I think about this a lot. these short form videos are a catastrophe for human brains. technology gave us great things. eased communication. handed us new habits. and also made us bend towards enslaving ourselves to meaningless brain rot short form content. it screws up the attention span. decreases concentration levels. affects our ability to focus. I can't imagine a generation of kids growing up consuming this. and sometimes just to make a kid shut up, parents hand them youtube shorts. i was like bruh, it's not even passive smoking. you just handed a lit cigarette directly to that kid. this has to be course corrected. but here's the problem. short form content is one of the main sources that people get news, information, facts and so. so we can't just nuke the whole of short form content and cut access to it. because whether we like it or not, this is how people get information now. I recently visited Stanford University and had the chance to attend a few research presentations from computer science phd students. one of them was about how Americans are getting information and the different sources of that information. one presentation focused on ishowspeed's recent china visit. the social media influencer. they were analyzing it because a lot of people are getting to know information about different cultures and environments through content like this. it was a deeper project. they were analyzing the reels posted, breaking the videos into frames, passing those frames through a language model, comparing that to comments. some sort of crazy analysis that I didn't fully understand. but I got the gist. the point is that short form content is one of the main sources that folks, not just in america but pretty much everywhere, are using to get information. it's very frequent that if you ask someone where did you get that information you just mentioned, they'd say instagram. tiktok. so we have this paradox. the thing that's rotting our brains is also becoming our primary information source. and it gets worse. there's this interesting experiment that researchers did. they fed language models, chatgpt basically, a bunch of short form content. some AI generated. some human made. and the ability of these models to respond well to questions deteriorated drastically. their ability to reason came down drastically. and apparently it's irreversible. i don't know what the solution is. maybe there isn't one yet. maybe we're too far in. but we should at least be honest about what's happening. we're not just wasting time on tiktok. we're systematically degrading both human and artificial intelligence at the same time. and we're calling it content.