Comment by LeCompteSftware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeCompteSftware | Hacker News Reader

LeCompteSftware

An underappreciated source of nonsense in 21st century discourse is people watching YouTube instead of reading things. It doesn't appear this author read anything, preferring to be spooked and misled by a YouTube video.

   trained them to play DOOM - honestly better than I do.

Maybe the author really really sucks at DOOM, but I think this is a false embellishment:

>> While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.” [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-b... ]

  To play DOOM, the system feeds visual data to the neurons. For the neurons to react, they have to interpret that data in some way.

This is totally false - not even a misleading metaphor, just plain wrong. The neuronal computer doesn't get any visual information:

>> So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn’t have any eyes? Or fingers? "We take a snapshot of the game with information like the player’s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output – move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game." [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...]

I am also concerned about neuronal computing. But it doesn't really help anyone to spread childish ghost stories about it.

I really hate YouTube, by the way. My dad used to read newspapers and had interesting ideas. Now he watches a bunch of YouTube and he's a huge idiot. It's not (directly) because of age: nobody is immune to narcotic slop. I had to delete my account when I realized how much of my life and cognition I was wasting. I wish others would do the same.

I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis. And one I hear frequently.

Books can make you an idiot too- I think of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or "Grit" or any number of pseudo-science best seller books. These books end up capturing the public imagination in big ways too- Grit caused some government policy in the US around when it was popular.

The difference, I suppose, is that YouTube works faster by having many different people presenting the same bad ideas that the algorithm has helped you to buy into.

On the other hand there are amazing and useful YouTube channels that I use all the time like Practical Engineering, Crafsman, Technology Connections, Park Tools, SciShow, Crash Course, and on and on.

Exactly.

The Printing Press is good example, one of the first books was on "witch hunting", which panicked people, and lead to a lot of deaths. The first, 'conspiracy theory' to sweep over humans.

Humans are just highly susceptible to manipulation. YouTube is just taking it to next level. Like the difference in eating coca leaves, versus snorting coke.

The nice thing about books vs. YouTube is that it's much easier to critically interrogate books while you're reading them. That was the difference with my dad: he thought about what he read. He repeats what he listens to on YouTube.

I hate the proliferation of audiobooks too, by the way. It's the exact same problem.

To be fair, even reading 'good' books won't make you smart. I think the key is to be critical, which should be thought at a young age. Ikram Antaki dedicated most of her last years in teaching this in Mexico.

Anecdote: When I started studying economics I really agreed with a lot of what I read from economists like David Ricardo, Marx, Smith, etc. Then, I studied what other economist had to say and I could see how they disagreed with the former. This made me realize that I agreed with those people because their arguments 'made sense' to me, but that doesn't mean that what they said is completely true. This is something that has stayed with me, I always wonder how can something be wrong.

Why is Grit pseudoscience? I haven't read it.

There are a number of studies that show that Grit is either not a thing or there are better measures of success. It has been a long time since I have thought about it so I don't remember which papers in particular.

Also, it can be argued the author was either playing fast and loose or knowingly misleading readers with her statistics: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-...

If you like Podcasts the "If Books Could Kill" Podcast goes into some of this story again too.

>I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis.

Signal/noise is much worse (arguably books are catching up thanks to LLMs)

People see emotional signals in youtube videos. They respond to vocal tone, facial expressions, these are known to circumvent critical thinking. Like if you examine crowds of science deniers the usual commonality is that they are having a parasocial relationship with a bunch of youtube creators who are nice to them and reinforce their beliefs. The actual content of the belief is irrelevant, if you are disagreeing with the belief, you are attacking their tribe. Not limited to science deniers either, you get this hacking of human tribal psychology even in stuff like people who watch computer game videos. They pick a few champions of their tribe and follow them without critical examination of the content. At least with a book, while this is still possible its much harder. Its also telling that a lot of cranks who published junk science have all migrated to youtube.

I dont think youtube makes you an idiot, so much as youtube content is designed to bypass your critical defenses and overwhelm you. It develops into a blind spot. People can be perfectly rational in most areas and then suddenly burp up some absolute nonsense they caught on youtube.

Oh and the best part, is when you point this out to someone they tend to go "Oh yeah that totally happens... except for my favourite youtube channel which does x and y and z and yes of course I buy all their products and donate to their charities"

I really do suck at DOOM - and I did read the paper about BNNs, so I anticipated how it works, doesn't make it any less interesting [0]

Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense.

0 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632

The point is that it doesn't really make sense to say they're "seeing" anything. You said

  So… are the neurons on that chip seeing?

  We all desperately want to say no.

But I can confidently say "no, that's totally childish, the neurons are clearly not seeing anything." And in fact it's not even especially clear that they're "playing DOOM" vs. hitting a biased random number generator in response to carefully preprocessed inputs that come from DOOM. There is a major distinction when the enemy positions are directly piped into the brain.

Again I share the ethical concern about this stuff. But your blog post is quite misleading.

Have to say. I kind of agree with both of you.

But 'seeing' in humans is also a bit manipulated.

Does it really matter to the argument if it is seeing 'red', or just that it is 'sensing input'.

Suppose someone builds a framework that maps Doom to a large succession of Tic-Tac-Toe games.

Would the person tasked with placing X and O marks still be "playing Doom"?

you don't have to imagine too far - I made DOOM run through a series of pre-rendered images in markdown files as a stateless engine before [0] and the answer to your question is highly upto interpretation

You move, you plan, your actions have outcomes Same question as if you're playing choose-your-own-adventure game storybook

0 - https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/backdooms

Converting an image to numbers, doesn't automatically scream, this isn't seeing.

The brain does a lot of manipulation of the input images, the pixels from the retina, that doesn't sound far from just linear algebra.

I don't think the average YouTube influencer is growing 200,000 human neurons.

This did have some real scientific backing. Even if the 'result's are hyped.

It is little extreme to call this false because it appeared on YouTube.

That's not what I said, I said the blog post was false because the author thoughtlessly digested a YouTube video. It looks like the blog invented some details that weren't actually in the video.

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