Sep 22, 2019
Too much wisdom
I wonder if it’s getting easier or harder to be effective in modern times. To be productive and focused and move towards your goals. One one hand, we have far more resources available than we once did. Nearly every question we can think of has a clear and articulate answer waiting for us on the other side of a google search, and where yahoo answers once held monopoly over the Q&A space online, we now have more mature alternatives like Quora and Stack Overflow.
On the other hand, we have more distractions than we once did. I remember the days when the main tip given by teachers on how to effectively study was ‘leave your phone in another room’. Back then, if you were studying on your computer, there were things on the internet that could derail your productivity, but you would need to go to them, they would never come to you. Nowadays they do, and these distractions appear in the very places where you most want to escape them. What’s worse is that they are better disguised than ever before.
It was easy when the biggest distraction on a web page was something like this:
Unless you’re a woman suffering a midlife crisis, the temptation to ‘LEARN THE TRUTH’ is small.
What happens when the distraction is a little more interesting and original?
Today I was trying to create a pong game as a first step to learning Unity, a game development app. My ball kept going straight through my paddle and I had no idea why. I googled it and here are some results that I thought might contain the answer I needed.
My Journey Begins
- Quora
Starts off fairly harmless, with some related questions on the side that might better answer my original question. But after you scroll through the answers and reach the bottom of the page unsatisfied, you see this:
What are the dirty secrets of Thailand? I went on holiday to Thailand recently, it’s possible that Quora knows this and thinks I might be interested in a ‘Top Story’ on the same topic. And of course because humans are the ones using the site, the top stories are going to be the things most likely to attract clicks, which in this case means dirty secrets. The middle top story sounds like something out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, and the one on the right is actually a question I’d like to know the answer to, partly because I’m Australian. But I didn’t come here to learn about geopolitics, I came here to learn about Unity. It’s time to try another website, this time one that’s dedicated to technical stuff.
2. Stack Overflow
The side panel here contains some fairly innocuous links. I didn’t come here to ‘Meet the Bots that Help Moderate Slack Overflow’ but I do think meta announcements like that can build trust in the platform and I don’t think they’re too tempting to click.
Below that are a couple of job postings. Nothing better to keep you focused on a specific programming task than remembering you’re an insecure human being who either wants to eventually get a job in tech or wants to see whether you’re currently being paid what you’re worth.
But I get it, Stack Overflow is a company that wants to make money and letting recruiters advertise is a valid means of achieving that. Next down is related questions, which in my opinion should have been at the top like Quora does, because they actually relate to the question.
And then at the bottom, just like Quora, we have a heap of completely unrelated ‘Hot Network Questions’. You’ve reached the bottom of the page, you haven’t found the answer you’re looking for, and now you’re feeling less motivation than ever.
Never has it been more tempting to find out how to cut a cake into three equal portions with only a knife. And what about the famous scholar with the unpublished draft? I simply must know!
Trying another page, I come across another top Hot Network Question.
I feel a sense of vicarious outrage and want to verify that the top answer to that question is that it’s never acceptable to give somebody a detention for that. But once again I remember, I didn’t come here to think about social justice, I came here to learn about collision detection in Unity. So I move on to…
3. Youtube
At some point I would need to bite the bullet and just properly learn the concept as opposed to looking up questions about it. So I go to the official unity learning center and begin my proper learning journey:
And of course the videos on this page are hosted on… Youtube. After completing the first video I get these recommendations:
These are not personalised recommendations. I made sure of that here. Somebody with 10 years of making video games has condensed all his wisdom into a small youtube video? How could I pass up that opportunity! Oh wait, that’s right, I haven’t even spent ten minutes making video games at this point, I have a feeling that wisdom can wait until after I’ve learnt the basics.
In the middle-right, Adam Grant gives a TED talk on the surprising habits of original thinkers. Maybe I should watch that so that I can ensure my game ideas are original. Above that, it turns out that ink cartridges are a scam. At the bottom right I can find out how somebody hacked a starbucks with a raspberry pi. I’ve just ordered one of those, maybe I’ll learn something useful watching that. Or… maybe I should just continue on to the second tutorial video on this page.
After every single tutorial video I am again presented with a smorgasbord of portals that will warp me from the boring, scary world of learning actual skills, to a fun shiny world of discovering what traits make people successful and how really intelligent people did really intelligent things while other people were too busy… watching Youtube.
I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills
Why is this process so goddamn hard? Every place I go to hunker down and learn some skills, I’m being offered a one way ticket into the abyss of interesting but ultimately useless distractions. The question of how to cut a cake into three even slices is an interesting one, but it has nothing to do with collision detection.
And then we also have famous programmers talking about their lessons learned over the years, or psychology experts talking about the dirty secrets of original thinking. That’s where things get pernicious for me. I have no doubt the people who make these TED talks sincerely want to improve the lives of their audiences with their wisdom and experience. But it’s a sad reflection on us, the consumers feeding our clicks into Youtube’s algorithms, that we care more about hacking our brains or comparing our own personality traits to those of the typical ‘genius’ than we care to learn what’s required to make pong while there are devs working on the next Red Dead Redemption.
I don’t blame these websites. They want to drive engagement within their ecosystems, and ‘top stories’ or ‘hot network questions’ or ‘trending videos’ are an effective strategy to achieve that. In most cases, you can use adblock’s element selector to hide that crap anyway. I don’t blame the original posters or the video creators; they’re asking interesting questions, or making genuinely useful content. And I don’t blame the people whose clicks surface these links to the top. They’re just as curious and/or insecure as I am.
But this experience is telling me something. Regardless of what personality traits accompanied the creative and technological heroes of yesterday, I have a strong feeling that the single trait that will decide the heroes of tomorrow is the ability to say ‘no’.
So if you came across this post while you were trying to remain focused on something a little more challenging, I hope you enjoyed the read! But next time, say no.
