Ep. 327: Would Kant Use TikTok?

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, two announcements before we get in it today. Number one, I had mentioned a few weeks ago that my book's slow productivity had been nominated for this business book awards, the SABEW. I actually have it here on my phone that stands for the Society for Advancing, Business, Editing, and Writing.

So they have this awards for the best business books of the year. They have three categories, Business Reporting, Career Development, and Leadership and Management. I had been nominated for the Career Development category. They just announced the other day that slow productivity has won the category, the SABEW says it's the best career development book of the year.

The two finalists, the two runners up in that category were Charles Duhig's book, Super Communicators, and Bonnie Hammers book, 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work. So 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 tonic that is sorely needed in our overworked burned out society, taking longer to do less seems kind of productive, but when the result is a top quality product, it makes it all worthwhile.

The author lays out his argument clearly and simply creating a compelling read that should help shift your mindset about work. So there you go, Jesse. Congratulations. Best 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 it on 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 November to November. So if you came out in December, you'd be anyways. So slow productivity was also named to their list of the best business books of 2024. The cool thing about this, SBEW 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 address to send your cash prize. So we get some money. What kind of cash?

I believe the first place prize for the best career development book for the SBEW Business Book Awards is $600,000. I thought you were going to say like $10 million or $60. I'm not quite sure. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. But anyways, I, I, right at the end of the year, it's, it's good to see a year out, you know, half year out from the SBEW coming out that is being recognized as one of the best business books of the year.

So please, you should read that. All right. Other, other announcement. Other thing I am excited about. Long time listers know what I mean when I say thriller, December is approaching my long standing routine for the month of December is I read really fun techno thrillers.

I like to eat them with a snack by the fire, maybe put on some like Christmas records on the whatever I growing up, I had always loved the fantastical nature of like that season that Christmas season is I really into like Santa Claus movies, et cetera, the sort of like fantastical the sort of escape is of the season.

I was an adult. I reaccess that by reading really fun techno thrillers, I really try to find this balance between have to be good enough writing that it's not painful to read, but it has to have a topic that I'm really interested in like a cool hook or an interesting like technology topic. 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 thriller December.

You don't have to read thrillers by the way, it's whatever your sort of guilty pleasure book is, I don't care if this is like summer romance novels or maybe you're really into hard sci fi or you're really into like sports nonfiction. This is not a month to impress people with your books. It's a month for just enjoying how books can be fun. Now here's my decree, just see it's why I ordered my first books already.

I think it's been kind of a stressful season. The election was stressful for a lot of us. Escape is on our mind. I'm starting it a week early this year. I think Thanksgiving week that final week in November is when I'm starting thriller December. Did you already finish your November books? I'm on the last one. Yeah, so so I I'm reading Peter T as book and that's my fifth.

So yeah, I'll finish that up soon and get started on my thriller December. I'm kind of I don't want to get into it. My 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 through various contingent reasons to be like the 15th of the month to the 15th of the next month.

So you know, I don't know how that happened, but now like I typically I will finish my November books, for example, around the 15th or 16th of November. And then my December books I'll probably finish you know around. I don't know how it got shifted not so important. But the point being is I'm excited for thriller December and you should be to we'll talk about it more. Suppose as we get closer, but today in contrast to the guilty pleasures of thriller December.

Jesse, 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. But we are putting on our thinking caps today. We are going to be sophisticated and smart and impress everyone with how air you die. We are. So I think we've got a smart episode of the show to do 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 smartphone that you've likely never heard before. It is however, I think an important argument to hear. Why? Because it draws 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 that goes back to the foundational moral philosophy of a manual Kant.

We're talking about a philosopher from the 1700s who is arguably the most influential source of moral ideas since the Bible. And it turns out if you read Kant correctly, he has a lot to say about decidedly modern inventions such as Twitter and TikTok. So I'm going to ask you to stick with me here. We're going to get a little bit technical, but I'm going to walk you through. We're not going to get too technical. All these ideas will be accessible.

And we're going to 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 uneasy and changes you can make. I think it's a cool thing to add to the argument. All right, so I'm going to be drawing today entirely from a single academic paper from 2021. I'll pull it up on the screen here of a pre print 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 there a duty to be a digital minimalist. This was published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy back in the summer of 2021. For those of you who are tracking at home, that's volume 38 number four. The authors are Timothy Isle's worth and Clinton Castro. These are philosophers from Florida International University.

All right, so I'm going to jump through this paper somewhat selectively to pull out what I think the important parts are. So I'm actually going to 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 so don't worry if you're just listening. Okay, so I'm going to jump ahead here. They're talking here about digital minimalism. Let me read from the paper.

Authors like Cal Newport 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 philosophy of technology use is a personal philosophy that covers which digital tools we allow into our lives. For what reasons and under what constraints. Newport's definition outlines a noble ideal, but we are happy to adopt a less demanding 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 Newport's ideal.

And jump ahead one more time here, Newport may very well be right that we have prudential reasons to reduce our smartphone usage. Perhaps most people would be better off if they became digital minimalist. But if the Kantian argument that follows is sound that we might have even more compelling reasons to adopt the end of digital minimalism, we may have moral reasons.

Alright, so let's make sense of what just happened there. They introduced my idea of digital minimalism. They simplified a little bit to make a little bit more general, but they say basically yes, this idea that Newport introduced is one of being very intentional about how you use your technology so that it supports instead of impeding what you values. That is the core idea of my book digital minimalism. It's at the core of my personal technology philosophy.

The key thing they say this is setting up the argument that we're going to explore is they say look, Cal and his book has what they call prudential reasons for why you should be digital minimalist what they means like practical reasons I go through like hey when you when you let technology

get into way of your values, there's like all this stuff that you don't do that you would otherwise like to do and I think you're going to like your life better. I'm sort of pragmatic practical direct direct argument to your experience intuition. They're saying yes, that might all be true. But we are going to make an argument that draws from Kant that says there is also a moral reason that we can draw from moral philosophy that says whether you want to or not.

You are obligated 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 minimalist. Alright, so 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 says comedian Esther Pavodyski.

I try 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. To many of us this is a familiar occurrence all too often we set out the complete a task but we are interrupted and subsequently derailed by our wireless mobile devices. Incidents of this kind might involve a moral failure for insofar as we are morally required to cultivate and protect our autonomy.

We fail 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 our issues with smartphone usage as captured by this anecdote of this comedian saying I try 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. 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 is 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 we're thinking about the behavior we observe in that comedian.

Povidysky is violating these definitions of autonomy alright 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.

Let's return to Povidysky's case from the beginning according to what they call the Frankfort Dworkin model. Povidysky's first order desire to check Instagram while reading is inconsistent with her higher order desire i.e. to want to read. Alright so the Frankfort Dworkin model talks about first order and higher order desires the things that actually is directing your activities right now versus what you want to be the case and if these are out of sync you have an autonomy problem.

So like by that model. Look at an Instagram when you want to read is an autonomy issue because your higher order desire is I want to read but your first order desire that's actually directing your activities is looking in Instagram right here's another model due to Watson. On Watson's characterization what is distinctive about compulsive behavior is that the desires and emotions and questions are more or less radically independent of the evaluation systems of these agents.

Povidysky's smartphone uses inconsistent with her evaluative judgments about what she ought to be doing and the behavior is compulsive alright 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.

Behavioral addiction the persistence and an activity even though it's you know it's not valuable or it's in the way of things you know to be more valuable finally they have a model of autonomy due to Bratman. Bratman defends a model of autonomy that requires harmony between what the agent does and more and her more or less long term plans.

Surely Povidysky's behavior fails on this count as well we can suppose that Povidysky like many of us would like to read many 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 alright so to summarize no matter which model one adopts. The result is likely to be the same Povidysky is not autonomous with respect to her smartphone usage.

Alright so we've established this first link in our argumentive chain. The way we use smartphones today seems to be hurting 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 Kant.

Although some ethicists reject the very notion of duties to oneself Kant makes them a central component of his moral theory. In fact I'll turn to this in the article here for those who are watching long at home I'm just scrolling. This is section three. 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 moral duties.

But he worries that they have not been properly understood and claims that no part of morals has been more effectively treated than this of the duties to oneself. He thinks that they have been misunderstood as a mere elevation of self interest and duty to promote one's own happiness which he dismisses as an absurdity.

Rather than grounding such duties in egoism Kant argues that humanity i.e. rational nature has an absolute inherent value and this generates self-regarding obligations in so far as the agent is morally recognized.

Is morally required to respect humanity in our own person the studies to oneself are derived from the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative we're getting smart here just to which tells us that we must always treat humanity even in our own person as an in never merely as a means alright 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 most important about our humanity.

Okay so what is that jump ahead briefly. Kant famously claims that human beings in virtue of their rational agency have a uniquely elevated status which he calls dig-ditty. So the idea that we are rational beings and no other creatures or objects are gives us this sort of special value and preserving the what he calls the dig-ditty of ourselves as rational beings is sort of the highest good. We have an obligation to help protect this in our self and others.

Moving on here on this view our actions can either express or fail to express the kind of respect that is becoming of human dig-ditty. So he's saying our actions need to be focused on respecting our human dig-ditty and our human dig-ditty is based on the idea that we are rational beings. Alright so we are really in the weeds here Jesse. We are deep in moral reasoning but out of this and a bunch of other words that I am kind of skipping we get to an actual argument form here.

Alright so they end up with three propositions that lead to a conclusion. Humanity is Proposition 1. Humanity i.e. rational agency has an objective unconditional non-fundable value which is dig-ditty. Proposition 2. Anything that has dig-ditty ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means. Proposition 3. 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. Alright we are 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 and 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 Kant's 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 dig-ditty as rational beings. The way that we use smartphones when we're unintentional, rob us of our ability to do this because it rob us of autonomy. And autonomy is at the core of respecting the dignity of being a rational being because at the core of being a rational being is the ability to make decisions about what you do rationally.

So the Kantian framework is seeing this core tension between we need to respect the fact that we are rational beings and smartphones take away our ability to make rational decisions about what we want to do with our life and our time. Therefore in approach to life that reduces smartphones ability of taking away our autonomy is justified.

Digital minimalism is sort of the definition of such a life. It's an approach to digital technology. It says we want to be intentional, not be robbed of our autonomy. Therefore there's a sort of fundamental Kantian moral argument that we should be very intentional about our technology using something like digital minimalism. Let me read the conclusion of this paper because I think they summed this up very nicely.

They're lit up here on the screen for those who are watching at home. All right, 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 smartphones and other addictive devices. We have this duty because we are required to protect the most valuable commodity we possess.

Autonomy. Kant believes that the proper exercise of our autonomy is the only thing that is good without qualification, something that shines like a jewel, having its full worth in itself. To wantonly forfeit some of our agency by following prey, the technological heteronomy is to demonstrate a failure to respect this precious capacity as the treasure that it is.

All right, so why are we geeking out on such 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 minimalism philosophy. It's because I think it is easy and think about technology and human flourishing the fallback on argument 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 wheels of progress. Are we fallback 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 just drive cars, we worried about TV. Now we don't worry about TV as much. It's easy to fall back on these arguments of status quo thinking.

What's critical about this particular argument is it says no, there is 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 and a long line of technotis ruptions that ultimately end up being not so bad.

We are actually reflecting a specific harm denial of autonomy and that 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 as humans. And so yes, we're uneasy not because we're naive, we're uneasy because something basic to our humanity is at stake. So this Kantian argument is pointing towards the exceptional nature of the issue we face with things like smartphones.

We cannot just ontologically speak and put in the same category as like any other type of techno fear. It is a specific technical fear which requires analysis on its 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're making fun of you or if they're trying to self justify their own heavy phone use.

You can now throw a lot of sort of annoying technical philosophical terms at them you can say things like heteronomy, heteronomy sorry even I can't get that right you can say things like heteronomy and ontological you can mention the categorical imperative. Keep dropping the word Kantian and they will just have to be quiet. Alright so there we go a nerd argument for a very real issue. So I actually found that article at Jesse because there's a follow up article that said.

Alright if that's true there's also an obligation others have to protect your autonomy through digital technology as well that there's like a moral imperative not to distract other people it's a whole interesting argument. Alright but enough of that nerdiness we got some good questions but first here from a sponsor.

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I just do some questions first questions from Kirsten from Missouri I just ordered digital minimalism 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 wasting 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 distraction free apps I do talk about them in the book like I tried them and it worked well. So the first thing I want you to understand is that digital minimalism is not a collection of 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.

It's a bit of a binary proposition you either need to adopt the philosophy or not you can't just pick and choose specific things to show up in the philosophy itself. The metaphor I like to use is cleaning out a closet that's overstuffed with junk. So if you had a closet that's overstuffed with junk.

What you are doing to the equivalent in the closet metaphor of like hey I'm 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. Like I bought some organizers and then you return to your overstuffed closet and you're like okay I have a few organizer bins here that I put some of the stuff in your closet still a nightmare. What works better for the closet.

Well the Maricondo approach of I'm going to empty the whole thing out empty it to zero. I'm going to put everything that was in that closet in the piles I'm going to go through and say which of 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 a net zero budget you start from zero and add back in the stuff you need carefully not just trying to throw organizational bins at the junk that's already 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 going to 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 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's 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 it makes it very difficult. The access to 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 groove out of their mind the reward circuit weekends and then they don't use them anymore. So you might use a distraction free app as part of your efforts to recreate your digital life but typically their uses are more temporary they're a training tool not a permanent feature of your digital landscape.

I love the condo advice how she when you get rid of something and you express gratitude to it and you're like bye tick tock express gratitude to the role you play it in my life. So our journeys have our journeys have crossed our journeys have parted. Yeah she's very calming. Next questions from JP I get stressed with my goals due to fear of failure I keep everything in my head and can't distinguish from urgent and not urgent I pretty much never finish what I start.

Well look you can't in the modern world. You can't organize your life just in your head. Just trying 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't do that. It's like trying to teach a bear to drive a car. It might be funny or terrifying but it's probably not going to work very well the human brain can't on its own organize a modern life. So what do you need to do instead?

Well you're going to 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 into 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 multiply a scanning which I talk about a lot in the show.

Has you planning things on multiple scales each of which have their own systems to go with it. At the highest scale you have a plan for the current season or quarter where you're making sense of your bigger priorities. You reference that quarterly or 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 to your calendar appointments with yourself to work on particularly important priorities from your quarterly or seasonal plans. So now you have a written weekly plan and a calendar that's been updated and corrected for the week. And then every day you look at your calendar and your weekly plan when you make a time block plan for that day where you give every minute of your work day a job.

You're not just trying to side 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 other appointments what you want to do at that time.

So you can balance your energy with your needs you can batch you can be efficient you can avoid excessive context switching etc. So each of these levels you have different tools all this is going to be supported by a task system where you're going to keep track of all the obligations you have to do. You'll look at that task system when you're doing your weekly plans you'll reference it during admin 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 own for keeping track of what you have to do. And making decisions in ad hoc ways you need something like. Multi scale planning. If you're going to keep track of 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 driving a car. That is pretty impossible actually true point about bear driving cars Jesse really hard to get insured.

It's a really high insurance rate. Especially if you live in West Coast of Florida if you live in the West Coast of Florida. Yeah. Get a bear to drive a car high insurance rate. All right what do we got next questions from Joseph I'm a teacher looking to improve my efficiency with admin tasks.

When I have a quiz and two different subjects to grade and 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 to grade both and then record both as blocks. Well it's a good question because I'm glad you're thinking about context shifting as more or less the number one productivity poison you want to be wary about long time listeners know this. It takes time to switch your target of your attention from one target to another.

So if you're moving 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 dumber. In this case recording grades into a grade book is mechanical and largely non cognitive in other words. You don't have to do difficult thinking it you're just taking numbers match into a name writing that name you have to do difficult thinking 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 writing a hard book chapter if you get up and go make a cup of tea.

And then come back that's not actually going to be a big hit that context shift is not going to be a big hit on your primary test because it's mechanical and not cognitive. So this is all to say it doesn't really matter where you put the grade recording. It's whatever you have 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.

Enter the grades grade another thing into the grades it's not going to make a difference cognitively. It's just going to be a matter of what's going to feel better for you. I would suspect the difference will 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 grading the two quizzes is separate like it's not the same cognitive context. I would enter the grades right after grading to give your mind a breather right.

I would also consider let's get advanced here cognitively advanced. Consider grading the first thing before you enter those grades go look at the second thing and maybe like read one of the quizzes to try to start loading that cognitive context. Grade a single quiz of the next thing this is going to go slow at first right because you now have colliding cognitive context as you look at the second quiz for the first time. That's a separate context from the quiz you just graded.

And so there's going to 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 first quiz I don't know how to say this Jesse.

It's a quiz and he has multiple quizzes to grade and there's two different quizzes that makes sense yeah alright 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 grade just one from the second type of quiz. Then here's my advanced advice go back and enter 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 this context over to the second type of quiz you initiated that by looking at a single quiz of that second type.

And now you go back and just mechanically enter grades your brain is going to continue making this switch so now when you're done entering those grades and you return to the second type of 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.

If instead you grade the first type of quiz you enter the grades then you turn to the second type of quiz it might take you might have to grade five or six students quizzes before you get that momentum going of your brain completely shifting.

Whereas with my tactic you grade the first type of quiz grade one of the second type into the grades then 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 is like one of the most important properties of modern work.

And it's 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 as a priority and we completely disregard the cost of context 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 you know I appreciate the chance to sort of nerd out on that. Well have to have Joseph respond and see see how it goes yeah he should so Joseph you hear this let us know if that technique works. Alright where are we next questions from François I'm a professor and also have a French podcast my university has agreed to include it in my official duties.

I haven't accepted their offer yet however if I do accept it how should I think about organs I organizing my podcast within the traditional academic framework of research teaching and service should this be included in my academic task. It's a good question for us while I had a French podcast for well and if you know this yeah and you had a pipe and a hat at a pipe and a hat and I just did my French accent.

Long story short I am no longer welcome in the Republic of France. I have been banned I have been banned from setting foot in France after they heard my awesome accent. France war it's a good question I don't know the French system super well so I'm going to answer this from the perspective of the American academic system which I think is like roughly congruent. So in the American academic system by far the most important thing for promotion and recognition is research.

You have to do service you need to be a good teacher. But those alone can't get you promoted or recognize it has to 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 are very clear about which of the three major tasks research service and teaching that it counts as an I would try to make it count as service.

When you count it as service what this means is you can reduce the amount of other service you do right what 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.

Because when it comes to service and promotion it's a little bit more binary you know 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 so you're overall time footprints the same that's great do not let it however impinge on the time you spend during research that's ultimately what matters most trust me I've gone through.

I've done two promotions I'm done with promotions now but I went through both my promotions from assistant to associate with tinier and from associate with tinier to full. Both of those promotions I had large portfolios of more public facing work and I had to deal with them carefully when I was promoted to associate I didn't mention my books was all computer science research.

When I went the full I did mention them because as we just saw in the deep dive some of the work public facing work I did also has a very big academic footprint we just did a whole paper from the journal applied philosophy in the deep dive that was responding to my digital minimalism book my book deep work has been cited an academic articles close to 800 times now just looking at the other day so I did sort of count that more.

But I didn't lean into my podcast even though I was past a 10 million download point at that point because it didn't quite fit clearly into it's not research. I didn't have an agreement like yours at this county to service it sort of had it as a 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 got to be careful about so you can use your podcast the gig that reduce other service loads and I think that's great because your podcast will probably have higher impact in the other service you're replacing just don't let it get in the way of research. So now that you're a full professor do you self the right as many papers.

It's more flexible yeah it's more flexible right now focusing more on like technology and digital ethics that I am computer science and that's the type of thing you can explore it's it's sort of the advantage of full professor to maintain yours 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 the quick way you can keep up on people's publications what if they published how much have they been cited. What are their statistics like their H index their item index what are their total citation counts what are total citation counts by years.

Once Google scholar figured out because I write under two different names my academic computer science papers are typically written under Calvin Newport and of course my public facing writings on the Cal Newport when it figured out. Oh Calvin Newport and Cal Newport are the same person.

It really changed my statistics so where you saw a sort of a fall off in citations in recent years now shows a steady high level of citations because the public facing work on technology I was doing is cal Newport gets cited a lot academically. So it's it's it shows a sort of smooth transition from less computer science more digital ethics and the impact is measured by citations a sort of state steady. I thought you're saying the other day was going to be your French name.

Yeah well yeah there's Calvin Newport there's Cal Newport and this Pierre Pierre the new port. Actually do have a French do have French heritage the my um. The paternal grandmother was a level the level family and the level family goes all the way back to the French Huguenots they came over here pre revolution and they used to be levalled as French. French Huguenot blood back in there. What do we got next we have our corner.

So 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 accomplishment without burnout. I'm going to Amazon so I can say it's now when Amazon's best business books at 2024 and the winner of best business book of the year. From the S something something something.

SABEW it has those letters in it there's a huge cash prize guys this is an important award somewhere between 60 and $600,000 reward my award winning book slow productivity we tried to a question each week that. What comes from that book if you haven't read the book yet come on get the book half the stuff we talk about comes from it alright what's our slow productivity corner question of the week it's from Madonna's gold tooth thanks.

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. Alright so do you know what this is Jesse there's a YouTube video you have a YouTube video yeah it'll explain what slow living is. I don't actually know what this is all right let's load this up let's listen here we're going to be learning this together what slow living is and then I can answer this question. Madonna's gold tooth.

Alright there seems to be one 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 more present for the little.

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 these are some simple tiny habits that I've implemented that have really helped me slow down five minutes of nothing this is literally a block that I have on my calendar every day just to 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 of a work that you're doing a book that you're reading for just five minutes and you sit there.

And you stare to wall not trying to meditate but you just let 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 it's not on computer screen and sometimes I need physical breaks to make that happen. Three zones for me this is my son of my cold plunging.

I think I get the idea. Well first of all for those who are just listed said a watching the video had like a faux graininess while they played like really relaxed music and he washed eggs. The chickens that he just stared at. I think with that type of music I like the music. I think almost anything seems most anything seems profound.

So every 3000 views yeah I mean almost anything I think will sound sort of important and meaningful and somber you could have a video of someone earnestly trying and failing to life threatening in the life threatening way to get a bear into the car to drive it.

Play to that music but good for him. Good for him. You know the bears Molly known as he's trying to get him into a Chevy Impala play it to that music and cut to some scenes of someone watching eggs you like yeah life is like a bear trying to get a car. Drop the insurance agency and get the charge card just him at the insurance agency just face ripped up and bandages trying to get the insurance guys just shaking his head you like yeah it's play that music.

You like yeah it's profound so no slow living and slow productivity are different. So let me tell you how and then I'm going to tell you what slow living seems to be like connected to our what some other stuff we talk about slow productivity is about work. It's about knowledge work it's about how do we define.

What productivity means in 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 pseudo productivity which is the use visible effort as. A proxy for useful activity slow productivity is a alternative it says our goal and knowledge work should not be to be as busy as possible. We should set focus on not doing too many things at the same time.

Keeping our pace of work varied natural but then really obsessing over quality that 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 things I talk and write about than anything else.

I think if you're a digital minimalist your life will seem slower in the way that's being talked about in this video. Is a digital minimalist works backwards from their values to dictate their 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 you can enjoy doing that in general digital minimalist 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 constantly paying attention to your phone you perceive your life is very sort of like fast paced emotionally activated. Sort of this like really sort of shaky jittery world that's always rolling past because when you look at your phone everything's moving fast swipe swipe swipe tap tap tap look at 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 this sort of homogenous behavior.

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 engaging 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 of time is of it being much slower your day seems longer your experiences richer.

So I think digital minimalism will probably lead you to something like slower living. Start with the digital minimalism and end up at the slower living. Right it's sort of a consequence of getting intentional about your life and 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 practicalies about your work at your desk slow living is about your life outside of work that that seem reasonable Jesse. Yeah. Maybe we should have chickens in here. I like that video we should do we should do more of that music we have kind of music cooler music like like that for the in depth episodes. Yeah a little more like a meditative music. All right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear this.

Hi cow I've noticed I struggle with tiredness and a lack of focus in the afternoons especially during my scheduled deport blocks. After lunch my mind doesn't feel as sharp and I often find myself drifting off day dreaming. 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 limited capacity to do deep work in a given day. So if you're talking about like highly demanding focused 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 contact shifts your mind is still clear. And be okay I got in a good hard early session I'm okay not having to return to these cognitive demanding activities in the afternoon because I'm just not going to have enough cognitive gas.

If it's more just know I I have administrative stuff to do I have to take notes after send emails it's not cognitive demanding 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 of like what should I do next should I keep doing this should I take a break.

Time block those afternoons and just make the single commitment to stick to your time block schedule the best you can. So you you 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 block schedule batch. Okay so let me do a lot of similar past together because even if minor sticking within the same cognitive context makes it easier this can apply even to cleaning out your email inbox.

I recommend if you have like a super stuffed inbox and it's like three o'clock and you're exhausted but you kind of have to get through it. Create a folder or label for the current messages your answering and then go through and grab a bunch of messages of the same type. So they're all relevant to the same cognitive context or all scheduling messages. They're all messages related to like an upcoming event move those all to that label or folder and then tackle those just by themselves.

So now you're doing messages without having to change your context then go and 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 from message to message to message and that's exhausting so that can help as well. Third in your day earlier.

Yeah I'm exhausted by three or four that maybe like stop your day between three and four time block your day. You're doing multi scale planning you have a good weekly plan you weekly plans and touch with your your quarterly plan. This is a key idea for my book slow productivity the second principle it says work at a natural pace which says this idea that like the perfect calibration for humans that do cognitive 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 working till three or three thirty. This is really what's optimal. Yeah your time blocked your 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 it 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 if this is in slow productivity I think this is in my book. A world without email. I talk about this type of programming called extreme programming and it's pair based and it's super intense and a produce fantastic code but super intense.

And I report the companies that do this type of coding 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 a nap so so don't assume that everyone is perfectly calibrated to work all out till five. Figure out what works for you if you're organizing on the ball you'll produce good work so I would vary it that way as well.

All right let's see here we have a case studies. This is where we have people write 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. So today's case study comes from Zach. Here's what Zach says recently I've made a monumental life change for the better in no small part due to cows books podcast and newsletter.

I graduated in March of 2020 while my classes went online I decided to get my real estate license and pursue my interest in real estate investments because of the high autonomy market activity due to the interest rate environment at the time. I was successful I specialize in commercial investment sales and became proficient in my field because my implementation of deport 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 it was trending in the wrong direction. On top of that I was working mostly solo while I'm a very team oriented person. After listening to your podcast religiously on my long drives my mindset began to shift.

I realized 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 and interviewing with jobs that align with my long term lifestyle vision for a few months a successfully landed a job at a tech startup. That provides me a much better day today it's a short beautiful commute to an office in my favorite part of town my work is varied challenging and interesting and most importantly I'm working with a like minded team who are all just as obsessed about productivity systems as I am.

I just finished my first week and I'm blown away at what a difference this intentional change has made in my life for the first time in years I'm bursting with excitement to go to work. Should I have applied for jobs while working probably but I was so burnt out that I had a burn the ship's mindset I'm eerily awaiting your next book nearly as much as I am awaiting Brandon Sanderson's the author of name of the wind.

I don't believe that in their Brandon Sanderson still want to go down told you I have an invitation to go see his layer yeah I have to do that. My wife is going on a trip down there the bread and airs that that would be weird.

She's like I'm going on a trip I'm going to be spending a week in Brandon Sanderson's dungeon I would be I'd be worried about that now she's going to that part of the country and I could think it's like if that was me going on that trip I would be able to see Sanderson's layer. Yeah I'd be be interesting if I get there and it's just half of it's just a sex dungeon probably not I think he's a pretty straight lace Mormon but you never know.

The least least popular pornographic video of all time is titled Brandon Sanderson sex dungeon six views. All right that's a great Zach I appreciated that two things I want to point out about that case study one lifestyle centric planning that's the way to think about your career.

It's one of the most important dials you have to turn in trying to construct your lifestyle but what matters is the target lifestyle what you want the day to day of your life to be like you work 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 happen stance that will lead you being happy.

The other thing I want to point about this example though is okay Zach started one job didn't work out he switched is that a failure no it's very common. Figuring out the components of your life ideal lifestyle is difficult and it evolves with experience so he had a hypothesis I think built on autonomy and financial security. At a hypothesis of a lifestyle vision that he thought would be ideal for him.

Zach pursued a job that best that hypothesis and then learned this real life experience oh there's these other things I care about I didn't realize them until I had them not be present in my life 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 he.

He updated his priors his vision of the ideal lifestyle evolved he said great let me now leverage my career capital and make a shift that's going to get me closer 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 career capital was less useful or less important because he was still pretty early stage career.

And then he used that money to buy him some time to find a job that focused on other things he had discovered a report in and now he's much happier that's lifestyle center career planning in action. It's it evolves it's tactical not sexy. Not Brandon senator since sex dungeon sexy. But it's what over time is going to make your life more fulfilling.

You know I've worn my VBLCCP had a few times now I've been wearing my deep life had regularly no one has no one has asked me yet or noticed what VBLCCP me I haven't got a reaction to it yet but I'm still thinking we'll find our first. You can eat questions about deep life for people to assume it's a brand. No no questions yet yeah I'll see I'm going to keep wearing mine until I find a true believer but I haven't found them yet.

Alright we got a cool final segment coming up a tech corner segment but first let's hear briefly about another sponsor. You know what's not fair the fact that Netflix hides thousands of shows and 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 protest or you could be smart about it and make sure you get your full money's worth like I do by using express VPN.

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So express VPN servers all around the world. So you can select a server and like whatever geographic zone you care about and then you'll get that zones netflix content or whatever streaming service you're using when you when you use that app so that's like an extra bonus thing you can get a benefit of using a VPN on top of all the other ones. The reason why I like express VPN is that it's easy you fire up the app right you can change your location to server with one click when it's on.

Which is easy to just click to turn it on use use all your websites and apps like normal and all this happens transparently in the back top background works on phones laptops tablets even smart TVs and more. It's super fast got high bandwidth. There's servers all around the world so like there's probably one nearby to get the fastest speed you can stream in HD was your buffering through it so it's got great sort of best in class speed.

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But type that in all lower case go to shopify dot com slash deep all lower case to upgrade your selling today shopify dot com slash deep. All right, Jesse good or final segment.

All right, for our final segment today we want to do a triumphant return to my tech corner segment where we get into a technical topic that is relevant to the type of things we talk about today so I put on my computer science had a little bit to help give us some more insight on topics relevant to living a deep life in a distracted world.

All 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 Copa 2.0 or California's big law we see that one of the things that they are pushing for is that when kids are using social media that we have to be careful about what it does recommend or not recommend.

Right, so you sort of see these arguments, okay, we're not talking about censoring information that it 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 threads when it was released that they were tuning down they claim the political nature of content and tuning up recommendations for others as this idea that there is a quote unquote algorithm that is in charge of showing us stuff.

And this algorithm is really important and we can change this algorithm that changed the experience or maybe strip it out all together and have an experience without it it is at the core of many discussions around social media and it's harm so I thought we would talk about how do these algorithms actually work.

So what I'm going to do here is greatly simplify the idea of how a sort of machine learning based optimization recommendation algorithm actually works. I want to start by saying there is a spectrum on which these algorithms exist.

So if we look in the social media ecosystem on one end of the spectrum will be something like Twitter which actually is relatively non algorithmic the way curation decisions are made on Twitter a lot of it is actually cybernetic which means it it's based on individual humans decisions to retweet or not and when those are combined with the network structure of Twitter which has power law dynamics it's really good at sort of selecting for certain content to have explosive growth and start trending.

But it's 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 it doesn't care who you follow or don't follow or what other people like it just uses an algorithm to select what to show you next.

So we're going to be leaning more towards that tiktok side really is like a computer is deciding not other humans what it is you should see I'm going to give you a highly simplified way of thinking about this and we can draw some conclusions from it afterwards. Alright so let's pretend for the sake of this example that we're building an algorithm to recommend tiktok videos and I am going to do a lot of drawing here got help us.

So if you're listening instead of watching you might want to actually load up the YouTube version of this this is what are we just this is episode 327 is that right yep. Alright so you just go to what the deep life calm slash listen look for episode 327 you'll see the video there usually comes up within the same day or the day after the episode lands okay. So we're tiktok and we want to recommend videos to a user.

So we need ways first of all of describing the videos we have in our collection and we wanted to scribe them in a way computers can understand 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 that we're going to use to help describe it.

Alright so we're going to have videos we're going to scribe 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 categorize 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 know 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 so a couple videos with a lot of cats and. Five and a couple over here and I don't know if fractional numbers of cats whatever. So we're describing all these videos by a single number. Okay in this simple example now let's let a 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 like or don't like. So in like the Facebook days would be an actual like button the way we think tick tock works is that it actually looks at how long you watch a video so if you quickly swipe to 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 going to start showing you videos and we are going to start let's say let's just.

Keep track of the videos you like so the videos that you actually watch for a little while and I'm going to plot those on this 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 or six cat maybe one eight. Maybe another couple more zero ones so I'm just keeping track of okay these videos you like. Where did 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. Are these videos you like falling on this single value I care about and there's different ways to do this 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 point that has like the best overall distance to all of your points.

Interesting my controllers weird in reality though the way this is typically done is is actually trying 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 likes.

So you have a bunch of zeros you like here but you have like a bunch of five sixes and eight so you know maybe your your average is like right where that X is that's kind of the center point. Of where the videos you like fall. So now when it comes time for me as tick talk to show you another video. What I can do to be smarter say great I'm going to randomly 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 we said was kind of at the center of your preferences so in here right this point is like somewhere between four and five cats. Is kind of like the center of your preferences when we measure videos by cats.

So you know it's possible that I could select you a video out here but I'm much more likely to select videos around here so you're going to get a lot of videos with like four or five cats and sometimes some videos with less cats and sometimes some videos with more but pretty soon you're going to be like wow this is eerie tick talk is really figured out that there's kind of I like videos that have you know like a couple of couples cats in.

Again this is simplified but it roughly gets to how these type of things work. All right so this is a single number of course these videos are going 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.

Let me select this here. Maybe there's two numbers by which we want to describe all of our videos so one number is the number of cats and then the number is like the number of skeletons. So we can just draw this if you're looking at the screen here it's just like another axis like now we're in a two dimensional space and again we can do the same thing all the videos fall somewhere every video has a spot somewhere in here.

You know a video with seven cats and one two three skeletons would show up right here in the space a video with like zero cats and four skeletons might be over here and again we we see we plot every time you like a video we kind of plot it in this two dimensional space and we can do the exact same thing we did before where we find like roughly speaking where the center is by some sort of.

So we can just do the center metric okay roughly speaking this is the center of all the videos you've liked and so now when we randomly select videos they're going to be kind of roughly in this range like you're going to see a lot of stuff with a good number of cats and a fair number of 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.

So we can do a lot of different 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 a three dimensional space and when we randomly select videos we select near there we can expend the number of numbers we use to describe these these videos they can get much larger and something like tick talk is going to have probably thousands of different numbers each describing different parts of these videos.

So once we get past three numbers we can't really draw these in a way that makes sense to us but the same mathematics works. The videos are described 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.

Alright two complications here what if you like multiple there's there's if we look in this region where you have a bunch of cluster videos you like what if there's like multiple types of videos you like this just shows up as like multiple clusters kind of like multiple clusters in this multi dimensional space of videos that you like we have ways of finding a bunch of different center points we do things like came in average.

Okay there's a bunch of different center points that each correspond like a type of video that you like and so now when we randomly select a video to show you it's we're giving extra probabilities to anything you're one of these clusters and the bigger the cluster the more likely we are to show you a video from there.

The other complication well how do we know if you like something that you've never seen before tick talk answers this by alternating between just purely showing you something weighted towards the things you like versus showing you something new so it 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 tick talk at first it kind of drifts over time until you finally stabilize into the clusters you like it'll show you a lot more random stuff at first to try to see what you like. It's like very roughly speaking something like this is going on. Alright so here's some conclusions about this these algorithms are automatic and agnostic 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 where and you can turn a knob is turned down politics and turn up sports content or turn down controversial turn up non controversial it's agnostic to that it has all these numbers most

which by the way are figured out using embedding tools that are machine learning tools so that you don't know what they are in advance right you're not choosing what these numbers are.

The software just figuring out what numbers matter and it's just automatically plotting your videos that you like or don't like and finding these sort of center spaces in the space and randomly selecting the algorithm has no idea what these spaces are from a content point of view it's agnostic to that it's selecting vectors that are weighted to be near other vectors that you've expressed preferences for.

So it can be remarkably effective it's why when you purify these algorithms like tick tock does it seems eerie like how did tick tock figure out. That you know I like videos about you know bears working on crafts.

But this type of exploration of the space and weighted selection will pretty quickly cluster these things together and the intersection clusters love a lot of weight it will just automatically find these things it seems very eerie but it's actually quite simplistic mathematically what's happening under

neith. 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 contact agnostic nature. What we end up needing to do is things like human in the loop dead zone definitions. So we show a lot of content to real people we say here's the type of stuff we're worried about and when they see the stuff that to their human intuition.

Matches things were worried about the kind of hit a button okay that's bad that's bad that's bad and they create what you can think of as alike dislike plots in this space. And then you can find the sort of centers of these spaces of stuff that people are tester said was bad and you can reduce weight for videos near those it could it 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 it's not just you coming in saying don't do this type of content. You have to have humans calling stuff bad and that translates into this inscrutable multi-dimensional space and it sort of affects the weight so it's kind of an imperfect way of trying to tame this algorithm. Stuff that the human testers haven't seen or clicked on is going to be treated like anything else.

And so these algorithms we just we have to keep this in mind recommendation algorithms are automatic and mathematical. And not easily tame a bowl 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. It's much more automatic than that it can give you like eerily successful results in terms of honing it on your interest.

But it's also very hard to keep an algorithm like that successful and somehow have it avoid lots of stuff because it doesn't know what stuff means humans have to get in there and it's messy at best. So anyways I hear a lot about algorithms. They're often discussed to be these like highly tunable understandable things. They're simple algorithmically. But complicated in their effect and complicated the team.

So there you go Jesse we did philosophy and computer science pretty good in the same episode. We just kind of got our nerd bonafides up here probably also lost half our audience. You got a professor guys here you have a professor podcasting sometimes you can get some of that anyways thank you all for listening we'll be back next week with another episode. You'll be a little bit less heading next week we'll see so the feedback is but until then as always stay deep.

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