Thank you Zvi for writing this excellent post that has helped my research immensely. I will make sure that this post’s research will be used to help other people’s research immensely as well, even if it doesn’t here.
Don’t ever passively use social media on your phone. No scrolling, ever.
Cut down social media use as much as you can even on your computer. Twitter is a strange hybrid case where I think it is often necessary, but f*** Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok unless you’re actively doing business or logistics.
I’ve researched this class of problem professionally, full time, for more than 3 years now. I’ve already found the best hack that mostly solves the problem is to rejigger chrome’s autofill to go exactly to the valuable pages and away from any news feed/scrolling. This is how you do it:
When you go to facebook on a desktop, you type “F” into the chrome bar and it autofills to “facebook.com″ which takes you directly to the news feed for scrolling. What you want instead is to type “F” and it autofills to ”https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien″ instead.
Write down/print a list of all the social media accounts that are worth looking at. In my case, that includes Eliezer Yudkowsky’s twitter and Duncan Sabien’s facebook, which update the most frequently.
For each one, use ctrl + C to copy the url of their home page, and use ctrl + t to create a new tab and ctrl + V to paste it in that new tab, then hit enter. Repeat that around ten times, ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter
This is the tricky part. Type in the habit-letter into the chrome bar (in this case, “F” for “facebook.com″) then use the arrow keys to select the bad-habit autofill (in this case, ”facebook.com″) and hold down alt + shift + backspace to remove it. Continue using alt +shift +backspace to remove things, until autocorrect only shows you the stuff you want. You might need to reinforce the things you want using the step 3 cycle more than ten times.
The final result should look like this:
In summary:
write down the accounts that are worth looking at (such as Dank EA memes)
copy their url and cycle ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter, for about 10 iterations
use alt + shift + backspace to delete anything but the accounts that are worth looking at
when you type “f” for facebook, it will show you exactly what you need to see, instead of the main page news feed which is the danger zone
This is the optimal strategy, and I’m only tentatively proposing it because it might lull people into a false sense of security. You are never safe on the contemporary internet. There will always be a springtrap somewhere that disarms you sucks you back into a news feed.
If you’re in the habit of using a phone for leisure, you’re fucked. There are many reasons why, none of which I’m willing to talk about publicly (aside from the news feed issue which is a big one). Zvi underestimates the difficulty of replacing phone usage with desktop/laptop usage, but phone habits will get net-harder to quit with every year that passes (possibly a little easier, probably much harder) so you might as well do it now.
If you want to make people good at skilling up for alignment technical work (e.g. if their brain-type is unique enough for them to have good odds of ending up becoming one of the alignment champions), then getting the candidates to switch from phones to desktops is probably one of the biggest bottlenecks.
Anyone up for writing software that can automate this browser process? Seems like it should be viable to write a program that checks all your autocompletes, you tell it what you want to change and then it fixes it via doing the thing a human would do?
Seems like we could use a browser/addon that gives the user more direct control over the autocomplete, rather than writing workarounds to hack bad software.
If this doesn’t work (chrome might refuse to cooperate) you can send an email to yourself containing all the links, and then bookmark the url to that email. After using it for a week or so, you can have that email be second on the list of search suggestions (the correct word for the stuff in the chrome search bar) whenever you type the first letter that takes you to gmail/other mail.
You can also use alt + shift + backspace and ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter to change that search suggestion to a new updated email with new links. Or, even easier, just make a bookmark to the email to yourself.
Thiseems a bit overkill when there are such things as bookmarks and pinning sites to your home page. Also if you have a bookmark manager app you can just make that your home page.
Thank you Zvi for writing this excellent post that has helped my research immensely. I will make sure that this post’s research will be used to help other people’s research immensely as well, even if it doesn’t here.
I’ve researched this class of problem professionally, full time, for more than 3 years now. I’ve already found the best hack that mostly solves the problem is to rejigger chrome’s autofill to go exactly to the valuable pages and away from any news feed/scrolling. This is how you do it:
When you go to facebook on a desktop, you type “F” into the chrome bar and it autofills to “facebook.com″ which takes you directly to the news feed for scrolling. What you want instead is to type “F” and it autofills to ”https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien″ instead.
Write down/print a list of all the social media accounts that are worth looking at. In my case, that includes Eliezer Yudkowsky’s twitter and Duncan Sabien’s facebook, which update the most frequently.
For each one, use ctrl + C to copy the url of their home page, and use ctrl + t to create a new tab and ctrl + V to paste it in that new tab, then hit enter. Repeat that around ten times, ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter
This is the tricky part. Type in the habit-letter into the chrome bar (in this case, “F” for “facebook.com″) then use the arrow keys to select the bad-habit autofill (in this case, ”facebook.com″) and hold down alt + shift + backspace to remove it. Continue using alt +shift +backspace to remove things, until autocorrect only shows you the stuff you want. You might need to reinforce the things you want using the step 3 cycle more than ten times.
The final result should look like this:
In summary:
write down the accounts that are worth looking at (such as Dank EA memes)
copy their url and cycle ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter, for about 10 iterations
use alt + shift + backspace to delete anything but the accounts that are worth looking at
when you type “f” for facebook, it will show you exactly what you need to see, instead of the main page news feed which is the danger zone
This is the optimal strategy, and I’m only tentatively proposing it because it might lull people into a false sense of security. You are never safe on the contemporary internet. There will always be a springtrap somewhere that disarms you sucks you back into a news feed.
If you’re in the habit of using a phone for leisure, you’re fucked. There are many reasons why, none of which I’m willing to talk about publicly (aside from the news feed issue which is a big one). Zvi underestimates the difficulty of replacing phone usage with desktop/laptop usage, but phone habits will get net-harder to quit with every year that passes (possibly a little easier, probably much harder) so you might as well do it now.
If you want to make people good at skilling up for alignment technical work (e.g. if their brain-type is unique enough for them to have good odds of ending up becoming one of the alignment champions), then getting the candidates to switch from phones to desktops is probably one of the biggest bottlenecks.
Anyone up for writing software that can automate this browser process? Seems like it should be viable to write a program that checks all your autocompletes, you tell it what you want to change and then it fixes it via doing the thing a human would do?
Seems like we could use a browser/addon that gives the user more direct control over the autocomplete, rather than writing workarounds to hack bad software.
If this doesn’t work (chrome might refuse to cooperate) you can send an email to yourself containing all the links, and then bookmark the url to that email. After using it for a week or so, you can have that email be second on the list of search suggestions (the correct word for the stuff in the chrome search bar) whenever you type the first letter that takes you to gmail/other mail.
You can also use alt + shift + backspace and ctrl + T, ctrl + V, enter to change that search suggestion to a new updated email with new links. Or, even easier, just make a bookmark to the email to yourself.
Thiseems a bit overkill when there are such things as bookmarks and pinning sites to your home page. Also if you have a bookmark manager app you can just make that your home page.