Internet Literacy Atrophy

The subscribe button is there to take advantage of your cognitive and motivational structure and keep you "engaged" with YouTube. Having subscriptions gives you a "reason" to return to Youtube on a regular basis, and gives Youtube an excuse to send you "reminders" about content in your subscribed channels.

Your subscriptions may also help Youtube to feed you content that keeps you there once you show up, although Youtube has access to other, often more effective ways of doing that, and having to "honor" subscriptions may actually interefere with those, so I don't think it really counts.

Anyway, the bottom line is that, if you are like most people, subscriptions will contribute to you spending more time on Youtube than you "should", in the sense that your Youtube time will interfere with goals that you would, if asked, say were more important. The intent is to have "watching Youtube" be an activity in itself, rather than having Youtube be a tool that you use to get information relevant to some outside purpose.

The subscription system is also used to motivate people to give content to Youtube. Although some mega-channels make economic sense, the "gamification" of subscription numbers helps to motivate marginal creators to spend more time and effort than they can really afford.

Subscriptions may occasionally help to meet a "user goal" like learning or staying informed about a specific topic... but their design and usual effect is to advance the "Youtube goal" of keeping the user staring at, or possibly producing, Youtube content and advertising, more than the user otherwise would and regardless of the user's own interests (in any sense of the word "interests"...).

Some people will say that the trap has to do with tracking your activities, but that's basically not true. Subscriptions don't track you any more than just visiting any major Web site will track you. It's more about controlling your activities. Your subscriptions do help a little with analyzing you as an advertising target, but I don't think that's a really major purpose or effect.

Spreadsheets make it really easy to set up a simple "mathematical model". It really doesn't take more than about 5 minutes to learn enough about spreadsheets to get something useful going, and actually starting a spreadsheet has very low overhead, both in terms of what you have to do and of how much thought you have to put into it.

The problem with that is that it's easy to start using them for everything, including things that are really too complicated to be safely done in a spreadsheet. It's also possible to have something that started out as a reasonable spreadsheet application grow from that into an unreliable, unmaintainable monstosity.

If you view a spreadsheet as a program, it's written in a "write only language". It's really hard to come into a big spreadsheet and understand how everything works, or know how to safely make a change, or meaningfully review it for correctness, or even apply revision control to it. There's no global view; you have to interact with the whole thing one cell at a time. And you're not exactly encouraged to give things meaningful names, either.

... but it's SO EASY to start with a spreadsheet that people are often lulled into making one, and then adding more and more to it. When your spreadsheet reaches a certain complexity level, you may then find yourself investing time into learning more and more arcane features so you can extend what it does... which means that, for you, a spreadsheet will become even more the default tool the next time you want to do something. But it'll still be a bad programming language.

You can end up with "spreadsheet experts" who use them for everything. If I had a nickel for every spreadsheet I've seen that should have been a database, for example...

It's sort of like writing shell scripts; it's trivial to write a script to automate a few commands you do all the time, but if you keep adding features, then a year later you have a monstrosity that you wish you'd written in a regular, maintainable language.

And by a "cloud version", I mean Google Sheets (or Office 365, for that matter). The data are controlled entirely by the host; it may or may not be feasible to extract all of the information you put in, and it's definitely not going to be trivial if your spreadsheet has any complexity. The program that does the calculations is controlled entirely by the host, and may be changed at any time, including in ways that alter the results. The feature set is controlled entirely by the host; features you rely on may be changed or completely removed at any moment. Not really attractive as a long-term investment.

On edit: what I use instead is usually a real programming language. I won't say which ones I favor, because it would be impolite to start even more of a language war. :-)

I believe the reason the author mentioned their credentials was not to establish themselves as an authority, but to indicate that it's possible to see the subscribe button as a trap even if one is tech savvy and knows it has nothing to do with e.g. subscription billing. (In contrast to where the article implied people avoided the subscribe button due to not understanding it.)

In agreement: It is literally an argument from authority because there is no other proof given. Readers of the original comment are asked to assume the commenter is correct based on their authority and reputation.

Like pjeby, I think you missed his point [LW(p) · GW(p)]. He was not arguing from authority, he was presenting himself as evidence that someone tech-savvy could still see it as a trap. His actual reason for believing it is a trap is in his reply to GWS [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Transcripts and playback at 1.5-2.5 speed (depending content) definitely helps a lot, as does a ToC with timestamps. You're right that it's higher bandwidth (in terms of information per second of participation), but I think my objection is that not all of that information is equally valuable, and I often prefer lower-bandwidth more-heavily-curated information.

Hmm, I wonder if I can generalize this to "communication bandwidth is a cost, not a benefit".  Spending lots more attention-effort to get a small amount more useful information isn't a tradeoff I'll make most of the time.

Modern tech is much more about guessing what you want and delivering it, which seems like it should be better and maybe eventually will be, but right now is frustrating.

Reminds me of this:

[Wolfram Alpha] is not a full-text search engine. It is a database query and visualization tool. More precisely, it is a large (indeed, almost exhaustive) set of such tools. These things may seem similar, but they are as different as popes and partridges.

Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type “two cups of flour and two eggs” (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram’s giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.

So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.

When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.

When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma’s fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, “Wolfram Alpha wasn’t sure what to do with your input.” Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we’re looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe.

And does the giant electronic brain fail? Gosh, apparently it does. After many years of research, WA is nowhere near achieving routine accuracy in guessing the tool you want to use from your unstructured natural-language input. No surprise. Not only is the Turing test kinda hard, even an actual human intelligence would have a tough time achieving reliability on this task.

The task of “guess the application I want to use” is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram’s guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user’s mind. God can do this, but software can’t.

Of course, the giant electronic brain is an algorithm, and algorithms can be remembered. For instance, you can be pretty sure that the example queries on the right side of your screen (“June 23, 1988”) will always send you to the same application. If you memorize these formats and avoid inappropriate variations, you may not end up in the atomic physics of the proton.

This is exactly what people do when circumstances force them to use this type of bad UI. They create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains. Of course, since the giant electronic brain is a million lines of code which is constantly changing, this is a painful, inadequate and error-prone task. But if you are one of those people for whom one of Wolfram’s data-visualization tools is useful, you have no choice.

[...]

Thus, the “flexible” and “convenient” natural-language interface becomes one which even Technology Review, not exactly famous for its skepticism, describes as “inflexible.” The giant electronic brain has become a giant silicon portcullis, standing between you and your application of choice. You can visualize all sorts of queries with Wolfram Alpha—but first you have to trick, cajole, or otherwise hack a million lines of code into reading your mind.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user/

Also, 3-year olds do not worry whether they might break something -- their parents would fix it.

Older people know that things can go wrong in various ways, but they are not sure how exactly. New scams are being invented every day. If you spend most of your time playing with the technology, you have a good idea about what is dangerous and what is not. If you only use it once in a while, it's a minefield.

For example, if you notice that you missed a phone call and you call the person back... it can cost you lots of money (if the person is a scammer, setting up a paid service, then automatically calling up thousands of people and hanging up, expecting some of them to call back). When you see the missed call, is this something you consider before calling back? Most old people do not have a sufficiently good model; they are aware that some seemingly innocent things are dangerous, but they do not know which ones exactly.

If you teach a 70 years old person how to use a smartphone, do you also explain to them all possible things that can go wrong? Heck, I am not sure I could even list all the dangers. I rely on being an active online reader, so when a new scam is invented, I will probably read about it before someone tries it on me; hopefully. But that old person is just thrown into a pool with sharks. Same if you teach someone browsing the web. Same if you teach someone shopping online. All the tech is full of scams, and if you get scammed, well it sucks to be you, you should have been more tech savvy.

(Recently, someone impersonated my 70-years old mother on Whatsapp and a few other online messengers. I don't even know how it is possible to create a Whatsapp account using someone else's phone number; when I try to create an account, it checks the number by sending me a verification SMS. But apparently it is possible to do somehow, because someone did exactly this; created accounts with my mother's phone number, and some young woman's photo; then used them to sell some cars. We have no idea how; my mother only uses her smartphone for calling, and sending/receiving SMS. We just reported the whole thing to the police, and my mother changed her phone number.)

The tech is hostile, but if you keep using it every day, you get used to it, and learn to navigate it. You recognize the most frequent scams, and you get lucky that the more rare ones avoided you.

Re: 1, I recall this being in dispute or at least oversimplified. If you put children and adults on equal footing (in particular, by giving adults the same amount of time to learn languages that children do - potentially several hours per day!), I would be astonished if children came out ahead.

(Notwithstanding some minor aspects of language which children indeed seem advantaged in learning, like speaking a language without an accent.)

The OP was hypothesizing that a lack of keeping up with tech trends leads to you "falling behind" and eventually reaching a point where it feeling insurmountable to learn new tech things. It is possible that this hypothesis is true, and that young people have such a huge advantage in learning new things that this advantage outweighs their similar lack of background knowledge.

I don't get that sense though. There are some places where 40 year olds have an advantage over 5 year olds in learning new things. There are other places where 5 year olds have the advantage. Then there's the question of how wide the gap is between 5 year olds and 40 year olds. Language comes to mind as a place where the gap would be massive, but new tech doesn't feel like it should have a massive gap. My epistemic status is just musing though.