Its not as simple as just being lazy, our brains are hardwired to take the path of least resistance. I believe someone industrious like you is the exception and not the rule which is why industrious people do well in life and a priased.
I don't believe that you'll find much if any evidence or compelling research to suggest that our species is "hardwired to take the path of least resistance".
I think that you are confusing passive complacency and conflict avoidance with a default state of how we are as a species and society, so far as such a thing exists.
Honestly, I don't think we'd even be here if people defaulted to lazy. The choice to be lazy is a remarkably recent symptom of the late capitalism era. Nobody could be lazy even 100 years ago. It just wasn't a thing.
Your perspective frustrates me because it implicitly abdicates taking responsibility for making good choices, explaining it away as "everyone does it". That is a mythology that you simply do not have to buy into.
This I can understand and if you look at the body of my post I talk about understanding if youtube was a selector of quality content, but people will watch hours of slop on youtube that is neither authentic or niche and that's what I want to get to the heart of. I fall victim to this too, I watch hours of youtube (long form) which in retrospect I accept as garbage, but will refuse to watch the the new hot netflix show that cost 100 million with some of the top writers and actors in the world, that's what I'm trying to understand.
I'm not as sure as you are that people are watching hours and hours of slop every day -- I feel like there are still plenty of humans out there trying to make a buck and getting their egos stroked by creating rage-bait for the normies. The algorithm is also pretty good at surfacing this dreck and keeping people watching. You know the sharpest minds at Google are hard at work making this happen.
Fair, but people will watch a random youtuber doing a video essay for the first time on an old topic like sbmm or AI in games and enjoy it yet find a 500 million dollar movie boring. I feel that your answer it correct, but there is something deeper than just para friendships to explain these other cases and I'm guilty of it too (watching a random youtubers video essay).
I see where you're coming from. Interested in verifying indeed it's something deeper. Leaning towards that it isn't, like there's nothing deep in debating sweet food vs salty food; sometimes you crave one and despise the other but not 7 days a week.
Are we banning cars then? What about unhealthy food? Heart disease is the number one killer in this country so if the gov wanted to protect people it would make sure everyone was skinny.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Cars are a form of transport which has obvious benefits. Even unhealthy foods are food which is y'know the thing people consume to live.
What are the benefits to keeping gambling? Does the entertainment value offset the societal harms?
What you don't realize is YouTube would rather have half the users if all of them watched ads vs AdBlock users, so they actually want you to stop using YouTube. Most people will just white list it, I mean the bulk of users use mobile anyway and cant really use AdBlock.
Couldn't you do this implicitly if I rate book A an 8 and book B a 7 then I have technically said book A is better than book B, so ignore the numerical value and take the better reading. Now put the rating out of 100 as out of 5 or 10 would lead to too many ties.
This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
