
The Perils of Constant Feedback - tomjcleveland
https://tjcx.me/posts/perils-constant-feedback/
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singron
The author makes a good point, but I don't think it's even the main part of
the problem. In e.g. notifications cause people to open the app, they are
optimizing the wrong objective function. Getting people to open the app isn't
your objective. If you just want people to open your app as many times as
possible, you should actually close the app so that they can open it again.

E.g. when an app sends me an unwanted notification, I open the app so that I
can turn off notifications.

Similar to the p=0.05 issue in science, for every bad product decision someone
wants to make, there is another bad objective function that it appears to
optimize. Just because someone provides a justification doesn't mean it's
justified. You need to make sure that changes are improvements in the things
that actually matter.

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thiagomgd
That reminds me when I installed Tik Tok to see how it was. You could disable
notifications for likes/comments on your videos, but not the trending videos
notifications. I uninstalled it to get rid of the notifications

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agumonkey
can someone uninstall Internet ?

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sgt
On the subject of notifications, people are being bombarded these days. I've
found that turning off most notifications helps me focus. Even Messages is
turned off so that I only see them if look at the badge or go into the app.

For emails I've switched off the badge even, and I need to actively go in and
look for emails in order to see if there's something new. I wholeheartedly
recommend this approach.

It allows you to work or do something calmly for an hour or two without being
interrupted.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Then it turns into everyone turning off all their notifications. What was
originally a reasonable amount of notifications on a smartphone 5 or 7 years
ago has now grown to such ridiculous amounts (often notifications for things I
don't even care about) that the apps competing for my attention are
cannibalize each other and consequently they've collectively destroyed the
market for my attention, by me choosing to turn off all notifications.

Notifications have essentially become a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
Everyone optimizing for their self interest ended up creating all losers.

~~~
texasbigdata
Also the 2 factor and marketing emails. Despite reasonable efforts it's almost
impossible to keep a non-high effort inbox zero at work and personal. At least
authenticator apps are becoming a thing and adoption is rising.

But white papers post sign up and "marketing people" just flood the channel. I
wish there were human only channels where any automation was banned. I guess
like whatsapp.

Same concept as "can we get on a call to discuss my product". A) please dont
cold call me, and if you do please just ask if now is a good time and B) as a
personal rule I won't get on any call with a vendor who won't tell me how many
digits his product sells for. In 2020 you can basically put your price on the
website for most things or hint at a range. If you vary prices by so much at
the same usage/feature level that you need to hide it from part of the
customers.... theres something wrong with the product because really good
vendors nowadays don't act like that.

I heard it's worse with younger peeple. The moment the doctors office gets a
tablet they won't talk to anyone.

One more thing: yes I clicked on all 8 tabs of your webpage. Yes I knew you
were watching on hot jar. Yes I got there white papers too even thought at
best I would skim one to see how good the graphic design was. Please don't
creepily make it so obvious you're tracking at the page view level. Not fun.

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jadbox
I really enjoy this article, because as simple as the point is, there's
something a bit novel taking what we've discovered in Machine Learning and
applying it to general life outlook strategies. I've often had this intuition
about the best strategy through life is having a dynamic shifting
goal/feedback horizon between 'long shots' and 'short-term heads-down' life
focus, but the article far better articulates the form of this strategy.

~~~
asdfman123
Another ML metaphor is this: don't just start from one point and do gradient
descent. Try starting at many different points and working your way through
the descent logic. It may be more trial and error and more dead ends, but you
might indeed find your global minimum.

To speak like a human: try new things and don't give up on them immediately.

Another ML metaphor: I wonder if the concept of an identity crisis is a way to
dislodge yourself from a local minimum? You know something better is out
there, but you haven't done enough exploration so eventually you rebel and
give up your comfortable little basin.

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johnsimer
I love that identity crisis metaphor

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asdfman123
I've been through it, and from what I understand that's actually what triggers
it. If you don't try enough things in life, you can reach a state of crisis --
so never stop exploring.

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icandoit
Imagine an AI assistant that tried to maximize well-being across time, instead
of engagement (aka arguing with strangers).

Imagine a job board that maximized its users income over time.

These would become essential services, right? Let's line up these incentives
:).

~~~
jacques_chester
Long delays make this difficult to attribute and also, difficult to correct if
there's a design error.

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proc0
The Bear Grylls analogy is hilarious! He'll do certain things wrong at a level
you cannot even attempt.

