I like them and you may like them, but Raemon clearly doesn’t.
It’s worth noting that I actually DO “like” them, insofar as they are fun. I enjoy getting lost in TVtropes for hours. But it’s empty mind-calorie fun. TVtropes is pretty meaningless. It looks like you’re learning and feels like you’re learning, but at the end of the day you haven’t accomplished anything useful.
Now, Wikipedia DOES, theoretically, actually teach you stuff. It’s possible that at the end of the day you have benefitted from your eight-hour-link-foom. But I’m pretty sure that the neural impulses responsible for most of your “yay I learned something!” feeling at Wikipedia are the same ones responsible for TVtropes, and this says to me that these impulses cannot be trusted. How much you actually learned that you will remember a week later that will actually benefit you is not necessarily directly correlated to how much your “yay I learned something” receptors are firing.
Less Wrong is the only website where I viscerally felt like the information was too dense and the links too distracting to actually learn something, which is due in part to overuse of hyperlinks, in part due to the fact that almost everything on this site was new information to me, and in part because that information was all pretty dense.
I agree that Wikipedia is mostly empty mind-calorie.
Typical example for me: yesterday I had a question about hypobaric combustion. I found the answer, and because I had a question in mind before I looked for it, I will probably remember that answer for a very long time. However, by the time I finished my search, I had another four tabs open, and by the time I closed my browser, I had probably read through around a hundred pages. I remember their content pretty well, and will probably remember it decently next week, and probably remember some of it well in a year (the page on Howard Hughes, I expect).
However, I can’t absorb that much information in two hours. If I want to keep it in long-term memory, I need to put it into my Anki decks, but that would probably take more than an entire day. 20 hours is probably an underestimate, actually. That’s a clear sign that I’m running on the “yay I learned something!” impulse rather than actually trying to learn things. Another clear sign is how often I go back to the same pages, still without bothering to put it into Anki. It’s an impulse society is not very judgmental about, so I have difficulty feeling ashamed of it and correcting my behavior.
It’s worth noting that I actually DO “like” them, insofar as they are fun. I enjoy getting lost in TVtropes for hours. But it’s empty mind-calorie fun. TVtropes is pretty meaningless. It looks like you’re learning and feels like you’re learning, but at the end of the day you haven’t accomplished anything useful.
Now, Wikipedia DOES, theoretically, actually teach you stuff. It’s possible that at the end of the day you have benefitted from your eight-hour-link-foom. But I’m pretty sure that the neural impulses responsible for most of your “yay I learned something!” feeling at Wikipedia are the same ones responsible for TVtropes, and this says to me that these impulses cannot be trusted. How much you actually learned that you will remember a week later that will actually benefit you is not necessarily directly correlated to how much your “yay I learned something” receptors are firing.
Less Wrong is the only website where I viscerally felt like the information was too dense and the links too distracting to actually learn something, which is due in part to overuse of hyperlinks, in part due to the fact that almost everything on this site was new information to me, and in part because that information was all pretty dense.
I agree that Wikipedia is mostly empty mind-calorie.
Typical example for me: yesterday I had a question about hypobaric combustion. I found the answer, and because I had a question in mind before I looked for it, I will probably remember that answer for a very long time. However, by the time I finished my search, I had another four tabs open, and by the time I closed my browser, I had probably read through around a hundred pages. I remember their content pretty well, and will probably remember it decently next week, and probably remember some of it well in a year (the page on Howard Hughes, I expect).
However, I can’t absorb that much information in two hours. If I want to keep it in long-term memory, I need to put it into my Anki decks, but that would probably take more than an entire day. 20 hours is probably an underestimate, actually. That’s a clear sign that I’m running on the “yay I learned something!” impulse rather than actually trying to learn things. Another clear sign is how often I go back to the same pages, still without bothering to put it into Anki. It’s an impulse society is not very judgmental about, so I have difficulty feeling ashamed of it and correcting my behavior.