There’s one creating his new BCI known as Henry
https://twitter.com/arithmoquine
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Since it became X I have not bothered with anything posted to Twitter. Even before that my usage was minimal but I used to look at the Trump Twitter Archive website for laughs. When I used Twitter it was principally to send messages to live TV shows or occasionally to point out to (UK) politicians there own stupidity.
To give this some semblance of QS content my mental health has improved a notch by not using X at all. That’s an improvement of 0.000000001% on my mental health of 99.9%.
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I never made a conscious decision to stop using Twitter but at some point in 2023 the value dropped below some implicit threshold and it mostly vanished from my reading/posting routines. I almost never think about it, but now I’m wondering what occupies the time I used to spend there. Definitely not other social media; I post marginally more on LinkedIn now to amplify research or share QS relevant announcements, but <1x week. Somehow the rest of my life just closed in around the gap.
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It’s not twitter, but I really like Michael Lustgarten on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@conqueragingordietrying1797
My life is also too full for Twitter, but Michael Lustgarten I did discover, incidentally through a Show&Tell video. I like to watch a video or two sometimes, and find myself wondering what kind of strenghts and weaknesses his doggedly empirical approach might have.
FWIW, Twitter is my main source of news about late-breaking updates on AI, crypto, science, etc. I’ll routinely see something on X that’s not published elsewhere, and conversely something in the NYTimes will get counter-arguments I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. (here’s one recent example)
But I never follow right/left political discussions, which I think is the main source of negative emotions for some people. Follow my Personal Science list for a curated list of people with some connection to self-experimentation. Some of them post "controversial’ ideas about health/etc, but I like hearing alternative perspectives especially when it’s so easy to hear from others with the counter-argument.
Hey @sprague that used to be my approach too but over the last few years it seems no matter how aggressively I unfollowed people whose posts led down that path or how many keywords I blocked, the oceanic tide of clickbait and dumb opinions kept overwhelming my filters. Do you have tips that work in the current system?
I checked my feed just now and can scroll endlessly without encountering anything political or mean-spirited.
Maybe it’s:
- Twitter remembers your old habits/follows and it continues to shove that stuff at you.
- You haven’t checked in a while and don’t know that many of the worst offenders have left in disgust.
My tip: I create a private list called “top” that only contains the few people I really care about (mostly techies like Paul Graham or prolific science buffs like @rainmaker1973). That’s my default and shows only a few dozen new posts per day. Easy to quickly browse.
When I have more time, I go one-by-one through lists organized by subject (personal science, AI, etc).
Also, be sure you’re not using the “for you” feed which is where the X algorithm keeps its clickbait outrage machine.