Merlin Mann: Better

http://www.merlinmann.com/better

by benofsky • 15 years ago

146 24 15 years ago

merlinmann.com

ChrisLTD2• 15 years ago

Is Merlin telling me to stop reading Hacker News?

stephth• 15 years ago

:) Only if it "produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game."

seiji2• 15 years ago

That's the crux, meat, soul, and artichoke heart of the matter right there. Use drivel as associative binding to generate new viewpoints (tip: clever books work well for this too). Don't use the drivel as an end in and of itself.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

I don't know about that, but anyone who writes a comment on this article totally missed the point.

Err.

zem• 15 years ago

or disagreed with it!

seiji2• 15 years ago

It's The Society of Drivel effect.

Morning radio shows on rock/alt stations perfected it a long time ago -- focus your segments around sex and alcohol. Throw in fart jokes too for good measure. Hoards of simple people will flock to you.

We've moved on though. More dangerous than airwave broadcast drivel is our newfound self-participatory drivel. reddit lets you think you're being clever. HN lets you think you're being smart. Brain rot personalized to your interests. It slips around your "I'm wasting my life" filters for hours (days?) at a time.

Sometimes it's good. You want to turn your brain off. Browsing reddit is cheaper than antidepressants. You just have to guard against too much looping. Infinite loops of social media consumption are hazardous to your health. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

ChrisLTD2• 15 years ago

So say we all.

phlux• 15 years ago

I love it when I come to a thread, HN or reddit, and I read the first comment and think "Cool, I'm done with this topic, no need to read ay other comments. <clicks x>

phillco• 15 years ago

Upvoted? Nope. Ctrl+W'd.

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

It's The Society of Drivel effect.

Really? I find more interesting and valuable content from assorted so-called amateur "user generated" sources than professional outlets that I'm routinely amazed.

Is there a lot of crap out there? Sure. But I don't think the percentage has changed, we just have more of everything and more ways to get it.

I like that. Yes it means I have do more filtering for myself but I'm OK with that. I'd rather have more sources and choices than go back to the equivalent of "you can have nay color you want so long as it's black" days.

HN lets you think you're being smart.

Or not, based on how people respond. Truth is I've come across many people on HN who seem to be in-fact smart.

There's some truth in what you wrote but it's clouded by some sort of world-weariness. The world is so much bigger.

aditya• 15 years ago

Better is relative.

While I love reading well researched and thoughtful pieces on certain topics, I also like the fact that, for instance, on HN there are quite a few off the cuff "idea" posts that are half-baked but meant to inspire conversation and discussion than to be authoritative treatises on the subject.

Merlin wanted to stop consuming and producing half-baked ideas and content, and that is his call.

bherms• 15 years ago

I like reading people write about how people shouldn't write insignificant shit. While I agree with him, it's always slightly ironic.

jhermsmeyer• 15 years ago

Exactly. Navel gazing at its finest, something the Merlin does with some frequency. Though to his credit, he does do it well.

achompas• 15 years ago

Very interesting to see this article on HN. Guess we're having a Merlin run here?

I'd actually go as far as to say that "Better" has shaped my thinking about social networking and the Internet in general. Attention is a finite resource -- even moreso for those who struggle to focus -- and as someone with an economics background I'm tempted to consider the marginal benefit vs. marginal cost of the things I read about on the Internet.

Usually these comparisons usually come out strongly negative, even when we're talking about Hacker News. We would get much more out of a chapter of CLRS or an OSS patch than something from Techcrunch or Daring Fireball.

Just something to consider.

pgroves• 15 years ago

You would probably like the economist Tyler Cowen's books. There are several but in one (I forget which) he goes so far as to say you should walk out of movies after 10 minutes if you aren't enjoying it and walk into the middle of another. Any other strategy is a waste of precious time.

He writes a ton of book reviews on his blog (marginal-revolution.com), but half the time the review is "I probably won't be finishing this one."

praptak• 15 years ago

I think it's a good time to reread http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html : ("A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.")

runjake• 15 years ago

This has been submitted to HN quite a few times. Here's the last one I personally remember: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704931

You can Google for "http://www.merlinmann.com/better site:news.ycombinator.com" for past discussions and thoughts.

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

I posted a reply to this that got auto-killed for some reason. Hilariously, that only reinforces the point I was hoping to make, which nobody will read. :-)

TheSOB88• 15 years ago

Obviously, it was auto-killed for the sex references. Because then it must be drivel.

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

In a nutshell: We don't know our neighbors, yet we spend our time reading news about countries we'll never even visit.

NickDouglas• 15 years ago

I'm really glad I don't know the elephants upstairs.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

Most people and most things aren't interesting, so I will be better of looking at what is than whom I have been randomly placed nearby.

lizzard• 15 years ago

I think part of this comes with age. We realize we don't have a lot of time left, we've accumulated a lot of cruft in our information input habits as well as in what we produce, and there's a strong impulse to focus. Writers and philosophers thousands of years ago were also complaining about this same thing and coming to the same conclusion.

ericn• 15 years ago

All I know is Merlin Mann became famous by selling productivity porn. Now he repents and he's a prophet?

Merlin Mann: Better

Related Stories