The Algorithm

 I was never super into the content algorithm. The continuous feed. The attempt by the various social media companies to find the things that would keep me engaged. And as such I think I may have underestimated the experience of it. Like, right now, I cannot for the life of me understand why a right thinking human would remain on X/Twitter. Or, frankly, Facebook. Facebook I understand a little -- there are a lot of my demographic and older humans on it and for them it is a labor saving device for a thing they would otherwise spend a lot of labor on (keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives). But X/Twitter I do not. It is a cesspool. 

But I've come to understand the pull of the Continuous Feed a little because of Substack. And I've seen why you'd hang on to the thing that gave that to you for awhile (e.g. X/Twitter or Facebook) even once it stopped giving you that, especially if you'd become bound up in it as an economic force. And I'm pretty impressed, frankly, because the algorithm has understood me pretty well. It has given me what I want. And what I want is to find the writing of other enlightened beings. And it is doing that. For those people are out there, writing. 

 There are lots of examples. There's the guy writing the guide on meditation in exactly the kind of language I would use -- or perhaps used to use -- to describe the shape of things. There's the academic trying to analytically and robustly describe Shape (have I blogged about Shape? Or Space? I don't think I've done either). 

 And there are guys who I can tell have never been in Pain the way most humans are in Pain. They correctly describe correct breathing or feeling their alignment or meditating and you can tell that they have either never been distracted by Pain, or if they have, have somehow forgotten what it's like. (And is there a third possiblity?) They say, "Oh, well, just do these things" and they speak and don't understand that people can't hear them because those people are Hurting. 

 But there they are, their writing delivered by the algorithm. And they do seem to be actual humans -- I've tried, but I cannot find this pattern in ChatGPT, so I don't think this is content generated by bots. While I can't discount the possibility that Large Language Models have also melted my brain such that I can't tell their writing from actual human writing, I am still speaking to actual high-level humans in the world on a day-to-day basis and they aren't indicating that this has happened to me. 

Am I surprised that the algorithm is this good? I guess I am. Or am not. I cannot tell.