
My Paleo Media Diet - michael_fine
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/paleo-media-diet.html
======
mechanical_fish
Nice metaphor.

To paraphrase Pollan: "Listen to people. Not too many. Mostly local."

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stephengillie
Listen to the people around you? That goes against the anti-echo-chamber
advice.

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alexmat
Just surround yourself with people who aren't like you? Easier said than done
I guess...

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stcredzero
Surround yourself with people who actually think and who aren't prone to just
believe the echoes in the chamber.

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brady747
As I was thinking - 'local' in values and principles, it doesn't have to mean
'local' in geography. :)

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dllthomas
Local in values and principles is precisely what leads to an echo chamber. Of
course, an echo chamber is very much the state of the paleolithic human...

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mechanical_fish
My god, constructive responses.

Some further observations:

I didn't think about this koan for more than three minutes.

I don't follow this very well myself. I also don't do paleo for that matter.
I'm a baker. I think pies and pancakes are awesome, French bread is the height
of human civilization, and while I try to moderate these things I wouldn't
give them up unless they were killing me painfully. (I live in fear of gluten
intolerance and eat a muffin every time I think about it.)

When I wrote "local" I tried to find the better word. In the end, "local" is
pretty good because it captures the paleo theme; our pre-literate ancestors
were always local. But this is 2012 and we shouldn't read that word literally.
Think of "local" as "among your friends, family, and neighbors".

This "echo chamber" concept deserves its own essay. Here I will say that the
word "mostly" is there for a reason, as it was in the quote I stole it from:
Michael Pollan is no more opposed to French bread than I.

And I _wish_ I could give the same loving attention to the words of seven
hundred diverse people, or seven thousand people, or seventy thousand people,
which would bring me up to almost 0.001% of the people _currently alive_ \-
but of course I should save some time for the great works of people now dead -
but this is impossible, just as my living until 2170 is impossible, and the
era has come where we need to face that squarely, because the technology is
there but the human capability is not. You can meaningfully hear the words of
a few hundred people per day, tops, and if those people are all different each
day it isn't good for your personality.

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dllthomas
Yeah, obviously giving every voice equal weight isn't practical, and whatever
filter you apply is likely to introduce some kind of bias. I'm not saying that
the fact that you get echo chamber effects devastates the whole notion, just
that it is a failure mode you should be aware of if pursuing something like
this, and that "local in values and principles" is worse than "local
geographically" as pertains to this specific effect.

Edited to add:

In fact, "mostly local" helps address a failure mode we see presently - if you
only hear news from your tribe and a little from neighboring tribes, things
you hear about are far more likely to be significant.

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jstogdill
I wrote that piece a few months ago when I was taking time off. Now that I'm
back at work (I work for O'Reilly Media's Radar group) it's like being an
alcoholic working behind a bar. I'm having a much harder time with it. I try
to do intermittent fasting and I still won't touch my phone/email before about
10am - I even got a separate alarm clock so I wouldn't be relying on my phone
for that.

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SoftwareMaven
You have a similar problem to food addicts (I was/am one). You can't
completely abstain, so you have to find strategies. Things that have helped:

Planning: Determine in advance what you will consume and when.

Support: Find others like you that you can use for support (just not on
Twitter ;).

Self-empowerment: 12-steps call this your "higher power", but I think that
brings too many religious overtones (even though they explicitly say it's not
meant to). Regardless, there is a power we have (or are given, if you are
religious), but you have to dig for it. The journey is what provides the
power.

Good luck!

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jongleur
One of the benefits of intermittent fasting is that you can in fact completely
abstain from food; not forever, but for a day, certainly.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
While that is certainly true, I, personally, would never do that because it
would put me in a situation that the combination of biology (real hunger) and
emotion (haven't eaten in a day!) would put me in an _extremely_ dangerous
place. Instead, I go for routine: regular, small meals; don't ever get really
hungry; etc. Couple that with eating high quality food that you actually want
to eat, and it has served me well.

You are in a different boat. You physically can abstain forever, but your
career doesn't allow you to. I could see how abstaining would be a very
helpful option there.

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Apocryphon
I feel this is going to be an inevitable practice for us. Just as the switch
to white collar jobs have forced us to confront our sedentary lifestyles and
allocate time specifically for exercise, the constant stream of information
brought to us by the internet is going to force us to get away from our
computers for an hour (and hopefully more) a day and get some bloody
contemplation.

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gahahaha
Our distraction is a full-blown epidemic — a cognitive plague that has the
potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought.
It can be compared to smoking: People aren’t aware what’s happening to their
mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into
their lungs and see the residual deposits.

~~~
Apocryphon
There's potential for a huge industry built around "regrowing attention spans"
and "info diets" and so forth. It will be partly a continuation of the
efficiency/simplicity lifehacking practices of the last decade, except to a
whole new level.

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sp332
This reminds me of Paul Miller's ongoing "Offline" series.
<http://www.theverge.com/label/offline> (older articles at the bottom) He's a
writer for tech blog The Verge, but he's taking a one-year break from the
internet. He's also really good at writing about it.

~~~
jstogdill
Yep. Great experiment. My thinking was also influenced by a book I read a few
years ago. Better Off by Eric Brende published without irony, if I remember
correctly, by MIT Press.

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tkiley
Better Off inspired me to move to a small cabin on Vancouver Island; for the
past year and a half (and the past order of magnitude of revenue and team size
growth!) I've lived and worked in this cabin.

That book helped me stay sane during an extremely hectic time of life, I
highly recommend it. Nice to see it getting a plug here :)

~~~
jstogdill
Wow. Cool story. I assume you've seen the PBS special "Alone in the
Wilderness"

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mark_l_watson
I try to do the same thing, but it is not easy with a Samsung Galaxy S III in
my pocket :-)

Instead of starting right in on work this morning I had coffee with three
friends and then went fishing on Oak Creek near my house. I was going to say
that I was offline for 90 minutes but I just remembered that I emailed a
picture of the creek to my Dad while I was fishing. Oh well...

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docgnome
I know this is slightly off topic and I apologize but I'm rather obsessed with
the topic at the moment.

First, vegan isn't a necessarily a moral choice. I'm vegan and my primary
reason for being so is for one animal: me.

Second, the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods
are terrible for you. I'm no expert in the field of nutrition but it seems to
me the paleo diet falls straight into the animal food based diet category and
therefore into the greatly increases your risk of multiple kinds of diseases
category.

(If anyone knows of any real criticism of the China Study, I'd like to read
it. All I can find boils down to "I like me therefore it's good for me")

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lmm
In my personal, anecdotal experience, every vegan I know has serious health
problems. Literally every single one. Never anything that can be traced
directly to their diet (e.g. one of those I'm thinking of mostly has severe
eczema), but it's such a sharp correlation that I can't help thinking there's
something to it.

While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming
seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for
living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain
parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle
burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism
like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable
inference.

And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that
would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many
different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that
differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal
byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.

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brendoncrawford
_> every vegan I know has serious health problems_

That does not necessarily mean that veganism caused their health problems.

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ctdonath
That many vegans with health problems watched those problems evaporate upon
return to omnivorous habits does.

Such anecdotes (data more so) are hard to come by due to the verbal abuse ex-
vegans tend to suffer.

~~~
docgnome
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've felt much better since
going vegan. I'm willing to grant that may be a placebo effect, but my acne
seems to also have improved a bit as well.

~~~
ctdonath
Hence room for the correct answer: we are built to consume both plants and
animals, but different people respond differently to particular combinations
thereof and thus have individual reasons to tailor their diets differently.

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fingerprinter
My own personal situation is that I've completely given up on Twitter. It was
just too much noise.

G+ is a once a day thing, maybe 30seconds.

Facebook is a twice a day thing, mostly to respond to friends messages. 5
minutes, probably on average. 10 on busy days.

I don't RSS anymore either. 0seconds

Email is open most of the day.

I'm more or less sick of it all and I feel better not having it clutter up my
life. I've tried hard not to substitute anything for it either, which means I
just have more free time. Kind of like when you stop watching one TV show,
don't replace it with another, just have one less you watch (or stop all
together). Over time, you'll end up with much more free time to do useful and
productive things.

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AtTheLast
"The circuit" gets me all the time. Sometimes I don't even know why I'm
checking email/twitter/reddit that I checked only a few minutes ago. I just
blocked reddit and youtube as an experiment to see if I can be more productive
without them.

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argonz
Another benefit that your friends filter out what they consider noise, they
will only communicate what is worth communicating (putting in the effort) by
their standards.

Taleb also uses this method.

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kitplummer
Well done Jim, you've made Hacker News. Now go eat a Twitterburger. ;)

Knowing that you've reduced you media restrictions somewhat, I'm curious if
you're now of the believe that, with all things, a balance is appropriate and
too much of anything is bad.

I still struggle with managing the overflow of data that is Twitter, at least
to a point where it's not a huge distraction. I wish I could, but I can't.

~~~
jstogdill
I think the question of balance is difficult if you really believe in
addiction. For people that aren't addicted, moderation / balance is a great
strategy. If behavior crosses into addiction the moderation strategy is much
less realistic. That's the crux question for me.

~~~
kitplummer
That's an interesting point. I wonder how many people of are regular
"socialites" are truly addicted, versus just think that's what you're supposed
to do these days. Much like HSN, gambling, etc...I bet the percentage of the
former is pretty high.

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coltr
I aspire to "be in the moment" as well, but being an INTJ I live in my head
almost all of the time.

If Stogdill is spending his time daydreaming or thinking about other things (I
do this as well) then ignoring his phone is not helping him live in the
present anyways.

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jstogdill
You aren't the first to mention that, and it's a good point. But I am not just
day dreaming when I'm not looking at my phone or whatever. I spend a lot more
time with people these days, and I'm loathe to pick the damned thing up when
I'm with them.

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jongleur
By paleo standards writing = agriculture. Internet's more like HFCS.

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gojomo
I would reserve the idea of "attentional High Fructose Corn Sugar' for just
some specific user-experiences, rather than the internet as a whole.

There are some interface patterns that tend to heighten the sense of
importance/urgency/novelty... without any real substance. Those help create
the overstimulation-crash-craving cycle like dietary sugar binges.

The interleaved Twitter/Facebook streams are one form of attentional sugar.
But the HN format is, too: mixed topics, jittery time-influenced rankings,
random arrival of comments/karma-deltas.

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keithpeter
<http://jnocook.net/linda/index.htm>

Jno Cook also did the Robert Frank Coloring Book, which is ace. Not sure if he
has stuck with this diet for the last 8 years or not.

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nacker
You want real Paleo? Try radio, or rather, this amazing podcast on media
effects from Gutenberg to McLuhan:

<http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/episode206-lq.mp3>

