Comment by embedding-shape
9 hours ago
> You will pollute your brain.
Such an interesting perspective, never crossed my mind that a brain could be polluted! My direction always been to fill it with as wide array of information as possible, the more different from existing information the better.
What are some other things that you think "pollutes your brain"?
Your information diet. Social media. Gossipy and negative people. Mulling over old failures/regrets/slights etc. The mind is easily pulled along by negativity and outrage... as can be observed in our current global psychological state.
All those are fine, as long as you're able to process it in a healthy way after. I guess personally I focused more on bettering that processing, as sometimes you don't get to control what information you get served, so at least it works in all cases.
Idk, I find that carefully tending the garden of the mind , sowing the seeds I want to harvest later, eradicating the weeds with prejudice, and in general not entertaining things which are not useful to my purposes is, for me, a highly beneficial practice.
This does not mean to ignore things that are unpleasant, but rather to not allow things that do not benefit your diverse goals to occupy your productive potential, focusing instead on things that inform your path, actionable and relevant information, tools rather than distractions.
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Don’t be so optimistic about your ability to “process information healthily”. You are more of a slave to your instincts than you think and can’t always know whether you’re actually doing a good job at this— literally, it’s not possible to faithfully introspectively this.
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The classic thing that pollutes your brain are punk (music and Mad Magazine) and smut.
I’d add “dangerous memes” such as injecting bleach to cure covid.
https://www.susanblackmore.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/201...
These days, I’ll take Mad magazine
I guess at this point my brain must be essentially mush then, add in frequent recreational drug usage and it's a surprise I'm even able to type?
Not who you asked, but Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is an excellent book about polluting your brain.
As for my personal experience, internet comment sections will pollute one's brain.
Filling your brain with reasonably reliable information is good, but filling it with people online just saying things isn't.
For example, when 30 reddit comments all repeat the same "fact" (for which their source is other reddit comments), it can subtly work its way into your subconscious as something you know is true but can't remember where you first heard it, which is only one step away from seeming like "common knowledge."
Now imagine a similar effect with a politically charged news story instead some random fun fact. Now imagine all the comments are actually just AI run by propagandists with the specific intention of making you believe things that aren't true.
One way I've tried to avoid the worst effects is by being very careful to remember my source for anything I know. I never say "It turns out xyz," I only say "according to abc, xyz." It's probably not enough, I think it might be time to just get off internet forums entirely.
Yes, I'm a hypocrite and yes, it's very funny.
> it can subtly work its way into your subconscious as something you know is true
I dunno, I know this is something some people struggle with, but I'm not sure how I could personally end up here. You can repeat something how many times you want, it doesn't make it true, and if anything, seeing people repeat the same "fact" like that would probably trigger the reverse in my brain, almost automatically going out of my way to disprove it while reading it.
Maybe it's a matter of being connected to the internet early in my life and essentially making "Don't trust anything you read on the internet" the most important rule in processing whatever you read.
Sounds like you always knew something it took me a decade to realize.
> seeing people repeat the same "fact" like that would probably trigger the reverse in my brain, almost automatically going out of my way to disprove it while reading it.
I think that's a very fundamental difference between you and me. I'm too lazy to fact check most of what I read.
One day I decided I would never run my mouth about something unless I felt I could write a five paragraph essay about it, and now I don't run my mouth very much because apparently there aren't a lot of things I'm willing to research even that much.
Still, I highly recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death. It has more and better insights into stuff like this, and I seriously believe everyone should read it.
It's not a choice, it's an inherent cognitive bias. If you didn't trust anything, it would be impossible to live.
Mixing metaphors, there is signal and noise. You can keep asking for noise, but the suggestion is to not train your neural networks with it as it will impair your inferencing. That said, we all have our own cost and reward functions...
Assuming brains work like computers, maybe yeah, that'd make sense :) You also won't know what's a signal vs noise until you've read and tried to understand it, and at that point you've already read it. Besides, something could be "noise" at the point you read it, but be a "signal" in a completely different context and/or time.
You’ll feel like you learned something without realizing it’s totally wrong.
But that's just "learning", doesn't matter if what you learn is totally wrong or totally right. Some things we learn are right when we learn them, but wrong at a later point. And then it's more learning once you learn that it's right or wrong, or maybe it's a bit wrong in that case, but mostly wrong in another, or it oscillates between wrong/right depending on year, location or even mood. There are no universal truths anyways, might as well just roll with it :)
> What are some other things that you think "pollutes your brain"?
Moderating posts on a public (or worse, private) forum. You will see some truly heinous, vile things.
I did that a long time ago, moderating forum categories like pedophilia, drug usage, suicide ideation and a bunch of others. Even ended up moderating a thread where a forum user committed suicide while live streaming it to forum members and the public, made big news at the time.
Still don't think my mind is polluted from it, although I've certainly seen, read and heard a lot of "sick" stuff through my years on the internet.
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