# You become the UI you use

Epistemic status: exploration

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People instinctively copy other people they interact with. But the communication tools we use determine what we see and don't see (what we can copy and what we cannot copy) and often also who we interact with (whom we copy).

Written communication is a filter that lets you know that someone disagreed with you, but doesn't let you see their kind smile. Thus people get more quarrelsome.

Reading someone's article or a book lets your see the presentation of their ideas, but not all the hard work they put into figuring all that out. Thus people get overconfident and assume that any idea they can present is equally valuable.

Advertising is a way to interact with many people. Each one of them will only copy a little bit of your message, but there are thousands of them, so it may be worth it. Even better, the communication is one-sided, so you do not instinctively copy their opinions in turn. (As opposed to a salesman, who must learn to ignore other people's feedback, which is difficult for most people.)

Banning and blocking people are ways to prevent copying. Voting is a way to encourage copying of content that appeals to people who vote.

Before internet, people copied those they saw on TV, and those who succeeded to write books. On social networks they copy those who write most (unless they are so annoying they get blocked).

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...this all feels like something we could pay attention to, and maybe use to improve the ways we communicate, and thus who we become by communicating to each other...

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As a random crazy thought, most of us probably prefer reading text to watching videos, but what if we required every article to start with a 10 second video that would play automatically when you open the article? For example, the video of the author reading the summary.

That would probably be annoying for many reasons, both for the authors and the audience. So this is not an actual proposal. But I wonder if it would somehow change the emotional background of the website.

(I specifically say a 10 second video, because my objection against videos is that they take too much time, so I would instinctively try to avoid them. But if I knew that on this website, each introductory video is exactly 10 seconds long, I probably wouldn't mind as a reader.)

Another crazy idea is to integrate the website with something like Khan Academy or Duolingo. Like, every time you read an article, it would offer short educational videos on the same topics in the sidebar, or tell you how to translate the words and sentences in the article to the language you are learning.

I have no idea how to achieve that technically, but I imagine that the experience of reading LessWrong (or any other website that implemented this) would become much less passive. Or, if every article about a topic started with a short optional test on the topic... maybe it would make readers less overconfident.

An article on effective altruism might contain a link to donate to given cause.

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Well, the proposed ideas are probably not good, but I feel that this space is worth exploring anyway, because something very useful could be hidden there. (Maybe not useful for LessWrong, but some other kind of website.)