Minimizing Distractions

Last week, I published an essay about the so-called Great Lock In of 2025, a TikTok challenge that asks participants to tackle self-improvement goals. I argued that this trend was positive, especially for Gen Z, because the more you take control of your real life, the easier it becomes to take control of your screens. In response, I received an interesting note from a reader. “The biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing,” he wrote, “is they don’t know what to do.” As he then elaborates: “Most of them are chasing shiny objects that others are showing whether on social media or in real life. And when they (quickly) realize it’s not what they wa…

This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of neurons in your brain, associated with your short-term motivation system, that recognize different situations and then effectively vote for corresponding actions. If you’re hungry and see a plate of cookies, there’s a neuron bundle that will fire in response to this pattern, advocating for the action of eating a cookie. The strength of these votes depends on an implicit calculation of expected reward, based on your past experiences. When multiple actions are possible in a given situation, then, in most cases, the action as…

On ​my podcast this week​, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, ​Sora 2​, which can turn simple text descriptions into impressively realistic videos. If you type in the prompt “a man rides a horse which is on another horse,” for example, you get, well, this: AI video generation is both technically interesting and ethically worrisome in all the ways you might expect. But there’s another element of this story that’s worth highlighting: OpenAI accompanied the release of their new Sora 2 model with a new “social iOS app” called simply Sora. This app, clearly inspired by TikTok, makes it easy for users to quickly generate short videos bas…