A lot of mathematics often takes 100+ years to find a practical use because we have developed it so much that we have use all the easy maths. Things like CS or SWE are so new that you can still find stuff today that can be used tomorrow. Things like computation and cryptography was all discovered like 100 years before we had a practical use for it. Its an example of late stage scientific discipline. Things like physics, chemistry and biology will get here as well eventually.
Its not as simple as just being lazy, our brains are hardwired to take the path of least resistance. I believe someone industrious like you is the exception and not the rule which is why industrious people do well in life and a priased.
This I can understand and if you look at the body of my post I talk about understanding if youtube was a selector of quality content, but people will watch hours of slop on youtube that is neither authentic or niche and that's what I want to get to the heart of. I fall victim to this too, I watch hours of youtube (long form) which in retrospect I accept as garbage, but will refuse to watch the the new hot netflix show that cost 100 million with some of the top writers and actors in the world, that's what I'm trying to understand.
Fair, but people will watch a random youtuber doing a video essay for the first time on an old topic like sbmm or AI in games and enjoy it yet find a 500 million dollar movie boring. I feel that your answer it correct, but there is something deeper than just para friendships to explain these other cases and I'm guilty of it too (watching a random youtubers video essay).
What you don't realize is YouTube would rather have half the users if all of them watched ads vs AdBlock users, so they actually want you to stop using YouTube. Most people will just white list it, I mean the bulk of users use mobile anyway and cant really use AdBlock.
Couldn't you do this implicitly if I rate book A an 8 and book B a 7 then I have technically said book A is better than book B, so ignore the numerical value and take the better reading. Now put the rating out of 100 as out of 5 or 10 would lead to too many ties.
This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
Without some level of recommendation engine wouldn't you need to pre-emptively know the blogs you want to follow already in which case what is the point of the site. What you are saying applies to a social network like facebook but could never work for blogs or youtube where you actually want to be exposed to new and interesting content.
The only way to stop a blogging site from being filled with crap is to limit uploads to lets say 12 per account , but give extra upload credits to blogs that get views or read time (however you calculate that). That way someone who wants to spam without providing good content is limited to only 12 posts.
Let me correct you on whole Zimbabwe point, the implication is oh the white farmers were so good and Mugabe ruined it by giving the land to the incompetent or uneducated locals and while there is some truth to that its definitely not the whole story. In truth the whites were stealing minerals and precious metals from the country on the cheap and laundering that money as farming proceeds giving the impression of this bread basket cause it was all funded by illicit funds. When they were kicked out they continued to steal these minerals through bribing the top officials but the only difference was there was no-longer an incentive to send the money back into Zimbabwe and hence the farming was no-longer supported by illicit funds and it collapsed.
tl:dr its easy to run a successful casino when you are funding it with drug money. Zimbabwe only ever had two options get robbed or get robbed, at least now the locals actually owned the land. The inflation was retaliation for standing up to the bullies!
Very true but lets pretend we are in the real world where making all these changes is exponentially harder than only changing the cars. Listening to Geo-shot the main problem is to get them to co-exist with human drivers.
self driving cars would be easy if all the cars on the road were self driving, what makes it difficult is getting them to operate in an environment with illogical human drivers.