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Title: flowretrieval: flow-guided data retrieval for few-shot imitation learning.
Abstract: Few-shot imitation learning relies on only a small amount of task-specific demonstrations to efficiently adapt a policy for a given downstream tasks. Retrieval-based methods come with a promise of retrieving relevant past experiences to augment this target data when learning policies. However, existing data retrieval methods fall under two extremes: they either rely on the existence of exact behaviors with visually similar scenes in the prior data, which is impractical to assume; or they retrieve based on semantic similarity of high-level language descriptions of the task, which might not be that informative about the shared low-level behaviors or motions across tasks that is often a more important factor for retrieving relevant data for policy learning. In this work, we investigate how we can leverage motion similarity in the vast amount of cross-task data to improve few-shot imitation learning of the target task. Our key insight is that motion-similar data carries rich information about the effects of actions and object interactions that can be leveraged during few-shot adaptation. We propose FlowRetrieval, an approach that leverages optical flow representations for both extracting similar motions to target tasks from prior data, and for guiding learning of a policy that can maximally benefit from such data. Our results show FlowRetrieval significantly outperforms prior methods across simulated and real-world domains, achieving on average 27% higher success rate than the best retrieval-based prior method. In the Pen-in-Cup task with a real Franka Emika robot, FlowRetrieval achieves 3.7x the performance of the baseline imitation learning technique that learns from all prior and target data. Website: this https URL
Subjects: | Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
Cite as: | [cs.RO] |
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This study aimed to validate emotion decoding using a facial landmark-based prediction model trained on real-world data. We used facial landmark data and behavioral ratings measured while 29 participants (21 female, 22 male; age = 19–29, M = 22.37, SD = 2.25). viewed short video clips eliciting 10 different emotions including amusement, anger, awe, disgust, enthusiasm, fear, liking, sadness, surprise, and neutrality. Cross-participant classifications with support vector machine classifier were conducted to predict emotions across individuals. The results demonstrated promising predictive capabilities, achieving over 40% accuracy for behavioral ratings, facial landmarks, and their combination. Notably, classification based on combined features reached 75% accuracy, excelling in emotions like disgust, fear, and surprise. In summary, this study demonstrates the ability of facial landmark-based model to decode emotions accurately, particularly emphasizing negative and high-arousal emotions, and underscores the importance of supplementary tools in enhancing emotional response prediction.
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The research received funding from the Brain Korea 21 fourth project of the Korea Research Foundation (Jeonbuk National University, Psychology Department no. 4199990714213).
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Department of Psychology, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju-si, 54896, South Korea
Junhyeok Jang & Jongwan Kim
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Jang, J., Kim, J. Decoding emotions: unveiling the potential of facial landmarks. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06449-9
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Accepted : 21 July 2024
Published : 03 September 2024
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06449-9
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Systematic review and clinical insights: the role of the ketogenic diet in managing glioblastoma in cancer neuroscience.
1.1. ketogenic diet, 1.2. metabolic changes of neoplastic cells, 1.3. theories regarding carcinogenesis: a focus on mitochondria and relation to kd, 1.4. mechanism, 1.5. ketogenic diet and epigenetic targets, 1.6. preclinical studies, 2. materials and methods.
3.2. ongoing trials, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.
Click here to enlarge figure
Study | Type of Study | Number of Participants | Overall Survival |
---|---|---|---|
Nebeling et al., 1995 [ ] | Case Report | 2 | 60 months and 48 months |
Zuccoli et al., 2010 [ ] | Case Report | 1 | NA |
Han et al., 2014 [ ] | Prospective Study | 11 | Mean Survival: 38 +/− 13 months |
Schwartz et al., 2015 [ ] | Case Report | 2 | NA |
Rieger et al., 2014 [ ] | Prospective Study | 20 | Median: 32 weeks |
Champ et al., 2014 [ ] | Retrospective Analysis | 134 | Median: 14 months |
Santos et al., 2017 [ ] | Prospective Randomized Study | 37 | NA |
Van der Louw et al., 2018 [ ] | Prospective Study | 3 | 16.5, 6.4 and 18.7 months |
Martin-McGill et al., 2018 [ ] | Prospective Study | 6 | NA |
Van der Louw et al., 2019 [ ] | Prospective Study | 11 | 9.8 and 19.0 months |
Woodhouse et al., 2019 [ ] | Retrospective Study | 29 | Not evaluated |
Martin-McGill et al., 2020 [ ] | Prospective Study | 12 | Median: 67.3 weeks |
Klein et al., 2020 [ ] | Prospective Randomized Study | 8 | Group 1: 20 months (9.5–27) Group 2: 12.8 months (6.3–19.9) |
Panhans et al., 2020 [ ] | Retrospective Case Series | 12 | 90.8–19.0 Months |
Voss et al., 2020 [ ] | Prospective Randomized Study | 50 | KD: 331 days SD: 291 days Low glucose KD: 348 days |
Schreck et al., 2021 [ ] | Prospective Study | 25 | NA |
Perez et al., 2021 [ ] | Retrospective Study | 5 | Median: 18.7 Months |
Seyfried et al., 2021 [ ] | Case Report | 1 | 80 Months |
Porper et al., 2021 [ ] | Prospective Randomized Study | 13 | 21 Months in patients with newly diagnosed disease 8 Months in patients with recurrent disease |
Voss et al., 2022 [ ] | Prospective Randomized Study | 50 | 250–485 days |
Phillips et al., 2022 [ ] | Prospective Case Series | 10 | Median: 13 Months |
Schwartz et al., 2022 [ ] | Prostective Study | 12 | Not Reported |
Philli s et al., 2024 [ ] | Case Report | 1 | 36 Months |
Study | Adverse Events Related to KD |
---|---|
Nebelin et al., 1995 [ ] | No reported symptoms |
Zuccoli et al., 2010 [ ] | hyperuricemia |
Han et al., 2014 [ ] | N/A |
Schwartz et al., 2015 [ ] | No significant adverse events |
Rieger et al., 2014 [ ] | Weight loss, diarrhea, constipation, hunger |
Champ et al., 2014 [ ] | Constipation, asthenia, weight loss, nephrolithiasis, hypoglycemia |
Santos et al., 2017 [ ] | Not reported |
Van der Louw et al., 2018 [ ] | Hypoglycemia, hyperkeratosis, vomiting, refusal to eat, asthenia, constipation |
Martin-McGill et al., 2018 [ ] | Constipation |
van der Louw et al., 2019 [ ] | Constipation, nausea/vomiting, hypercholesterolemia, hypoglycemia, diarrhea, low carnitine concentration |
Woodhouse et al., 2019 [ ] | Grade 2 constipation occurred in 1 patient. Grade 1 fatigue and nausea probably due to standard therapy |
Martin-McGill et al., 2020 [ ] | Hypokalemia, hypocalcemia, hypernatremia, hyperkalemia, constipation |
Klein et al., 2020 [ ] | Weight loss, hunger, nausea, dizziness, asthenia, constipation |
Panhans et al., 2020 [ ] | Asthenia, weight loss, nausea, vomiting, headache, decreased appetite |
Voss et al., 2020 [ ] | Epileptic seizures, headache, nausea |
Schreck et al., 2021 [ ] | Grade 2 adverse events: Leukopenia, nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, or seizure. Grade 3: neutropenia (possibly related) |
Perez et al., 2021 [ ] | Hypoglycemia, constipation, hyperkeratosis, vomiting asthenia, hyperuricemia |
Seyfried et al., 2021 [ ] | Not reported |
Porper et al., 2021 [ ] | Nausea, asymptomatic hyperuricemia, anorexia |
Voss et al., 2022 [ ] | Gastrointestinal symptoms, headache, muscle cramps |
Phillips et al., 2022 [ ] | Fatigue, irritability, and feeling lightheaded. No grade 3 or higher adverse events. |
Schwartz et al., 2022 [ ] | Not reported. |
Phillips et al., 2024 [ ] | Prolonged fasts caused mild fatigue, diarrhea, and cold intolerance. No adverse events for KD. |
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
Valerio, J.; Borro, M.; Proietti, E.; Pisciotta, L.; Olarinde, I.O.; Fernandez Gomez, M.; Alvarez Pinzon, A.M. Systematic Review and Clinical Insights: The Role of the Ketogenic Diet in Managing Glioblastoma in Cancer Neuroscience. J. Pers. Med. 2024 , 14 , 929. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm14090929
Valerio J, Borro M, Proietti E, Pisciotta L, Olarinde IO, Fernandez Gomez M, Alvarez Pinzon AM. Systematic Review and Clinical Insights: The Role of the Ketogenic Diet in Managing Glioblastoma in Cancer Neuroscience. Journal of Personalized Medicine . 2024; 14(9):929. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm14090929
Valerio, Jose, Matteo Borro, Elisa Proietti, Livia Pisciotta, Immanuel O. Olarinde, Maria Fernandez Gomez, and Andres Mauricio Alvarez Pinzon. 2024. "Systematic Review and Clinical Insights: The Role of the Ketogenic Diet in Managing Glioblastoma in Cancer Neuroscience" Journal of Personalized Medicine 14, no. 9: 929. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm14090929
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The writer jia tolentino on parenting — and living a good life — in the age of smartphones..
[MUSIC PLAYING]
From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
And now for something completely different. We recorded this episode right before the first presidential debate, and there has been such a crush of political news since then, but there hasn’t really been a moment that felt right to release it. But I loved this conversation. And in a funny way, it’s more relevant now, given how much the election has come to revolve around the reasons people do and don’t have children and the meaning of that choice.
So a few months ago, Jia Tolentino published a big piece in The New Yorker” on “CoComelon.” “CoComelon,” if you do not have a two-year-old, is a show that every really little kid really loves and every parent has a more complicated set of emotions about. But it’s something Tolentino wrote at the end that was what really caught my eye. She said, “I found myself wondering if we’d be better off thinking less about educational value in children’s media and more about real pleasure, both for us and for our kids.”
In a way, this is an episode about real pleasure, which is not what I went into it thinking it would be about. It’s about the tension between pursuing pleasure, or what I might call meaning, and pursuing the kinds of achievements we spend most of our lives being taught to prize. Honestly, I think this gets much more to the heart of the questions people ask about having children than all this political rhetoric about cat ladies and extra votes and tax rates. And I don’t think it’s an accident that in this conversation, as we’re trying to talk about the value of what we can’t measure against the value of what we can, we end up finding ourselves in the language of religion, of psychedelics, of emotion. These are questions where I think we’ve culturally lost some of the vocabulary that we used to have to talk about just what it means to live a good life. Not to have a higher income or a better job, but what is a good life.
Jia Tolentino is the author of the great book of essays, “Trick Mirror,” one of my favorite books about being alive in the age of the internet. She’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. And as always, my email is [email protected]
Jia Tolentino, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me back.
So, you told me that you came to a new understanding of why you had children on your way to tape today outside the Port Authority, and you would tell it to me when we were on the show. So, why did you have children?
I was thinking on the train up here about that question, like why did I have kids? And I was thinking about my trepidation beforehand. And I feel like I bring back every conversation about children to a conversation about psychedelics, unfortunately. But the idea seemed scary and overwhelming in the same way that doing acid seemed scary and overwhelming before I did it for the first time. It was like, oh, this is going to last for so long. There’s going to be part of it that’s so intense and so difficult. And I didn’t do it until I felt like I know that the person that I’m going to do it with, I’ll have fun with. I can trust that I’m doing it in kind of a safe and right environment, where I will get the thing that I want out of it.
But the thing that made me decide to do acid for the first time is not dissimilar to the thing that made me decide to have kids, which is, I think it’ll be fun. I think on the whole, I think it’ll be fun. I felt that there would be real, lasting, kind of destabilizing, kind of boundary-dissolving pleasure in it that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure kind of does.
And I really hadn’t thought about it that neatly until you said that we wanted to talk about this. I don’t think I understood that, really, the thing that drove me to this was probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure-seeking.
It’s funny because I sometimes use the psychedelics and parenthood analogy, but I use it in a very different way, which is people will tell me they’re struggling with the decision, and they’re reading the parenting books. And I always say that to read the parenting books is, it’s like the difference between reading about doing psychedelics and doing psychedelics —
— and that the fun is not the point. I have this discomfort with the discourse around fun and parenting, as if the way to measure any experience in your life is whether, when you’re filling out a time use survey, you’re having a lot of fun doing it.
When I’ve done psychedelics, I don’t necessarily think they’re fun. Sometimes they are. But what brings me to them is meaning. And I feel like what brought me to parenting or what attracted me to it, what made it seem not even a question to me was that I want meaning in my life.
And I mean, what is a more fundamental sense of human meaning than continuing the human chain?
Well, I should say, too, when I say fun — I mean, I think that’s why I corrected myself. What I think of as fun is, it’s much less enjoyment and more like pushing the limits of what — I don’t know — can stand or I’m capable of. I have a kind of arduous idea of fun.
Like, something that I long to do constantly is go to Antarctica and completely lose my mind. That sounds like one of the most fun things I can imagine. And so, doing psychedelics, it is extremely challenging sometimes and not always fun, but that is a specific kind of pleasure that the definition of which is very close to finding meaning.
One thing that’s very clear to me, as your work has shifted towards thinking a lot about parenting, I think since you’ve become a parent, is that you find it really interesting. It’s very intellectually generative for you. I find that’s true for me. I think that the thing I always say to people about parenting that was surprising to me is how interesting it is. It was really undersold to me how just kind of it would focus my mind on things I would have never thought of or never thought of at that depth before.
You’ve written one of my favorite lines about parenting, and you wrote it in this piece about Angela Garbes’ book and about your own experience hiring a nanny. And you wrote, “We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of a computer and send a bunch of emails than she can to do a job that’s so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.” Tell me about the choice of the word “holy” there.
It’s the only — part of this is because the way I was raised, deep in the evangelical church in Texas, but that’s the only word for it, you know? We were talking about fun. We were talking about pleasure. Now we’re talking about this idea of the sacred, right? And I think that for me, the thing connecting all of those is some sort of submission and disappearance into something, right? It’s the total submission to someone else’s body, really, in your baby, you know? That, I found there’s no other word for it and to their bodies needs and to the mess of it and the — yeah, there’s no other word.
And it also feels the same way with the parts of parenting that are, in fact, tedious and repetitive and so mundane, which is often the exact same stuff, right? Like wiping a butt over and over again and wiping spit-up from somebody’s mouth and washing tiny, little hands, right? These things are so often tedious, and they are holy. And the thing that connects them both, it’s submission.
And I found that the transcendent moments in parenting and the really just objectively boring ones, where I’m laying on the floor of my living room wishing I could read a book, instead of just stacking little plastic eggs on each other, it feels like the same project.
And I have found parenting really interesting. And I think by the time I decided to try to do it, I figured it would be, right? I figured it would be in the same way that I was like, no matter what, as with my first acid trip, it was like, no matter what, this will be interesting. No matter what, this will be extremely difficult in a way that is interesting. How could it not?
I think there’s so much tension and energy and guilt in this connection between the sacred and the mundane, the sense that you often should be feeling. You are so close to this transcendent experience. You are doing the most meaningful thing, and you are so bored or so tired, or you so want to be somewhere else.
What do you do when what you are trying to do is escape the thing you should be paying attention to? And it’s such a profound, constant experience in parenting but also in life.
Right? To be alive is also holy. To be alive, to be able to experience this at any moment, right? The possibility of connection, of experience, of just being in this world, it should be so overwhelming. And instead, I am staring at my phone.
Phone, yeah. I started laughing when you were talking about that because I was just thinking about my little baby’s about to turn one. And so it’s like, I just instantly thought back to — I don’t know — days when she was like four months old. And you know those days when it’s like 9:30 a.m., and you’re like, I wish everyone would go to bed, you know? Anyone ever have those days?
And I would feel, when I had that thought, right, like being tired from getting up in the middle of the night, whatever it was, and I was just like, can everyone just go to bed now so I can not speak and not do anything and not learn and not play or whatever?
And I would have the thought, I’m abrogating the whole purpose of being alive, right? I could actually just enjoy this, pushing the swing in the sunshine over and over and over. But instead, I just want to look at some dumb shit on my phone and whatever.
And — I don’t know — have you ever had this experience? I think back to when I was little, and I would read books while I was on roller skates. I don’t think that the quality of wanting to leap out of the texture of the present is something that’s specific to the smartphone era.
I remember I read in the bathtub. I just always — you memorized the shampoo bottles. You’re always kind of looking for a narrative to take you out of the present. And I remember that being something that was true for me as a really little kid, even as I was someone and remain someone that — I mean, I was very present, and I did have a great time all the time, pretty much.
But I do think that the way that the smartphone has sort of deformed and put that desire quivering in our pockets, beckoning to us, I was going to say, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but I have this sort of symptom of this brain disease that’s particularly troubling to me, is like, pre-kids, back when I had enough alone time to have original thoughts more than once every five months or something, I would think something.
And I would have this sense of, this is an idea that is shimmering with movement, in some way, you know? And then it would be too much for me. And then I would be like, I can’t. I can’t deal with it. I’m going to write it down, and then I’m going to scroll for five minutes. Like I would very frequently have that response. And that terrified me even though I kept having it.
And it sometimes feels to me not that we’re turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it’s precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it’s too precious. It’s too much, that being present is work, in a way, that it’s this rawness, and it’s this mutability. It requires this of us and a presence. That is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it’s good, in a weird way. Have you ever — do you know what I mean at all?
I absolutely know what you mean in a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid. Why do I read? I mean, now I think it’s almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn’t understand. And I read obsessively, constantly, all the time, in cars, in the bathroom, anywhere.
Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.
And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading.
One of the things I was thinking about what you were saying that was we have — there’s more spiritualism in this conversation than I expected, but I’m enjoying it. And it feels a little bit like our metaphors are shaped by different traditions, right? I know you grew up deeply Christian. And there’s a sense in the way you think about and write about it — the holiness, the awe of all creation, right? The external world that requires something of you.
And a lot of my experience of this or thinking about it is shaped more from meditation and mindfulness. And so the thing that I was thinking about what you were saying that was what always feels limited to me is my attention. And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it.
And what allows me to access the transcendence of my children, of the world is, honestly, how rested and how awake and aware I am. I mean, I spent some time in a coffee shop before coming here to talk to you, and I just needed that time listening to music and reading, so my attention could recover, so I could be present here with you.
So in that way, I think escape is undertheorized. That escape, it can be good or bad. I think we have trouble with this question of, are we distracting ourselves, or are we recovering?
Are we getting a kind of necessary contemplation, so that we can come back and experience a world and process what we’ve experienced and seen, or are we running from it? Are we trying not to feel from it? Are we trying to be anywhere but here?
Or are we looking for something, right? Are we looking — because I think that a lot of what takes people to screens is, it looks like escape, but I think it’s also pursuit.
A friend of mine was watching my baby when it was one of those school’s off, whatever. Andrew’s out of town, whatever.
And I was saying, OK, before you put her down for a nap, rock her in the rocking chair. Give her a couple of minutes. And then once you see the eyes blink really heavy, just dump her. And they were like, oh, that’s her phone scrolling time. And I was like, yeah, that’s her phone scrolling time, you know? Her brain just needs to — sometimes we’re just putting our brain on the static signal.
I think this is a place where there’s so much self-judgment, right? Are you escaping? Are you recovering? And then we put that judgment also on our children. And this gets us to “CoComelon.” Why don’t you describe, for someone who has never seen it and has no idea what that word means, what is “CoComelon“?
So “CoComelon” is one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time, not just for children. And yet it’s something that if you haven’t changed a diaper in the last four years, you probably have no idea that it exists, you know?
(SINGING) Beans, beans
It’s time to eat your beans
(SINGING) Yes, yes, yes
I want to eat the beans
Beans are good for you
Yay, yay, yay
I love them, ooh
How to put this? It’s this. The backdrop of “CoComelon” is that major children’s animation companies did not make entertainment for babies and young toddlers because this was seen as sort of unethical. And kids can’t really learn from a screen at that age, so we’re not going to do it. And then YouTube was invented, and then the iPad was invented.
And suddenly iPad parenting, of which I certainly take part in, was instantiated as the way that suddenly we were all living.
I think half of 2 to 5-year-olds have their own mobile devices, which, again, my 4-year-old is one of them. And then, so, just, this land was wide open, this pristine farmland of just millions and millions and millions and millions of children whose attention could then be captured and monetized. And then you get all these things. Like, people know Ms. Rachel, probably.
Hi. Hello Can you say “mama“? Mama. Mama. Let’s sing it.
(SINGING) Mama
Let’s clap it. Mama. Let’s sign it. Mama. Good job.
But then there were all of these nursery rhyme channels where you would get just sing-song nursery rhymes and kind of squeaky-looking, mesmerizing, uncanny animation of just giant, bobble-headed, eternally smiling babies, and perfect, little worlds where the sun is always shining. And the parents are always around. And it’s rainbow popsicles, and it’s fort building, and just smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles, and the same words repeated over and over and over and over, and bright, clanging noises, and these things that are torturous for adults, but basically heavenly to whatever is going on in our babies’ brains.
(SINGING) Wash my hair
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo
Wash my hair
Wash my face
“CoComelon” is like — it’s so popular that as of some time ago, the daily viewers, where it was like 80 million daily viewers, which is as many people has watched the 2016 presidential debate between Trump and Clinton. And that’s just everyday viewers. And I think a conservative estimate would be that it’s watched for 200 billion minutes a year. And it’s just all the more remarkable because most of those viewers are basically pre-verbal. I’ve learned much more about “CoComelon” than I ever thought I was going to.
There’s something interesting in “CoComelon,” and I assume this maybe partially motivated your inquiry into it. There are two of them, I think — really “CoComelon” and “Blippi,” but we’ll focus on “CoComelon”— that exist at this absolute tension point of children adore it and adults hate it. There are other things adults don’t mind, right? “Sesame Street,” actually, most adults like. They remember it. We remember it. I enjoy it. You can’t really get that many kids to watch “Mister Rogers” now, but if you can. But parents like “Daniel Tiger.”
“Daniel Tiger.”
There’s all kinds of stuff that parents will love. “Bluey,” I think, in general, parents like “Bluey” more than their kids like “Bluey,”
But “CoComelon” is this one where, from a very young age your children go — and I feel like you could describe this two ways — completely vacant or completely focused in front of it. It’s either an experience of being totally filled or totally empty, and I can never quite tell which. And parents just — it drives them mad. Why this one? Why do you feel like there’s this unfathomable divergence between what the kids want here and what the parents want here?
Well, I think, as far as I can make sense of it, this is the first sort of — like, “CoComelon” ushered in a paradigm where children’s entertainment is not configured as entertainment, but as just raw, attentional capture. And I think that that’s why. It’s the people that work on it or that worked on it, they’ve been laying people off like crazy, despite these viewing numbers and the $3 billion parent company valuation.
But I do think that the people that created it are interested in providing pleasure and entertainment for the people that watch it. But the project of this company is attentional capture. And obviously, there’s significant overlap between attentional capture and entertainment. But I do think that we can — and now I kind think we should meaningfully differentiate them, maybe especially for kids. And I think that’s why.
I think you can feel it in the sort of bones of the stuff and the reaction parents have to it, you know? Even “Teletubbies,” college students love coming down from drugs and watching “Teletubbies.” Even silly baby entertainment, it can provide delight, which is not saying any of this has ever been pure, right? Children’s television has basically always existed as like an eternal toy commercial.
But even “GI Joe,” “My Little Pony,” basically, way back, “Mickey Mouse Club,” whatever, all of these things, they were configured as entertainment first. And there’s something about this that doesn’t feel like it’s configured as entertainment first. It feels like it’s just eyeball capture, just mining attention with a pickax into the parents’ eyes.
How much do you think the parental anger at “CoComelon”— and I will very much include myself here — is a kind of self-loathing, though, right?
100 percent.
I love the line you said — not entertainment, but raw attentional capture. And two things really jump out at me from that. One is that when you’re putting an 18-month or two-year-old in front of “CoComelon,” you’re usually doing it for a reason. You desperately have to get something done around the house. Their older brother is sick. You’re on a plane, right? There’s a reason you’re doing it.
And what you’re doing is trying to create raw attentional capture. If it did not completely capture them, it would not be serving the instrumental purpose you are using it for. I mean, they’re too young for entertainment, really, at least in the way we think about it in culture. So, one, it’s like we have asked this thing to provide a service, and we are mad at how well it provides it.
And then, two, there is this creepy analogy to ourselves. I mean, how much that we absorb and consume is not entertainment, but raw attentional capture? How well does that describe parts of Instagram or TikTok or even television that we binge, knowing that it has almost no nourishment to it?
But we just don’t want to think. We are asking it to provide an instrumental service, which is make the time go faster and make me disembodied because I don’t want to be here right now, having my holy life. I want to be completely absorbed in something else, something outside of myself.
Yeah, so one thing about “CoComelon,” right, like you said, they’re not doing anything new. It’s just that the audience is new, right? I talked to former writers who were telling me that they got a spreadsheet of all of the search words that toddlers were making their parents type in on YouTube Kids or whatever, and they would write episodes to those search terms, right? It was extremely S.E.O. targeted operation. And everything that I see has been algorithmically tailored to exactly what I want to be looking at as well, you know?
And I think I will say, I don’t have that much screen time anxiety about my kids, right? I’m like, y’all have plenty of resources, you know? Like, you were creative class children in Brooklyn. You are luckier than 99 percent of the global population. You’re going to be fine. I don’t care about your specific language. I don’t know. I don’t worry about screen time in a very specific way.
But I have a preemptive sorrow about the way that any ill can be instantly evaporated by putting my phone in front of my toddler and letting her — or not my toddler anymore — my four-year-old and letting her text emojis to my partner all day, you know, another one of my distraction tactics.
I get the sense that you’re going to be looking at screens so much. You’re going to be doing everything that I’m doing, but probably by hours and hours worse. And you, like me, are going to be unable to be just present without reaching for your phone after a certain number of minutes probably, right?
And your conception of what is possible is going to be limited to what is presented to you on that screen and your conceptions of what you want. And I feel like all of that screen time anxiety that I feel about her comes from my own sense that screens have already foreclosed a lot of that negative capability in my own life.
I want to expand on a line you gestured at there when you talked about what are we afraid of. And this is one of the places your piece really connected for me. I have this feeling, as I said earlier, that we’re under-specified on what we want and what we don’t want.
And you write, “When it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch, we are afraid of what exactly? That our kids’ capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use? That they will lose their ability to sit with the plain fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to conceive of new possibilities? That they’ll grow up to be just like us, only worse?”
And those all feel like things we’re afraid of and also maybe that they will never know any different. And I wonder about this, right? I mean, my kids, they will never remember a time before YouTube kids, right? They didn’t exist in a time before YouTube kids.
There has always been escape. There’s always been distraction. And the fact that it was not that good, I think was important. And I have trouble describing this. And I have trouble then making the distinctions based on it. But it’s like, I want my children to be able to escape the difficulty of reality. I think it’s important. I do it, too.
But somehow, I know when I do it in certain ways, it’s bad for me. And when I do it in other ways, it’s good for me. I don’t know why it is bad for me to look at my phone and good for me to read a magazine. But it is, and I can’t put it on a chart for you.
Can you not? It’s because one is surveilled, and the other isn’t, right?
I don’t think I care about the surveillance.
You don’t? But don’t you think that’s why one feels better than the other? You feel freer doing one than the other? You don’t feel your choices being sort of actively manipulated and shaped and constrained by an extremely bald profit structure? That, to me, feels — like you said, the escape was worse, but it also was an escape, right?
We were in our books in the back of the car, and nobody knew what was happening and what we were reading, except for us. Our parents would never know. There was no machine record of it whatsoever — even if we were writing, right, if we were doing the equivalent of what is, I think, widely and rightfully configured as unhealthy, like the 11-year-old girl on Instagram.
The way I was processing my life in narrative or whatever, or the way I was writing my life into its existence, was in a notebook, where no one could see it, and no one would ever profit from escalating or distorting it or testing it against anything. And so much of that seems tied, for me, to the lack of silent, invisible, constant surveillance.
So — and I mean this completely sincerely — I love how much that doesn’t resonate for me at all.
Oh, really?
Because it means that I’m having such a different experience of this. And so I want to have them both here. Because, one, I’m so close to a phone vegan. I’m so unbelievably annoying about what I have on my phone. So virtually nothing on my phone even can surveil me at this point.
Do you not have a browser?
I have a browser, but I don’t use it that much, except literally to look at Pitchfork music reviews, which is one of my favorite time wasting activities. But I have a lot of — I have The New Yorker app. I’m unbelievably annoying as a person.
But for me, the thing that I notice about a magazine, which I think is my favorite form of media, like full-stop, is, there is room for me to get interested and absorbed and let my attention move away from where I am at that moment. But it is not so absorbing or so grasping that my attention can’t shift back, that I’ve fully lost track of my body or my surroundings.
And I think this is one of the things that I want to get at. I am unnerved by how much we feel the need to net everything out, whether culture is good or bad, to these very measurable outcomes about school achievement or income in 20 years or teen mental health. And it feels to me like we’ve just lost the ability to make judgments based on sort of virtues and values about when things are good and bad, like whether it is better to read a book or look at TikTok, irrespective of —
— whether that shows up into —
Studies of educational achievement, yeah.
Exactly. I feel like we have lost self-confidence in making cultural judgments for ourselves, for society. as parents, we are so achievement oriented. I feel like you see this in the debate about Jon Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” that if we cannot show something on a chart, it’s like we cannot have the self-confidence to make a judgment about it.
Well, I think I was going to pitch you another possible reason why the magazine feels different from the phone, which is that, I mean, the phone, it is always entwined with usefulness, and your work email lingers. I mean, you are reachable, to be useful to someone when you were looking at your phone, even if you’re just reading the same book on your Kindle that you would be reading off of it, right?
I think real pleasure, you’re not — there’s nothing quantifiably achieved in it. You are not just un-surveilled, but you are not being useful to a goddamn person, you know, except the person directly in front of you, if there is one, right, or the people, the many people. And that has to do with what you’re talking about. The sort of Emily Oster-esque — not knocking her — I subscribe to her Substack — like, the reduction of everything to, what does the data say, and what are the outcomes? And that’s the choice, right? It’s sort of maybe an intellectual inadequacy in my own life that causes me to come back to this.
But it’s like, does it feel good, or does it not? And I think we still know what feels good and bad. And I think that that’s a good of a metric to judge anything on for ourselves and our kids, to some extent, right?
I think that really helps me describe or realize something. I want to go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, this question of, what are you afraid of, afraid of for your children, specifically? And I think maybe that gets at it.
The reason I like magazines and don’t like my phone is not surveillance or anything else. It’s that I feel better when I read a magazine. There are a million reasons for that. And I would probably describe it as my attention is more collected and centered and stable afterwards, and so I can then attend to other things in my life better and with more joy. But it’s just I feel better. I like it. It’s more pleasurable.
And I think the thing that I worry about, the thing that I’m afraid of, is, I wanted to bring children into the world not because the world is perfect. But it is beautiful. And I feel like I got this gift of getting to experience it. And I want them to have this gift of getting to experience it in its wonderful dimensions and its horrors.
And I am worried that I have unleashed a set of technologies upon them — and that we’ve done this socially — that is going to structurally and permanently degrade their capacity for that experience, in the way that I notice it degrading mine in the moment. And I’m frustrated at myself for not being better at policing. But them, they’re young, and they’re getting tuned and trained and wired or whatever metaphor you want here.
And I think the thing I am afraid of is not like their grades will be bad because they watched “Ninjago.” It is that their experience of the world will be thinner and more scattered because they will have been trained on these hyper stimulating things that somehow absorb you at the same time they make you feel bad. And that will just become the sort of baseline of what attention is supposed to be like.
So they’ll be like us, right? They will have their experience of the world curtailed by the desire to check a device every however many seconds, right? They will. There’s just no doubt about it. It’ll probably be a lot worse for them. But hopefully, like us, too, they will have found the things in the world that they can be devoted to in a way that supersedes, at least a certain amount of time, the screen, right?
The only way that I see out of this for my children is the only way that I see out of this for myself, is like, I can’t be disciplined. I can’t spend X amount of minutes less per day on my phone because I know it’s bad for me how much I’m on there already. I can’t.
It’s only when the real physical world is brighter and more colorful and full of surprises. And luckily, I found something that holds my attention more than phones do. I found a certain set of things that —
Psychedelics.
[LAUGHS] Well, certainly psychedelics. Going out dancing, being face to face with a friend, reading, writing, right? Listening to music. Actually, this extremely limited set of things that are more mesmerizing to me and more pleasurable to me than the screen. And that’s like one of my very few concrete hopes that I have for my kids, is that they find something that makes the world’s dimensions enlarge in a way that overmatches however the world enlarges or seems to enlarge through a screen.
I want to get at how you’re getting there, because I think there’s something very deep in this question between attending to pleasure or attending to some joyful or meaningful dimension of experience, and attending to some of these other ends.
You talk in the piece about a researcher, and she casts no aspersions on the work she does, which sounds both necessary and annoying, who has done all this research trying to rate these different children’s shows according to how educational they are.
And so you have “Daniel Tiger,” and that gets a two. It’s a very weird 0 to 2 scale. But you have something like “Daniel Tiger,” which is an offshoot of the “Mister Rogers” Cinematic Universe, which gets a 2. Or maybe “Bluey” would probably get a 2. You have some “CoComelon,” which gets a 1. Not very educational, but not actively meant to be harmful and frightening. And then you have the strange underbelly of YouTube Kids, this sort of computer-generated, A.I.-animated, often kind of horrifying Dream Logic crap CGI, and that’s a zero.
And I was thinking, reading that, about what is implicit in this scale, which is that the best thing should be the most educational thing. And I don’t really believe that for myself. I’m not sure I believe it for children. But I think there is this question we face of, well, what is our measure? But what, for you, helps orient the tuning fork, both like for Jia or for your children?
I think within this question and this calculation, whatever I did in my own life and whatever part of that calculation led me to the idea that having kids is going to be a part of this pleasure-seeking — and it was indicative that the idea of pleasure had shifted a little for me, right? It wasn’t the pure hedonism of 12 years earlier or whatever, you know? It was something that was deeper and harder and more prolonged.
And I think part of it is, like, when I think about wanting my children to be oriented around pleasure, and that’s what my idea of a good life for them entails, it also involves them learning to conceive of pleasure as the things in life that make them feel more human. I guess, maybe that’s one of the ways I’ve clarified it for myself, right? The things that bring me pleasure are the things that make me feel more human and not less.
I think it’s interesting to say maybe we should be searching for pleasure as opposed to achievement. But that that also, there’s a lot of things one might want, right? Pleasure is one of them. But I mean, achievement is a reasonable one, too. And then there are all these —
If you find pleasure in it, right?
Right or maybe not, right? Maybe pleasure isn’t the point of life, or maybe — I mean, there’s all kinds of things that I do that I think are important or that I think are socially useful that I genuinely don’t find pleasurable.
But you don’t find a kind of hard pleasure in them, like a hard, sort of durational — you know what I mean? Do you ever like these things that — have you not fooled yourself into — [LAUGHS]
Sometimes somebody in the middle of a podcast will just press on a point in me so sore that I have to spend a minute to be like, am I really going to go here?
I’ll say, I guess, this. I am struggling with this question quite a lot lately in my own life where I am so driven, sometimes, by internal pressure that things that I think are pleasurable have been drained of their pleasure.
And literally, this morning, when I was getting ready for my day, I just have this note in my notebook about the things I need to do today. I’m like, can you try to be driven by something other than this internal pressure?
When I began writing about politics, I was a blogger in college before blogs were basically even a thing. There was no thought of it being a career. It was done for nothing but a kind of pleasure, right? A kind of delight in being engaged in the world and trying, in some small way, to understand it, and even in some even smaller, completely inconsequential way to influence it.
And now that I have this much bigger platform, it’s so much less pleasurable. And so, I think it’s interesting, this idea you’re getting at of expanding pleasure.
I think, well, back to the thing that you were talking about, where the researcher was coding stuff about what was educational or not, and that was the unspoken good, right, I think it’s definitely not coincidental that the things that were coded as maximally educational are also the things that parents find pleasurable to have on in the background, and that it’s not coincidental that the stuff that was not educational is videos where Minnie Mouse’s head falls off and rolls down a mountain, and that the middle ground was like this sort of “CoComelon,” “Blippi” thing that I think there’s something about kids probably can learn more when they are experiencing some sort of delight.
I hate “Blippi.” I just find “Blippi” completely unnerving. If you have never watched “Blippi,” go enjoy yourself on YouTube. But my kids like it.
Whoa! And look at what you rode up on — a police bicycle! Can I look at it?
Of course, you can, Blippi.
Oh, cool. OK, now look at this — a helmet. Wow. This keeps you nice and safe, OK? And ooh! Look up here. Do you see that? It’s a light. [IMITATING LASERS]
I do go back and forth a little bit. Maybe the reason they like it is that I don’t like it. They are different than me. They are not supposed to what I like. It gets to this broader sense of structuring everything around education and achievement. It’s like, we’re already thinking about this when they’re two?
Everything has to be educational. They can’t put on pants. They can’t put on shoes. And already, we are stretching out the tarp of their consciousness across a scaffolding of the adult world, right? Achievement, and education, and are you bettering yourself, and are you improving.
And I both get it, but it does feel like a transmutation of what we have done to ourselves onto them at a younger and younger and younger age, just this movement of a kind of what was once an elite adult culture, right? The sort of self-improvement culture, Dale Carnegie culture, lifelong education, to now it’s, like, your babies are supposed to be doing it. It feels odd.
Well, and I also think, to me, it disturbs me less because it is indicative of this broader culture of optimization that I abhor and participate in and find really pernicious. And I’m terrified of how it might advance itself upon my kids. I’m afraid of that.
But it also — nothing’s educational at this age anyway. Most of the “CoComelon” audience is not learning shit. I was wading through a lot of literature and research about this. Tiny little babies can process TV more than we think they can, but they can’t really learn anything anyway.
And I think that absolutely, it feels kind of overtly like a veneer that everyone is just pretending that we can talk about what is going to be good for them and what is healthy and what is not, while completely avoiding just there’s a big giant spotlight on what’s on the tablet and the whole world, the whole world, and all of the ways that the actual world will change the trajectory of their lives is kind out of focus.
The child psychologist Alison Gopnik — and I probably wouldn’t have brought this into conversation except that we’ve already been circling psychedelics a couple of times — has made this point. She’s at UC Berkeley. There’s been a lot of psychedelic research there. And so there’s been this interesting cross-pollination in those departments. And she’s made this point that the child’s brain looks a lot like the brain of an adult on psychedelics.
So it really does!
It really does. You have a lot more disorganization in the way the neurons are connecting a lot more. We learn, as we get older, to filter the world, right? And that’s not just a conceptual skill. That’s actually how our brains are organized.
Psychedelics disorganizes the brain, which is why people make a lot of unusual connections, and they’re absorbing an overwhelming amount of experience because they’re not filtering it out. There are other ways to get there, too. I remember when I came back from a silent meditation retreat, I was so unable to filter out visual information that I felt like I wasn’t safe to drive because just trees were too overwhelming.
But what was making me think about — the reason I bring it up here is that both in my own experience and people I’ve known, it’s like people, when they’ve had a psychedelic experience, when they turn on the TV at the end of it to kind of come to rest, if they decide to do that, they tend to watch cartoons. They watch Pixar. They don’t go for thoughtful adult movies.
And I think there’s some interesting analogy to that in this conversation about a children’s show, is, like, if a child’s brain is more psychedelic, more disorganized, more open, then in the same way that adults who have gone through those experiences want something more colorful, beautiful, safe, et cetera, that their orientation may be in that direction, too.
Maybe there’s something valuable in it, right? At the end of that experience, I don’t want something highly educational. And in the experience a two-year-old is having, wide-eyed in this completely overwhelming world, maybe they don’t and shouldn’t.
I think that’s why when it comes down to pleasure, I’m also — I once did an iconic three-movie comedown stream of — I think it was like “Ponyo,” then “Pocahontas,” then “Bambi” or something, you know? And I was like, this is living. This is pre-kids. But I think that the idea that anything kids watch should be one thing or another, I think we’re both kind of in disagreement. They’re kids. Let something just exist without a purpose maybe for a little bit.
But I also, for this reason, I think that just basic ideas of beauty and pleasure, they’re not that different from kid to adult. I mean, obviously, there are limits to this, right? Like, I was thinking about having a pacifier in your mouth all day long or whatever, but I think little children find the same things beautiful. We experience this every day. They are stunned by a leaf, a beautiful flower, looking at an animal, a picture of an animal, thinking about a whale. They’re oriented towards these things that we get to most readily in the psychedelic zone.
But this is maybe an argument for kids’ TV. We can maybe want it to just be beautiful. And I think we can want them to have an experience of beauty in a way that is not instrumentalized and has nothing to do with achievement.
If you’re going to be in front of a screen escaping or looking for something or just zoning out, why not have it just be legitimately delightful? And maybe “Blippi” is that for some kids.
But I came out of thinking about “CoComelon” for months with that idea in my mind. I was like, I think now that it might be a legitimate thing for me to want them to be looking at beautiful, stupid cartoons, the same ones that I would want to watch coming down from a hallucinogen.
There’s a way in which you manage what you measure. And I think the main way we have been taught to measure this or think about this question is, it’s always called the screen time question, right? The question of screen time. Do your kids have screen time yet? How much screen time? And something it feels to me like you’re getting at is that that’s just maybe the wrong way to think about this entirely.
I feel completely unbothered by, quote unquote, “screen time” when I am there with my kids. If we’re watching “The Incredibles” together, I do not think that is any less good of an experience for them, for almost any definition of the word good, than if we go to Target together or if we’re just having fun together. Like, that’s a good experience.
Do you think that we have just sort of lost the plot on this sort of altogether, maybe for kids and adults and sort of making this about almost like the existence of the screen, rather than the experience of the person?
Yeah, the experience of the person. I mean, right. So if you actually get into the studies on the actual effects of screen time, it is like the screen itself is almost a red herring, right? People think about screen time as it correlates with achievement and verbal abilities and self-regulation and language abilities at grade level 7, all these things that are tracked longitudinally.
And the correlation is much more strongly between the kind of life the kid has and those things, right? We all kind of sense that it’s not — the screen is not the singular determining factor. It’s just that we put screens in use in ways that reflect the life of the child holistically, and the kinds of opportunities they have, and the kind of household they’re raised in, and the freedom that they have to not be thinking about basic needs, and to flourish in these other realms that we call achievement.
There are researchers that argue that children’s screen time use should be reframed as an indicator of parental distress. You know what I mean? It’s the life that matters, I think. And I think that applies to us and our smartphones, too. Like, when I was kind of required for one job or another to be constantly paying attention to the news as it was scrolled out on Twitter all day long, I was glued to social media kind of by requirement.
And I think the way I thought of it then was like, this is bad, but it’s OK as long as my real life is bigger than it. As long as I self-evidently always feel that the physical world is more inviting to me than my screen, then I’m not going to spend one second worrying about my brain rot because there’s nothing I can do about it, you know? I think as long as the world is winning out most of the time, I think that’s a reasonable — it feels like a reasonable metric to me.
I think so much of why parents hate “CoComelon” is a kind of self-loathing, often born of a kind of fatalism. It’s like, I don’t like this, but I’m doing it anyway, because other parents do it, because I need it, because I can’t think of an alternative, because I don’t have the energy to structure things differently, which is I’m not saying this is a thing true for other parents and not me. This is a thing true for me.
And I think that one reason I’m so interested in this conversation is that the conversation for kids feels, not exactly, but in many ways, like a miniature and clarified version of the conversation for adults. And weirdly, we’re better at having the conversation for kids because at least there, we can imagine making judgments about good and bad and about using paternalism and cultural pressure.
Not that many people I know are truly happy with their digital lives if they’re in a constant state of irritation and aggravation with themselves above all. But there’s something about the fact that everybody else is there or feels like everybody else is there that makes it impossible to imagine or effectuate a different reality, even just for yourself, even when such a reality is possible.
Mm-hmm. I also think there’s something about what you’re saying where you do something on your phone, and it’s unsatisfying. And you’re dissatisfied with the way that you’re doing it. But the smartphone has become the repository for all possible dissatisfaction and yearning.
Civic dissatisfaction — routed through the smartphone. Social — you feel lonely, you go to the thing that’s making it worse, right? I do think that we’re kind of in the grip of the loop where the dissatisfaction with the thing itself presents it as the answer, right? If you lack money, be a TaskRabbit, or drive for Lyft, or deliver. There’s a way that the phone is the catchall solution for any sort of discontent.
Let’s say someone is still using Twitter, and they’re miserable, and they want to get off of it. Probably they’re still going to be looking for a source, a replacement that exists on the phone, you know? OK, maybe not that one, but what about Reddit, or something like that?
What I think is so hard about that is that what makes it impossible to have alternatives to a bad status quo is the continued investment in the status quo. But because it maintains just enough staying power, that is energy people are not being able to put in to creating things that are different. And I think there are things that are different out there or certainly things that are different that could be imagined.
And again, I think this ends up being true for kids, too. We are very social creatures. And what everybody else does really ends up mattering. I mean, kids see other kids in a restaurant, and the other kids are allowed to watch a phone during the meal. And that makes it harder to resist your kids wanting to do that, right? I mean, there’s this whole pressure about getting kids smartphones in school because their friends have smartphones.
And again, there is something so contagious about everything, and there’s something that is so true in the way that the existence of something fairly totalizing or fairly central, the fact that you have to participate in it, particularly if it’s something that drains your attention and creative energy, the fact that you have to participate in it at all, or certainly, if you have to participate in it a lot, it makes it that much harder for other things to emerge, because they would need to emerge in that same space with that same energy.
I had television growing up. I don’t think it was terrible for me, but I do wonder about how different it is that my kids can watch anything at any time, whereas I was at least a little bit prisoner to what was on when, including, I had it easier. I had Nickelodeon, which had a lot of kids’ programming, right? I didn’t only have to watch it on the kids’ hour on network television. With all these things, it feels like there’s some balance that makes sense, right? Some point where it’s enough and not too much. Enough escape, but not too much escape. Enough choice, but not too much choice. And there’s just a lot of things it feels like we’ve, to me, hit too much. And maybe that’s just me getting old. And I just think when I was a kid, it was enough, and now it’s too much. But I also think there has to be conceptually too much has to be a possibility, and maybe we’ve reached it.
Well, I think, again, I mean, it’s like my dumb ass keeps bringing this all back to pleasure. But I think that feels like that line, right? Like, once you’d had enough of watching six episodes of “Pete and Pete” in a row, which I certainly did, once you were feeling severely diminishing returns, you would walk away from this machine that was not watching you and was not altering its behavior to get you to watch it more.
And we were able to do that. We were able to have this kind of unadulterated, physical, cognitive instinct about what was the right amount of escape and what was the right amount of engagement, because we just followed what we wanted to do. We weren’t walking away from six hours of “Pete and Pete” because it was good for us. It would be better for our language abilities in the seventh grade if we did so.
We were just like, I’m bored. I’m no longer getting pleasure from this. I’ve actually not been getting that much pleasure out of the last two episodes. I’m just going to go do something else for a while.
I feel like every time I write about children’s or anything, any sort of media, it’s like everyone has been having these exact same worries. I was even thinking, with this conversation, you know the concept of acedia?
OK, so this is like, there’s a joke. Me and my friends have a joke that it would be a beautiful name for a girl, where it was this medieval conception of depression that, to me, feels like exactly like what we talk about when we talk about smartphones.
I looked it up. I looked it up on Wikipedia last night to make sure that I was — and there was this beautiful description on Wikipedia of acedia as a flight from the divine that leads to not even caring that one does not care. It’s like this listlessness, this disengagement from the world, this boredom. And then you start not even caring that you’re so bored, like this total inability to act upon your life.
As with the example of we were able to walk away when we weren’t having fun anymore, we didn’t have the option of the TV just being like, wait, wait, wait. Try these 45 other things. I’ll hypnotize you again in 45 seconds if you just give me the chance, right? I can feel it interfering with my own ability to understand when something’s fun and when it’s not.
And I think that I am worried about that with my children. And I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m like, the only way out is a set of experiences or desires that will clean out and clarify your radar for what actually feels good and what actually doesn’t and, yeah, feels good in any of the ways — the meaningful ones, the not meaningful ones.
But it seems to me like one of the things that that responsive surveillance mechanism does is it mixes all of those things up, so that even if you’re no longer having fun on Twitter, there’s still some part of you that feels like you are, just because of the mechanism itself.
I think this is a place where the surveilled language and fear really does hit for me. Surveillance, it sounds so creepy, and it is. And it’s part of it. But I actually feel like it masks the reason we give ourselves over to it because it feels good to be learned about.
We all have experiences of the algorithms coming to know us or predict us and recommending a book we’d never read before that actually was really great, or music that we never heard before that brought us into a whole new genre or a whole new artist that we would have never found on the radio necessarily, or tweets that we are glad we saw.
But it’s that way of being learned so it is able to continuously recommend things that are more and more alluring. And it makes that experience of the diminishing marginal return more distant, right? That place where it’s like, well, I’ve already watched two episodes of “Pete and Pete.” I don’t want to watch three. That’s a lot of episodes of “Pete and Pete.” Instead, it knows better what you want and is better at giving it to you. It’s why I find I really try never to leave my kids alone with a recommendation algorithm, right, YouTube or anything like that. It’s much scarier. And where they end up is much worse. But it is learning them at every second and how to give them the thing they actually want that will keep them clicking.
And again, I think this is where “CoComelon” feels weird. I mean, “CoComelon,” to bring it back to that, it’s one of the first successes in children’s television or video entertainment, I guess you’d call it, that doesn’t come out of television. It comes out of YouTube. It comes out of recommendation algorithms. It’s built around recommendation algorithms.
And I feel like it feels like recommendation algorithms, right? It feels like it knows the kids too well. It feels too tuned to their short attention spans. The whole thing is just overly optimized. And on one level, that makes it very effective as a babysitter or an attentional harvester, or just maybe it’s better as entertainment for them.
But it creates, in this very clear way because you’re watching it happen to a two-year-old, this feeling of what it looks like when culture is built because it knows you, and it knows how to predict you. And that scuzzy feeling that we have in a vaguer way, I think, with ourselves when we’re older, we get into this very intense way with them when they’re younger. But it’s the same thing, in a way, to me, like all up and down the age ladder.
I also think that, again, this is a thing where the thing that you get through the smartphone, like you were saying, this experience of being learned and being known very, very deeply, it’s a really human desire that has made this so effective as an addictive technology. Of course, we want to be learned, and we want to be known. That’s so much of the entire pleasure of being alive interpersonally.
We want that for good reasons. But it’s like, yeah, it’s part of why “CoComelon” and so much on the phone, it feels frictionless. It’s been designed for frictionlessness. And I think that’s part of — I mean, maybe this is helping me understand how I delineate good pleasure, meaningful pleasure, from meaningless pleasure, which is that I think there’s friction in all real pleasure and in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world. There’s friction in it. There’s true surprise.
And I think that when someone is learning us in the real world, when they’re coming to know what we would like and they’re seeing things about us that we don’t even see, all of these things that the algorithm is doing, when another person is doing that for us, they change us in ways that the algorithm doesn’t, right? That experience contains sharp edges in a way that the algorithmic one never can.
And that’s why it’s almost the same thing, but it’s why the real world version, it feels infinitely more meaningful than Spotify learning what song I want to listen to next. Because even as good as the algorithm genuinely has gotten at giving me what I want to listen to, the total removal of friction — and I think that’s one of the reasons that all the YouTube stuff feels just instinctively bad — again, it’s one of those things where maybe it’s easier to see with “CoComelon.”
It’s easier to see that the seamless microtargeting, endless stream of giving you exactly what you want, I’m certainly guilty of understanding that it’s good for my kids to have a little more friction in their life and not just get everything what they want at a touch of a button and then me pursuing that as soon as they’re in bed.
This maybe gets at another thing that I’m afraid of, because one of the things I was thinking about while you were saying that is, I decided a couple of months ago, I would sign up for a bunch of the A.I. relationship apps, right, like Kindroid and Character AI and things like that, where these language models are built to create a kind of A.I. you’d be friends with or a lover with, or it would be your therapist or whatever.
And I tried them out for a while. And they’re pretty good now. I mean, they’re good at texting. What they write sounds and feels realistic. I always tell people they’re much better at texting than most of the people I know.
Would it have fooled you?
It doesn’t fool me. Yeah, it would definitely have fooled me.
It would have successfully catfished you if one of them had started texting you?
100 percent, easily. I would not have known it’s not a person. But I never could keep myself coming back to them because there was no meaning in the interaction, right? So since moving to New York, I’ve been making new friends.
And I was thinking about how one of the friends I made, we text a lot just sort of during the day. And they’re not interesting texts, necessarily. Sometimes they are, but it is meaningful to me that he is giving me that attention back, right? The message of the text is that I am being chosen for somebody else’s attention. It’s a kind of meta text about a relationship that is emerging.
And I didn’t end up writing a piece on this, though, because I can see the Character AI usage numbers that are being released. And this is a sort of A.I. system used much more by younger people. And they’re logging in a ton of times a day and spending huge amounts of time on it.
So, to go to the point of what I’m afraid of, right, this question of the retraining, for me, who grew up before large language models, the kind of uncanniness, what I would call the meaninglessness, of that interaction is very front and center, right? It’s very noticeable.
But if you’re younger, and your social dynamics are way less formed, and your discernment of social dynamics is much less mature, and your choices are more limited because of who you know and how you can see them and how you can be in touch with them, maybe it actually doesn’t feel that way, or maybe you get trained out of it feeling that way. I do think you can lose the sense of and taste for friction, and that that is a loss and that it does foreclose forms of pleasure, just as you were talking about.
Hugely. There’s this old Kurt Vonnegut thing where he was talking about the pleasure of mailing a letter. And it’s like how the whole point of it is not that you’re doing something efficient. The whole point of it is that you go for a walk, and you wink at a girl, and you pet a dog or whatever.
I mean, but yeah, I get used to — I used to — pre-children, I had a years’ long streak of never using Amazon and a personal policy of, if it was within walking distance of me in downtown-adjacent Brooklyn, then I could not order it online. I had to physically go out and get it. And I have backslid on all of this since having my second child significantly.
And it’s also partly because the experience of having children, wonderfully, it is the source of all that friction. It’s sort of like back to what we were talking about at the beginning. I think that as our world orients itself increasingly towards frictionlessness, children can seem exclusively like a form of friction. And that friction can seem exclusively like something that’s undesirable, when, in fact, I think my sense that I wanted some of this specific kind was one of the things that made me think it would be fun.
And I do think that a total lack of impediment, the ability to pick up and go anywhere you want at the drop of a hat, which is a wonderful way to live, which anyone who has it and wants it, I’m jealous of you, and good for you. I mean, it’s like everything that we’ve been talking about is, those are values that have been inculcated by the same form of ultra-advanced capitalism that created the smartphone and created all these things that make us so depressed in the first place.
And I think that part of me wanting, feeling ready to try to have kids four years ago, five years ago, whatever it was, was a sense that I wanted to undo these things in me, like this sense of exceptionalism, which children really took out of me, you know? We were texting about the thing where you’re playing with your kids. And you’re like, I’m probably not particularly good at being the horsey right now, but the thing that matters to you is that I am the person being the horsey.
The most common way I feel like I fail as a parent — and it’s the way I fail both my kids and myself — is by trying to really control and optimize the experience and treat it like other things in my life. We’re going to do this at this time, and then we’re going to here. And you got to get your shoes on by this moment.
And to your point about being the horsey or finding some joy in submission, parenting is so unpleasant when you feel like it is a distraction from the thing you would prefer to be doing, right, like looking at your phone or taking a nap. But it’s also, I think, unpleasant when you are trying to treat it like other things in adulthood and control it. It’s most pleasant for me when I have the resources inside myself and also the wisdom to just kind of be around. They’re running around and occasionally playing with me. And I’m sitting on the couch and occasionally playing with them. And it’s like you could just do a lot less. We’ve made parenting really, really hard. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as parents to try to do a great job of it and be achievement oriented. And the kids should be watching only educational shows, when, really, they should be watching no shows at all.
And there’s a million things we’ve done that are not really anything that the kids ever asked us to do. They would like you to be around a bit more or a lot and be attentive, but also not overtake their experience with your own. And that’s really hard. I would like to get better at that.
I think that people know this, though. I think that when I had my first kid, the thing that I found most difficult, but now I think I’ve smooth-brained my way into finding really pleasurable is that when you’re with your kids, at some point, you just have to completely surrender to not — the time just really can’t — you can’t really do anything else, you know? You are just going to — this is your weekend now. This is what weekends are going to be like now.
And there’s a removal of choice in that that is the thing that I was afraid of and I think a lot of people are afraid of, but also the thing that is arguably the most freeing. I remember also, I had read “How to Do Nothing” right around. And I was like, yeah, this might be a shortcut to the kind of outside the clock time, where you are just not being useful to anyone but the people in front of you, this thing that I was trying so hard to do in other ways that now I have to do every single weekend, whether I like it or not.
And I no longer feel that as a loss, I’m realizing. I used to. I used to think, oh, I could have done so many things with these weekends. And now I’m like, oh, it’s time to go to the playground, you know. Time to go to the playground again.
We’ve ranged a lot here. But to go back to, in some ways, the article that led to this show, if a kid watches an hour of “CoComelon” a day, should you feel bad? Would you feel bad?
No. Should I go on? [LAUGHS] No, I don’t think so.
I think that’s a lovely place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
I forgot about this question until I was on the train here, and I was like, OK, I got to think about the last three things that I was just texting people about because I really loved. OK, so I was extremely late to becoming “Lonesome Dove” pilled. I was like six months pregnant, and I was on a work trip to Thailand. And I had 48 hours of alone time on the end of that work trip. And I was like, this is the most important —
the books I bring are the most important books. This is the only time I’ll be alone for 48 hours all year, you know? And I was like, I need to bring the perfect book, the book that will make me feel like I’m a kid again, will give me just this wildly disproportionate, emotional attachment. I want to be sobbing by the end of this book. And I read “Lonesome Dove,” and it was all that and more. I have been “Lonesome Dove” pilling many of my friends as the year has gone on. If anyone hasn’t read it, truly recommend it.
I really like this book, “In Ascension,” that our friend Max recommended to me. If anyone is in the Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer kind of thing, it’s like that kind of grounded, beautiful, enigmatic, slightly schematic sci-fi. Really loved it, another one that I’ve been texting a lot of people about.
The third one is “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut, one that I feel like I’ve been texting friends about every month since I read it. It’s about scientific discoveries that bring people to the brink of madness. And there’s a really interesting thing that goes on where the book starts off almost entirely nonfiction and then ends almost entirely fiction. And the gradations in between are amazing.
And I’ll just note, because you mentioned in your last answer, you talked about reading “How to Do Nothing,” which is by Jenny Odell. And I still think it’s the best book about attention and habits of mind —
Incredible.
— in this era. I’ve enjoyed this so much, Jia Tolentino. Thank you very much.
Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amon Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.
The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’
I feel that there’s something important missing in our debate over screen time and kids — and even screen time and adults. In the realm of kids and teenagers, there’s so much focus on what studies show or don’t show: How does screen time affect school grades and behavior? Does it carry an increased risk of anxiety or depression?
And while the debate over those questions rages on, a feeling has kept nagging me. What if the problem with screen time isn’t something we can measure?
[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube , iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts .]
In June, Jia Tolentino published a great piece in The New Yorker about the blockbuster children’s YouTube channel CoComelon, which seemed as if it was wrestling with the same question. So I invited her on the show, and our conversation ended up going places I never expected. Among other things, we talk about how the decision to have kids relates to doing psychedelics, what kinds of pleasure to seek if you want a good life and how much the debate over screen time and kids might just be adults projecting our own discomfort with our own screen time.
We recorded this episode a few days before the Trump-Biden debate — and before Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate. We then got so swept up in politics coverage we never got a chance to air it. But I am so excited to finally get this one out into the world.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube , iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .
(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Jeff Geld, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .
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Finding a Maximally Specific Hypothesis: Find-S . The find-S algorithm is a machine learning concept learning algorithm. The find-S technique identifies the hypothesis that best matches all of the positive cases. In this blog, we'll discuss the algorithm and some examples of Find-S: an algorithm to find a maximally specific hypothesis.
ML | Find S Algorithm. The find-S algorithm is a basic concept learning algorithm in machine learning. The find-S algorithm finds the most specific hypothesis that fits all the positive examples. We have to note here that the algorithm considers only those positive training example. The find-S algorithm starts with the most specific hypothesis ...
3. Apply the FIND-S algorithm by hand on the given training set. Consider the examples in the specified order and write down your hypothesis each time after observing an example. Step 1: h0 = (ø, ø, ø, ø, ø) Step 2: X1 = (some, small, no, expensive, many) - No. Negative Example Hence Ignore. h1 = (ø, ø, ø, ø, ø)
The S algorithm, also known as the Find-S algorithm, is a machine learning algorithm that seeks to find a maximally specific hypothesis based on labeled training data. It starts with the most specific hypothesis and generalizes it by incorporating positive examples. It ignores negative examples during the learning process.
Specific Hypothesis: If a hypothesis, h, covers none of the negative cases and there is no other hypothesis, h′, that covers none of the negative examples, then h is strictly more general than h′, then h is said to be the most specific hypothesis. The specific hypothesis fills in important details about the variables given in the hypothesis.
Return the maximally specific hypothesis, if it exists. The Specific-to-General Algorithm is a simple and efficient way to learn a maximally specific hypothesis from a set of training examples. It is widely used in machine learning and has applications in many different domains, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.
FIND S Algorithm | Finding A Maximally Specific Hypothesis | Solved Example - 1 by Mahesh HuddarSolved Example 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6MQLC2Dd...
In Machine Learning, concept learning can be termed as "a problem of searching through a predefined space of potential hypothesis for the hypothesis that best fits the training examples" - Tom Mitchell. In this article, we will go through one such concept learning algorithm known as the Find-S algorithm. If you want to go beyond this article and really want the level of expertise in you ...
GB is the maximally general positive hypothesis boundary, and SB is the maximally specific positive hypothesis boundary. The intermediate (thin) rectangles represent the hypotheses in the version space. Version space learning is a logical approach to machine learning, specifically binary classification.
A hypothesis is a function that best describes the target in supervised machine learning. The hypothesis that an algorithm would come up depends upon the data and also depends upon the restrictions and bias that we have imposed on the data. The Hypothesis can be calculated as: y = mx + b y =mx+b. Where, y = range. m = slope of the lines.
The goal of a learner is to find a hypothesis h which can identify all the objects in X so that: h (x) = c (x) for all x in X. In this way there are three necessary things for an algorithm which supports concept learning: 1. Training data (Past experiences to train our models) 2. Target Concept (Hypothesis to identify data objects) 3.
The specific boundary S, with respect to hypothesis space H and training data D, is the set of maximally specific members of H consistent with D. Version Space Representation Let X be an arbitrary set of instances and let H be a set of boolean-valued hypotheses defined over X.
Maximally Specific Hypothesis. Find-S Algorithm Concept Learning Hypothesis Partial Ordering. Maximally Specific Hypothesis. Begin with the most specific possible hypothesis in , generalize this hypothesis each time it fails to cover an observed positive training example. Find-S algorithm ignores negative examples. If the hypothesis space ...
Reference. General-To-Specific Ordering of Hypothesis. The theories can be sorted from the most specific to the most general. This will allow the machine learning algorithm to thoroughly investigate the hypothesis space without having to enumerate each and every hypothesis in it, which is impossible when the hypothesis space is infinitely vast.
Python Program to Implement FIND S Algorithm - to get Maximally Specific Hypothesis. Exp. No. 1. Implement and demonstrate the FIND-S algorithm in Python for finding the most specific hypothesis based on a given set of training data samples. Read the training data from a .CSV file. Find-S Algorithm Machine Learning 1.
4. FIND-S Algorithm Finding a Maximally Specific Hypothesis Solved Example 2 in Machine LearningFollowing concepts are discussed in the video:*****...
CSG220: Machine Learning Version Space Learning: Slide 2 Concept Learning • Recall that a 2-class classification problem is also called a concept learningproblem • Given the mapping f : X Æ{+, -} to be learned, the set of instances f-1(+) X is the corresponding concept • A concept is just a subset of the instance space X,
A hypothesis is an explanation for something. It is a provisional idea, an educated guess that requires some evaluation. A good hypothesis is testable; it can be either true or false. In science, a hypothesis must be falsifiable, meaning that there exists a test whose outcome could mean that the hypothesis is not true.
The search begins (ho) with the most specific hypothesis in H, then considers increasingly general hypotheses (hl through h4) as mandated by the training examples. ... There can be several maximally specific hypotheses consistent with the data. Find S finds only one; ... Machine Learning More. Advertisement NumPY Tutorial Pandas Matplotlib ...
Introduction : The find-S algorithm is a basic concept learning algorithm in machine learning. The find-S algorithm finds the most specific hypothesis that fits all the positive examples. We have to note here that the algorithm considers only those positive training example. The find-S algorithm starts with the most specific hypothesis and generali
If there are several maximally specific hypotheses that fit a data set, Find-S will just return one of them, where as C-E will return all of them as part of the specific boundary of the version space. If there is only 1 maximally specific hypothesis though, there is no difference. Hope this helps!
The hypothesis is one of the commonly used concepts of statistics in Machine Learning. It is specifically used in Supervised Machine learning, where an ML model learns a function that best maps the input to corresponding outputs with the help of an available dataset. In supervised learning techniques, the main aim is to determine the possible ...
Machine learning(ML) studies the construction and analysis of algorithms thatlearn from data. ... hypothesis space. A hypotheses is a function h : X! f 0;1g. The goal is to nd a hypothesis h such that h = c, a task that may be unattainable since we know the values of c only on S.
Few-shot imitation learning relies on only a small amount of task-specific demonstrations to efficiently adapt a policy for a given downstream tasks. Retrieval-based methods come with a promise of retrieving relevant past experiences to augment this target data when learning policies. However, existing data retrieval methods fall under two extremes: they either rely on the existence of exact ...
Therefore, the data utilized for both training and testing in machine learning comprised behavioral measurements, facial landmark data, and a combination of both. Data processing. We streamlined the datasets related to facial expressions through a comprehensive data processing phase, considering the abundance of information and landmark features.
Recent scientific research has shown that the ketogenic diet may have potential benefits in a variety of medical fields, which has led to the diet receiving a substantial amount of attention. Clinical and experimental research on brain tumors has shown that the ketogenic diet has a satisfactory safety profile. This safety profile has been established in a variety of applications, including the ...
transcript. On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics The writer Jia Tolentino on parenting — and living a good life — in the age of smartphones.