Just wanted to chime in and say thanks for including the full transcript. I strongly prefer reading to listening and so I was able to read this over my morning coffee and send it to friends who prefer podcasts before they started their morning commutes.
And generally, I'm a big fan of the weekly newsletter from successful forecasters. Keep up the great work!
I found the argument of the counterfactual to be persuasive. Do you have a sense of how much of the time would people actually be doing something better with the extra bandwidth?
I think it's a good argument to say that we don't know for sure. But people who are addicted to youtube today would probably have done something more meaningful in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s...?
We speak with Ivan Vendrov about recommender systems and their impact on human attention and society & how these algorithms shape billions of hours of human time daily.