. He was making good money, so he saved up enough to buy him time to make a switch.

He was early enough in his career that sort of skills based care capital was less useful or less important because he was still pretty early stage career. And then he he used that money to buy him some time to find a job that focused on other things. He had discovered important, and now his match happier.

That's lifestyle car planning in action. It's IT evolves. It's tactical, not sexy. It's not brand and son son sex unch and sexy. But it's what over time is going to make your life more fulfilling you. I've learned my vbl ccp had a few .

times now I ve been wearing ed, my deep life at regularly.

No one has, no one has ask me IT or noticed what vbl ccp, me. I haven got a reaction to IT yet, but I still thinking we'll find our first you're going to questions about deeper live for people to assume it's a brand.

No no questions. Ah yeah.

i'll see I going to keep wearing mine until I find a true believer, but I haven't them in. We got a whole final site coming up, a tech corner segment. But first let's hear briefly about another you know, what's not fair, the fact that netflix hides thousands of shows the movies from you based on your location and then has the nerve to just keep increasing their Prices.

Now you could just cancel your subscription in protest or you could be smart about IT and make sure you get your full mony's worth, like I do by using express VPN. So we talk a lot about VPN on the show. I'm very clear you should use a VPN the way IT works very briefly is that instead of just directly accessing a website or service with a VP, and you instead connect to a VP and server, you tell that server with an encrypted message, the site in service you actually want to use that server talks to IT on your behalf, encysted to response sin back.

So that means anyone monitoring your internet usage only learns that you're talking to A V P N server. They don't learn what site you're talking to. They don't learn what service you're talking to. One of these advantages of doing this beyond just the obvious privacy advantages, the hacking advantages, the security advantages, is if you connect to A V P N server in a different location, and that server talks netflix on your behalf, netflix, things are in that location.

So express P P N S servers all around the world, so you can select the server, and like whatever geographic zone you care about, and then you'll get that zones, netflix content or whatever stream service you're using you when you use that aps. That's like an extra bonus thing. You can get a benefit of using a VPN on top of all the other.

The reason why I like express VPN is that is easy. You fire up the APP right, you can change your location to serve with one click when it's on, which is easy. Do you click to turon use, use all your websites and apps like Normal.

And all this happens transparently in the book top background that works on phones, laptops, tablets, even smart TV and more. It's superfast c at high band with their servers all around the world. So like there's probably one nearby to get the fast to speed you can stream and hd was you're a buffer through IT.

So it's got great sort of best in class b. Um it's a rated number one by top tech reviews like seen IT and the verge. That's why of the VPN out there. I recommend express VPN right now. You can take advantage of express VP and black friday cyber monday offer to get the absolute best VP n deal you'll find all year.

Use my special link express V P N dot com slice deep and you will get four extra months with the twelve month plan, or six extra months with the twenty four months plan, totally free. That's express VPN dotcoms left deep to get an extra four or even six months of express VPN for free. Everyone talk about our friends at shop of five.

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I put on my computer science had a little bit that help give us some more insight on topics relevant to live in in a deep life, in a distracted world, right? Today's tech corner. I want to talk about how do recommendation algorithms work? why? Because in part, this is really relevant to the ongoing discussion about social media and social media regulation.

So if we look at some of the new child safety legislation like kosa or coca two point o or california, uh big law, we see that one of things that they are pushing for is that when kids are using social media that we have to be um careful about what IT does recommend or not recommend, right? So you sort of see um these arguments. Okay, we're not talking about since in information that you can exist on social media, but we want to be careful about what we recommend or don't recommend.

We also see this in discussions about things like twitter or twitter alternatives like threads or blue sky, or there's often this notion of the recommendation algorithm can be tuned up or tuned down. We saw this a lot with the discussions around threats. When I was released that they were tuning down. They clam the political nature of content and tuning up recommendations for others.

This this idea that there is a corn quote algorithm that is in charge of showing us stuff, and this algorithm really important, and we can change this algorithm that change the experience, or maybe stripped out all together and have experience without IT IT is at the core of many discussions around social media and its harm. So I thought we would talk about, well, how do these algorithms actually work? Um so what i'm going to do here is greatly simplify the idea of how a sort of machine learning based optimization recommendation actually works.

I want to start by saying there is a spectrum on which these algorithms exist. So if we look at the social media ecosystem, on one into the spectrum will be something like twitter, which actually is relatively non out grid mic. The way curation decisions are made on twitter, a lot of IT is actually cybernetic, which means it's based on individual human decisions to retreat or not.

And when those are combined with the the newark structure of twitter, which has parallel dynamics, it's really good at sort of selecting for a certain content to have explosive growth and start trending, but is largely non algorithmic. It's actually just the aggregate of a lot of human decisions. On the other end of the spectrum is tiktok, which is essentially entirely algorithmic.

Um IT doesn't care who you follow or don't follow or what other people like and just uses an algorithm select what to show you next, then want to show you next and want to show you next. So we're going to be leaning more toward s that tiktok side really is like a computer is society, not other humans. What IT is you should see.

Now I can give you a highly simplified way of thinking about this and we can draw some conclusions from IT afterwards all right. So let's pretend for the second this example um that we're building an algorithm recommend tech tok videos and I am going to do a lot of drawing here. God help us.

So if you're listening, instead of watching, you might want to actually a load up the youtube version of this. This is, what are we just? This is episode three twenty seven. That right? right?

So you go to what the deeply that com slash, listen, look for abb sod three twenty seven and you'll see the video there usually comes up with the same day or the day after the the episode lands. okay. So we're tiktok and we want to recommend videos to a user.

So we need ways, first of all, describing the videos we have in our collection and we wanted described them in away computers can. So we want to use numbers. So let's start really simple.

Let's say we're going to assign a single number to every video. They're not gonna to help describe IT, right? Although a second I only try again, here we go, right, so I can draw.

right? So we're going to have videos. We're going to describe each videos with a single number. Let's say, you know, this number, for example, here is going to describe for each video the number of cats in that video. And so we have this a single number on which we can cattegat ze videos.

I drew a line here, and we can imagine this is, this is our space in which videos can fall. And i'm sort of adding numbers to this line. And in this very simple example, kind of numbered from you zero up to eight, we can use yellow dots in this example to be different videos.

And we can just sort of place them on this line depending on how many cats they have in them. There's a couple of videos with a lot of cats and some five a couple over here and and we have fractured numbers of cats, whatever. So we're described in all these videos by a single number.

Okay, in this simple example. Now let's let user come along. And what we do is we want to look at the the videos that you are looking at, and let's say, we want to categorize them simply as a video you'd like or don't like.

So in like the facebook days would be an actually like button. The way we think tiktok works is that IT actually looks at how long you watch videos if you quickly swept the next video, you don't like IT. If you watch IT long enough, then we can consider that you do like IT.

So we're to start showing new videos and we are going to start, let's say, let's just keep track of the videos you would like. So the videos that you actually watch for a little while, and i'm going to plot those on the same one dimensional line here with a purple dot. And so maybe like a couple videos with five cats.

You like one with zero cats. Six cats is a three cat, one in the six cats, maybe one, eight, another couple more, zero ones. So i'm just keeping track of, okay, these videos you liked, where do they fall in this range of number of cats?

Now after we've done this for a while, what I can do, and this is how these sort of basic algorithms work in a very simplistic way. I can say, okay, where on average where on average are these video you like following on this single value I care about? And there's different ways to do this.

Um you can think about what we're trying to do here is basically find the average point. Think about this is like we're trying to find a that has like the best overall distance to all of your points. interesting.

My controller is weird. Uh, in reality, the way this is typically done is, is actually try to minimize the average square of the distance is don't worry about that here. What i'm trying to do here sort of find a point on here that sort of in the middle is the average.

It's minimizing distance to all of your lives. Do you have a bunch of zero you like here, but you have like a bunch of five, six and eight. So you know maybe your averages like right? Or that that's kind of the singer point over the videos you're like fall so now when IT comes time for me as tiktok to show you another video, what I can do to be smarter is say, great, i'm gonna andy.

Select you a video from all the videos that exist but i'm going to wait the probability that I select a given video depending on how close IT is to this point that we said was kind of the center of your preferences. So in here, right, this point is like summer between four and five cats is kind of like the dinner of your preferences when we measure videos by cats. So it's possible that I could select to a video out here, but i'm much more likely to select the videos around here.

You're going get a lot of videos with like four, five cats and sometimes some videos with less cash and sometimes some videos with more, but pretty soon you're good like, well, this is a tiktok is really figured out that there's kind of I like videos that have you know like a couple are impose cats in them. Again, this is simplified, but IT roughly gets to help these type of things work. alright.

So this is a single number. Of course, these videos are gone to have more dimensions on which we're going to want to measure them. But that's okay because the same thing works even as we go to more dimensions.

So maybe we say, okay, there's two numbers. It's like this here. Maybe there's two numbers by which we will describe all our videos.

So one number is a number of cats, and then the other number is like the number of skeletons. So we could just draw this if you're looking at the screen here is just like another access. Like now we're in a two dimensional space. And again, we can do the same thing. All the videos falls somewhere.

Every video has A A spot somewhere in here you know video was seven cats in one two three skeletons would show up right here in the space of video um with like zero cats and four skeleton might be over here and again we see we plot every time you like a video we kind of claud IT in the two dimensional space. And we can do the exact same thing we did before where we find, like roughly speaking, where the scene is by some sort of cinner metric. Okay, a roughly speaking, this is the cinner of all the video you've liked.

And so now when we ran and we select videos that are going to be kind of roughly in this rains, going to see a lot of stuff with a good of cats and a fair number skeletons. And like you're very rarely going to see something with like a bunch of cats and a bunch of skeletons or no cats and whatever, right? We could do this with three numbers.

Now we would be in three dimensional space. And you could imagine there's regions where you have lots of videos you like in three dimensions space. And when we random with like videos we like to near there, we can expand the number of numbers we use to scribe these.

These are videos. They can get much larger. And something like tiktok is going have probably thousands of different numbers, each describing different parts of these videos.

Now we can't draw this. Once we get past three numbers, we can't really draw these in a way that make sense to us. But the same mathematics works. So the videos are describe by a ton of numbers.

We keep track of the videos you like, and then we can select four videos that are, in some sense, close to the clusters of videos that you like, right? Two complications here. What if you like multiple? There's there's if we look in this region where you have a bunch of clustered videos you like, what is like multiple types of videos you like.

This just shows up as like multiple clusters. You kind of like multiple clusters in the multidirectional onal space of videos that you like. We have ways of finding a bunch of different points.

We do things like came means averaging. Okay, there's a bunch of different center points at each correspond like a type of video that you like. And so now when we ran only select a video to show you, it's we're giving extra probabilities, ties to anything.

You're one of these clusters. And the bigger the cluster, the more likely we are to show a video from there. The other complication, well, how do we know if you like something that you've never seen before?

Tiktok answers this by alternatives between just purely showing you something, waited towards the things you've like, adversus showing you something new. So we IT will opportunistically show you new things just to see, give you a chance to show a preference for things you ve never seen before. That's why when you use tiktok at first, they kind of drift over time until you finally stabilize into the clusters you like.

It'll show you a lot more random stuff at first that try to see what you like. It's so like very roughly speaking, something like this is going on. So here's some conclusions about this. These algorithms are automatic and ignostic the content details, right? It's not computer code where you can come in.

And IT has, like in their political content, unsafe for kids content, sports content like we're and you can turn a knob as turn down politics and turn up sports content or turn down controversial, turn up, uh, noncontroversial. It's agnostic to that. IT has all these numbers, most of which, by the way, are figured out using embedding tools that are machine learning tools.

So you don't know what they are in advance, right? You're not choosing what these numbers are. The software just figured out what numbers matter as just mad ally plotting your videos that you like or don't like.

And in finding these sort of singer spaces in the space and randomly selecting the augment is no idea what these spaces are from a content point of view. It's agnostic to that. It's selecting vectors that are waited to be near other vectors that you ve express preferences for.

So IT can be remarkably effective is why when you purify these algorithms, tiktok does that seems early. Like how did tiktok figure out that you I like videos about, you know, bears working on craft, but this type of exploration of the space and waited selection will pretty quickly cluster these things together. And the intersection cluster love a lot of wait IT will just automatically find these things.

IT seems very easy, but it's actually quite simplistic mathematically what's happening underneath. But because it's automatic, they're not nearly as controllable as we think. Controlling these type of recommendation algorithms is difficult because of their automatic counter technology nature.

What we end up needing to do is things like human in the loop, the zone definitions. So we show a lot of content to real people, and we say, here's the type of stuff we're worried about. And when they see this stuff to their human intuition matches, things were worried about, they kind of hit a button.

Okay, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad. And they create what you can think of us all like, dislike plots in this space. And then you can find the sort of sinners of these spaces of stuff that people our tester said was bad. And you can reduce weight for videos near those.

I could, I could give you sort of negative probability weight if you're near one of those zones, right? But this is, again, this kind of indirect is not just you come in and say, don't do this type of content, you have to have humans call in stuff bad. And that translates into this inscrutable table, multi dimensional space and IT sort of affects the weight.

So it's kind of an imperfect way of trying to tame as algorithm stuff. Ff that the human testers haven't seen or click on is going to be treated like anything else. And so these algorithms, we we have to keep this in mind.

Recommendation algorithms are automatic and mathematical and not easily came able in a sort of human understandable way. So when thinking about reforms of these technologies, do not think about like a newspaper editor who's making decisions you can just say, hey, do less of this is much more automatic than that. I can give you like eerily successful results in terms of honey on your interest, but it's also very hard to keep an algorithm that successful and somehow have a avoided.

Lots of stuff because IT doesn't know what stuff means humans have to get in there um and it's messy at best. So anyways, I hear a lot about algorithms. They're often discuss to be these like highly tuned, able, understandable things.

They're simple, algorithmically, but complicated and their effect and complicated the time. So go just say, we did philosophy and computer science pretty good in the same episode. We just kind of got a nerd, Bonnie ed, up here trials the last half of our audience.

You got a professor guys. You have a professor podcast, and sometimes you can get some with that. Anyway, thank you all for listening.

We'll be back next week with another episode. We'll be a little bit less heady next week, i'll see. So if the feedback is but until then, as always, stay deep.

I cw, here, one more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletters, which you can sign up for at town, new port dot com. Each week I sent out a USA about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been riding this newsletter since two thousand and seven, and over seventy thousand subscribers get IT sent to their in boxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and charloix that afflict our world, you got a sign up for my newsletter at calling for dot com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.