Social Media Just Solved My Biggest Problem in 20 Minutes
Dear Magicians,
Everyone knows that social media can undermine productivity and foster negativity. So, why did a random stranger manage to solve my biggest research problem in just 20 minutes?
Consider the absurdity of my situation. While recording my latest podcast, I faced a difficult choice: maintain eye contact with my brilliant guest or frantically jot down notes about their insights. Interrupting the flow kills conversations, and missing moments of brilliance crushes content.
This first-world problem would likely take my university’s innovation committee six months to convene a panel to discuss creating a task force to evaluate potential solutions through their committee on committees (yes, UCSD has one of those!).
In desperation, I posted my dilemma on Twitter, expecting nothing but silence from the algorithm. Instead, to my astonishment, someone built a custom app for me in just a few hours, not days or weeks. It’s called “Wavepoint,” and because of the urgency of my situation, you can use it too, for free.
This app allows you to record audio while maintaining eye contact, automatically transcribing the conversation and highlighting key points along with timestamps. You could use it for a podcast, reading your children a bedtime story without missing their adorable meanderings, or during a work/faculty meeting to identify when productivity completely derails. If you’re a doctor, you know that patient breakthroughs happen quickly — capture those moments without breaking eye contact. Are you a lawyer? You may need that timestamp when opposing counsel inadvertently admits guilt. You get the idea.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate what just occurred. A platform that many criticize built us a free app while my entire institution was likely debating whether Comic Sans is appropriate for interdisciplinary grant proposals. The contrast between Twitter and peer review is stark. One ships working software, while the other takes ages to produce anything of value.
Here’s what the “social media is evil” crowd often overlooks: the same platforms deemed responsible for fragmented attention can actually help focus collective intelligence to solve real problems. Critics argue that social media encourages shallow interactions and distracts from deeper, meaningful work. However, I’ve met countless friends on X/Twitter, some of whom I’ve never met in person.
While academics are caught up in collaboration theory within peer-review limbo — where the review process is so slow it makes continental drift seem swift, resulting in papers taking months or even years to be evaluated and published — practitioners are delivering solutions faster than my latest paper was dismissed by the Journal of Rejection Studies (edited by Dikembe Mutombo).
Think of it as dark matter; 95% of social media’s mass-energy may seem toxic or trivial, but the remaining 5% holds entire intellectual universes together. We often focus on the noise, overlooking the signal, and then wonder how a random stranger just outperformed our entire university in problem-solving.
This isn’t just about platforms; it’s about harnessing asymmetric generosity. One person’s thirty-minute coding session resolved what could have been months of distraction.
The real question isn’t whether social media is beneficial or harmful to science. Instead, we should ask: what problems are you not solving because you’re avoiding the very communities that could help you solve them?
Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,
Brian
Appearance
I join legendary evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for a dynamic conversation on evolution, atheism, artificial intelligence, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Dawkins tackles big questions from the audience, explores society’s shifting morals, and champions scientific curiosity, all with his signature wit. An inspiring dive into science, skepticism, and the meaning of life.
Genius
It takes two to think
An article in Nature suggests that the magic number of collaborators for breakthrough thinking is two, not twenty.
A 2019 citation analysis showed small teams (1–3 authors) publish significantly more disruptive results than large groups. The insight: your best ideas emerge during unstructured conversations with one trusted “science buddy,” not brainstorming sessions. Large groups trigger conformity; two people practicing improv’s “Yes, and” rule travel impossibly far without social dynamics derailing creativity.
Ask a colleague over coffee: “What’s your worst idea?”
Image
The Goode Solar Telescope captured the clearest images of coronal rain — plasma that cools, condenses, and falls along magnetic field lines due to gravity. Unlike Earth rain, these charged strands arc back to the solar surface. Some are just 10 km thick. The time-lapse video is colorized to represent hydrogen-alpha light.
Schmidt et al. / NJIT / NSO / AURA / NSF
Conversation
I sit down with Dr. Natalie Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute and an explorer of Earth’s most extreme environments. Together, we challenge the basic assumptions behind our search for extraterrestrial intelligence — questioning whether life must always look like it does on Earth, and whether we might be searching for the wrong signals entirely.
Join us as we rethink the search for life in the universe, and discover why Earth’s place in the cosmos might be far more precarious — and extraordinary — than we ever imagined.
Get the transcript and AI interactive content from this episode here
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By popular demand, and for my mental health 😳, I am starting a paid “Office Hours” where you all can connect with me for the low price of $19.99 per hour. This coming Friday 5/30 is the next installment!
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It’s also available for paid Members of my Youtube channel at the Cosmic Office Hours level (also $19.99/month). Join here and see you in my office hours!
Upcoming Episode
Adam Becker will be on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast soon. Adam is the author of the acclaimed book What Is Real? and now returns with
More Everything Forever that exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
🎯 Got a question for Adam? Submit it here: https://tally.so/r/mevW70
