[HN Gopher] Ledger of Harms
___________________________________________________________________
Ledger of Harms
Author : MrsPeaches
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-09-16 07:18 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ledger.humanetech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ledger.humanetech.com)
| sva_ wrote:
| It reminds me of something odd I heard recently. There seems to
| be a growing consensus that the Turing test is not an adequate
| measure of intelligence, and many argue Turing was misunderstood;
| that too much significance was given to the test.
|
| Now the Amazon folks came along with the "Alexa prize". Whoever
| creates a bot, that people want to spend the longest duration of
| time with, wins. So maximal user engagement is seen as measure of
| intelligence.
|
| I find it really weird that our tools seem to seek to waste the
| largest amount of time for us. I would've thought, that the ideal
| assistant would minimize engagement time, while maximizing
| utility; and it also seemed to me like a product like that would
| easily blow the time-wasting competition out of the water.
|
| But it doesn't seem so. Maybe too early in the development...
| esperent wrote:
| > maximal user engagement is seen as measure of intelligence.
|
| Where do they state this? It seems like maximal user engagement
| = maximal profits and that's all Amazon cares about.
| sva_ wrote:
| Well, maybe they did't state it like that. My memory mixed
| that up a little.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90590042/turing-test-obsolete-
| ai...
| mszcz wrote:
| > So maximal user engagement is seen as measure of
| intelligence.
|
| Yeah, I think that we already have maximizing for user
| engagement in social networks. That didn't turn out that great
| so far, at least in my opinion. Now we'll have have bots
| actively spreading most polarizing, rage inducing topics so
| that engagement is high.
| toss1 wrote:
| I recall that one of the early metrics at Google was actually
| how _short_ a time the user spent at their site.
|
| The idea (absolutely correct, IMO) was that the shorter the
| visit, the more successful the search was. I.e., if they
| provide exactly the desired result at the top of the list, the
| user would promptly click off to their desired destination,
| whereas if they gave poor results, there would be many more
| search actions.
|
| However, they have long since strayed away from such sound
| reasoning.
| ssss11 wrote:
| The ideal assistant, and the corporate strategy of capitalist
| behemoths, is clearly at odds. The longer we give them
| attention the more money they make.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > our tools seem to seek to waste the largest amount of time
| for us
|
| Yeah and it might seem fun initially, yet in the long term shit
| like Alexa and striving for artificial 'human-like interaction'
| just creates more alienation.
|
| ...and alienation and isolation, and an atomized society, only
| benefits capital. Our current mode of production aims to keep
| workers easily replaceable, with projects siloed and in rigid
| knowledge hierarchies that make workers dependent (and keeps
| the propertied class propertied), instead of enabling and
| fostering the individual and collective intellectual and
| emotional growth and skills of humanity.
|
| Instead of AI to keep us 'company', we need systems that enable
| humans to have maximum transparency, agency and participation
| [1].
|
| Platform cooperativism and 'protocol cooperativism' (through
| projects like http://valueflo.ws and holochain) are imo the
| most important shifts of our time.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
| insight/2014/j...
| zbentley wrote:
| Tangentially: are there any good non-ecosystem-oriented (i.e.
| not built by someone who wants you to spend more time in their
| ecosystem; doesn't necessarily have to be free or open source)
| voice assistants for home automation (not arbitrary phone
| tasks; stuff like reminders and playing music in a house,
| perhaps hosted in said house as well)?
|
| I'm assuming not, both because hard, missing corpus of training
| data for high quality q&a understanding, and minimal demand.
| But maybe I'd be surprised!
| SCNP wrote:
| Home Assistant has a lot of plugins but I haven't checked in
| a while. I seem to remember something about an AI/ML plugin
| for voice either coming soon or starting development.
| Everything for Home Assistant, I think, needs to be able to
| run air-gapped, too.
|
| Edit: Should have included a link: https://www.home-
| assistant.io/
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Isn't Apple's Siri close to what you want? I've never had my
| iPhone or MacBook try to sell me anything or show me any ads.
| (I'm in France, so maybe it's location dependent?)
|
| It works well with HomeAssistant to change the lights, etc.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Mycroft - https://mycroft.ai/
|
| and
|
| Voice2json - http://voice2json.org/
|
| I've been playing with lately. Mycroft is pretty solid out of
| the box (or at least, promising)
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I am curious if you ever worked retail before moving into tech?
| I did and the experience was very much out of a hollywood
| comedy sometimes. We had all kinds of labels for the buckets of
| customers but by and large the biggest one was the chatters.
| Mostly "old" (though now that I myself am "old" I would
| reclassify them as middle aged) people that wanted to talk to
| you. About their family, about their hobbies, about their
| doctors appointment, about every single possible option for
| their purchase decision, and then they would MAYBE buy a diet
| coke before leaving.
|
| It was infuriating as a teenager just trying to get the job
| done so I could slack off with the cute crewmembers or read the
| backs of the video game boxes for the umpteenth time, but now
| that my social circle has dwindled to wife, children,
| acquaintances, and work I get it. A deep creeping loneliness
| when you have no one to talk to and in my case all the money in
| the world that younger me never could have imagined.
|
| It doesn't shock me at all that Amazon would want a way to
| engage older, generally more wealthy, people and I am sure
| their expectation is that if successful it would lead to
| significant sales increases or at least mind share capture for
| their platform over their competitors. Here's to hoping that
| they are successful for the sake of the lonely in the world and
| that they enjoy their 1000% increase in diet coke sales.
| sva_ wrote:
| I see what you mean, and I agree. But it's doubtful to me
| that we're close to a point where people would feel like a
| voice assistant is an entity worth having meaningful
| conversation with. It's still a dumb machine, but I'm sure
| that will change in the future - for some people.
|
| Or perhaps I'm overestimating what people know about current
| 'AI' systems. The less you know about or understand a
| subject, the more mystical and sometimes interesting it
| appears.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Maybe the goal isn't to have people waste time talking to
| the voice assistant; rather, the goal is to use the voice
| assistant to discourage the chatters from burning human
| support agent time by making them navigate a machine system
| that filters for "real" issues.
|
| Customer support is a cost center for most companies, so I
| can see where the strategy of a) minimize costs and b)
| provide just enough support that the FTC doesn't get
| involved while making the experience frustrating enough
| (including the cancellation experience) that most users
| accept crappy service.
| specialist wrote:
| Agree with all.
|
| Yes and:
|
| I'm mostly against voice tech. Just feels weird. Still
| frustrating to use, after 30+ years.
|
| My skepticism that voice would ever become a normal thing was
| mooted by observing my son play a Living Books CD-ROM
| adaptation of a Mercer Meyer's Little Critter book.
| https://archive.org/details/littlecrittergames
|
| Critter asked a question. My son answered. Then nothing
| happened. My son was hurt, disappointed, confused. No
| different than if a human child ignored him.
|
| My totally obvious prediction:
|
| Voice UI will become normal for the generation that grows up
| with a Critter that understands verbal responses.
|
| And to your point, those Alexa style agents will remain their
| life long companions (pacifiers) into old age. Just like my
| 84 yo mom's relationship with the TV.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For some reason we all enjoyed these experiences at my store.
| I think it helped that local management had just
| fundamentally given up, so we knew that as long as some
| somebody from the larger company hadn't scheduled a visit,
| we'd have plenty of time to slack off later. Which probably
| improved customer service, and we did have plenty of
| regulars, so good job management.
|
| "Just get the truck done" could probably have been our motto.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm sure I speak for a lot of people, old and otherwise, when
| I say this:
|
| I f _cking_ hate* those "voice assistants" that companies use
| on their "support" lines, to avoid hiring actual people.
| Almost everyone would rather punch "1" or "2" to avoid them.
|
| And I doubt that anyone calls them "just to chat" although
| maybe if I listened to the call logs, I'd be shocked.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I love how little I desire to use my Alexa Dot simply _because_
| of how much she babbles on and on. I flipped on "brief
| response" mode and still it will be "hey Alexa play this song"
| and she'll play it then go "did you know with Amazon you can
| blah blah blah spend more money with us..."
|
| A longer Alexa sentence != longer engagement time, which I
| don't think they've figured out yet.
| leppr wrote:
| Wow that's rich. I already thought the purely functional
| action confirmations of the Google home are too annoying, but
| Amazon Alexa straight up tries to re-engage their users and
| people put up with it?
| CodeMage wrote:
| Google Home does it too. Every once in a while, it gives me
| the action confirmation and then proceeds to give me advice
| along the lines of "and by the way, if you ever want me to
| [do this or that]". If I try to interrupt that charter, it
| cancels the whole command. I can't find a way to disable
| that behavior.
| yosito wrote:
| Jesus christ! I didn't need another reason to never buy an
| Amazon device, but you sure gave me one!
| [deleted]
| alexatalktome wrote:
| Heard from support that replying with negative responses are
| likely to shut it up.
|
| They track the rate of negative feedback and high negative
| feedback will kill it over time.
| bob229 wrote:
| I love the CHT but no serious organisation uses the NYT as a
| source
| HPsquared wrote:
| Grammatical nitpick: don't call your information a set of
| factoids.
|
| "1. An inaccurate statement or statistic believed to be true
| because of broad repetition, especially if cited in the media.
|
| 2. (originally Canada, US) An interesting item of trivia; a minor
| fact."
| hoseja wrote:
| Insufferable nitpick: that has nothing to do with _grammar_
| specifically.
| andrewzah wrote:
| The reality is that it means both of those things, because
| people use them interchangeably. That's just how it is.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| I like: fact is to factoid, what human is humanoid.
|
| I kinda looks like a fact but isn't.
| [deleted]
| mthwsjc_ wrote:
| Why is this being called a ledger? Is it a special kind of list?
| dijit wrote:
| A ledger is a list with values, usually financial.
|
| So, a special kind of list indeed.
| pfortuny wrote:
| It measures in some sense the cost of each item, so it
| resembles an accounting book (ledger).
| roenxi wrote:
| The perspective this site offers is valuable; but they suffer
| from not having a baseline.
|
| One that stuck out to me is "Technology integrates and often
| amplifies racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia". This seems
| unreasonable - all of these things were substantially worse
| before technology got involved. Technology seems to blunting the
| sting, enabling more effective organisation among minorities and
| promoting a better understanding of the problem.
|
| It seems likely that many of these problems were much worse
| before the big social media companies too.
| baktubi wrote:
| There's obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise folks
| wouldn't have started using it). A social network is a good
| thing in theory.
|
| The problem is not the technological concept itself but where
| and how we consume it (e.g every 30 seconds). Keep in mind
| Facebook started when mobiles were somewhat limited and
| children had flip phones if at all. And on those, "background
| apps" were scarcely a thing.
|
| Nowadays, people are like zombies--and more time is spend
| wasting away in front of multimedia than providing value to the
| world.
| hashkb wrote:
| > There's obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise
| folks wouldn't have started using it)
|
| The "good" doesn't have to be significant for us to become
| addicted. There are some upsides to smoking cigarettes and
| other self-destructive behaviors, I'm sure.
| baktubi wrote:
| Hmm come to think of it cigarettes _are_ actually a social
| network of sorts. At least in the beginning :)
| VSerge wrote:
| they create the need for breaks from anything from work
| to recreational activites, and provide opportunities for
| interaction with like-minded humans. I'd say that
| qualifies, and although I never liked smoking and am
| grateful to have dodged that bullet, I always envied the
| natural icebreakers that smokers had when stepping
| outside of a place to smoke with random others.
| hashkb wrote:
| I started smoking for this reason and considered it a
| benefit at the time. But after quitting you come to
| realize that the camaraderie is covering up the fact that
| you're all out there killing yourselves instead of doing
| something better with your time; and you need to find
| other smokers because everyone else can't stand the way
| you smell.
|
| Replace that spot where you go to smoke with a foursquare
| court and dare your boss to tell you you can't take as
| many foursquare breaks as the smokers get. Foursquare is
| fun and you and your group will invent your own rules and
| it'll turn into your own game that's way more fun than
| smoking cigarettes. Most places now, you can smoke a
| joint or a weed pen if you really need the physical act.
|
| There's this idea that if you smoke you get extra breaks
| - bring it up in a reasonable way with any manager and
| you can have those breaks, too. And thank the few folks
| sacrificing themselves so that the rest of us can say we
| get as many breaks as they do.
|
| Edit: a benefit I miss is excusing myself from an
| uncomfortable situation because I "need" a cigarette.
| But, without that crutch, I developed better GTFO
| strategies.
| leroy_masochist wrote:
| > This seems unreasonable - all of these things were
| substantially worse before technology got involved.
|
| I'd agree -- the OP ledger, despite seeming well-intentioned,
| seems completely imbued with the current on-campus value
| system, wherein something isn't defined as _really_ bad unless
| it harms BIPOC and LBGTQIA people more than it harms others.
|
| If we define the arrival of the internet as roughly the
| early/mid 1990's, America as a country has gotten
| _extraordinarily_ less racist and homophobic since then. For
| example, 33% of white people in the South approved of
| interracial marriage in 1991; today that figure stands at
| 93%[0]. Similarly, gay marriage was completely eschewed by
| political leaders, including Democrats, until the early 2010s
| (e.g., Obama was firmly against gay marriage, at least on
| paper, when he first ran for President).
|
| None of the above is to say that we now live in a colorblind or
| non-homophobic society, I just find it odd that they're
| claiming that tech is making people more bigoted, when the
| opposite has happened since the Internet has been a thing --
| but this is somewhat understandable given that their target
| audience has been conditioned to see stamping out bigotry as
| humanity's highest calling.
|
| [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/09/10/record-
| hig...
| yosito wrote:
| > all of these things were substantially worse before
| technology got involved
|
| I'm not really sure that they were. Between the late 60s and
| the early 2000s they seemed to go way down in western society.
| In the 2010's they started to pick up again with the rise of
| smartphones and social media.
| tremon wrote:
| If that were true, then the rise of overt racism/sexism
| coincides with the rise of identity politics? If so, do we
| know which is driving the other?
|
| I have always operated under the assumption that the amount
| of (latent) allophobia in a given population is pretty much
| constant (or rather, a sawtooth wave around a hardly-changing
| trendline). The reason that we don't have violent clashes
| every week is because society is big enough that the
| oppositional groups don't come into direct contact that
| often. It seems that social media facilitates that direct
| contact (and algorithms actually drive it, because
| engagement), so we see more of the ugliness. But I'm not
| convinced that more overt allophobia automatically implies
| that there's more allophobia in total, just that it's more
| readily expressed.
|
| But I realize that this is all conjecture, because there is
| no way to accurately measure latent allophobia anyway. It's
| just my personal interpretation of complex societies.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| Okay, I just woke up, still a bit cross-eyed. I read the title as
| "Ledger of Hams" and expected a proto-food-blogger writing a log
| of all the hams he ever ate, how they compared to his "ieal" ham,
| and attempts to create a mathematical model of "the perfect ham".
| Now I want to read _that_ piece.
| mettamage wrote:
| For what this comment is worth: I'm watching too much YouTube and
| it's screwing with my life. Underneath it is a desire to have
| more social relationships I think. My previous "addiction" was
| Facebook, years ago. Since then it has been YouTube.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| That's a shame since I think that Youtube can be really
| amazing.
|
| My main (practically only) use for it is to watch amateur-
| produced special interest shows that are done on a regular
| basis. Usually it seems to involve automotive bodywork or
| subsurface mining with the occasional computer show.
|
| The channels that move to having sponsors or getting a lot of
| free stuff are for the high jump (although it's absolutely a
| riot to watch Heather Heying shill for some sofa company,
| hating life all the while). I think the best ones are done by
| pure hobbyists.
|
| Otherwise my current plan is to build a library of worthwhile
| videos via youtube-dl and DVD transfers. My guess is that the
| ad environment and much heavier copyright policing on youtube
| will make much of it unwatchable over time.
| hkt wrote:
| I've been the same with Twitter and Facebook. I've quit both
| and sometimes feel at a loss as to what to do, but I'm finding
| that if I put in the (frankly, herculean) effort I can find
| groups I like that are less geared towards dominating my
| attention and more rewarding. One such group has been my trade
| union, which I hadn't expected.
| drybjed wrote:
| Here's a few tips to combat this addiction:
|
| - turn off Youtube history, there will be no more suggestions
| based on your recent viewing activity to keep you engaged.
| Also, searching for a sink review will not result in Youtube
| suggesting sink-related videos for the rest of eternity.
|
| - install browser extensions: Clickbait Remover for Youtube
| (sanitizes video previews to remove clickbaity look from them)
| and DF Youtube (allows you to disable comments, related and
| other sections on the page, leaving only the video itself to
| focus on).
|
| Now you should be able to deal with this addiction in no time.
| Jolter wrote:
| First one kind of works, kind of doesn't. They still make
| recommendations based on your "likes" which is enough to fill
| at least my feed with semi-relevant content.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Clear your watch history and only watch things that are
| positive or educational. My youtube recommendations are purely
| music albums and different educational channels.
| grapist420 wrote:
| what are you watching, what's the point, how is it screwing
| with your life
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Yt is ridiculously addictive.
|
| They seem to recommend just the right thing to "okay lets watch
| this one last video" wasting hours of my day.
| sva_ wrote:
| Weird, the algorithm usually gives me crap, and I rarely
| click the recommendations. Perhaps because I didn't 'train'
| it.
| rgoulter wrote:
| Overall I don't find YT too addicting. - I think several
| different websites can substitute for "I'm bored, what's in
| the fridge?".
|
| Though, I did have to manually ignore a bunch of clips-
| from-tv -shows type channels.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I've trained it for 7 years, it knows me better than my
| parents.
| hoseja wrote:
| Worst part, it's actually _objectively good_ content in
| large part, as far as I am able to tell.
| jl6 wrote:
| Content addicts need to realize that there is more
| objectively good content out there than they are
| physically capable of consuming in one lifetime.
| Therefore the question to ask is how much of your life do
| you want to spend on content consumption.
| andrepd wrote:
| What's stunning to me is the ease with which it gives me
| fringe content. Example: I searched for a funny 20s clip of
| our President of the Republic, instantly the
| recommendations were _filled_ with propaganda from the
| local right-populist party 's yt channel.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The YouTube algorithm is well-known for channeling people
| towards extremist political content. _Mostly_ far-right-
| wing, though I imagine you could seed it to throw you
| down a left-wing rabbit hole.
| beckman466 wrote:
| Same, I watch mostly leftist and socialist content and the
| algorithm suggests utter shit.
| andrepd wrote:
| Don't worry, as soon as you watch 1 video from an alt-
| right channel your feed will be inundated with far-right
| content.
| quantafire wrote:
| This posted also in the last 24hrs:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28544615
| Timsmits wrote:
| We've been building an app to help you to make your smartphone
| screentime more conscious and we've just opened the beta this
| week!
| <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unpluq.bet...>
|
| It basically blocks distracting apps by default and gives you a
| barrier to open them like shaking your phone for a couple of
| seconds! Eager to hear what any of you think of it!
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I feel like this is a bit too tech centric. Poor dopamine hygiene
| will ruin your life. Doesn't really matter if you're hooked on
| twitter or methamphetamine.
|
| People who profit from encouraging poor dopamine hygiene will
| have an outsized influence on the people they've hooked, doesn't
| matter if you're managing an ad campaign in the US or part of the
| opium pipeline in Afghanistan.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think you are in violent agreement with TFA; most people
| don't need to be convinced that meth dealers don't have their
| clients' best interests at heart...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yeah, I suppose you're right.
|
| I originally clicked the link hoping that a "ledger of harms"
| would chronicle the worst offender for each harm. Not
| inciting anybody to anything, just making it known that _if_
| someone had some adversarial behavior in mind, _then_ it
| would be best directed at such and such an organization. That
| 's what I would call violent agreement.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| There should be something more specific about Tinder there.
| Cannot see how two-parent family units will not decline even
| further over the next few decades (not the only factor there of
| course but asking for government hand-outs is not the solution
| either).
| motohagiography wrote:
| The idea that the nuclear family can survive installing a
| secret slot machine for anonymous sex in every pocket is
| culpably naive. It was novel, sure, but it's objectively an
| inferior good and a vice if you don't manage it well.
| amelius wrote:
| This gives an unbalanced view, as it leaves out all the benefits
| of social media, such as watching funny videos, watching friends
| have a good time on holidays, staying "in the loop" with gossip,
| staying informed about events, releasing anger about political
| issues, and such.
| Jolter wrote:
| I think the argument is that all those things you mention can
| be bad or good, depending on how (and how much) it is done. I
| think nobody will debate that you can use social media to watch
| funny videos. But my personal standpoint is that every
| individual would be better served by consuming less content and
| instead doing something that is truly fulfilling. Such as
| spending time with others AFK, studying a topic of interest,
| taking up a creative hobby, doing a sport etc.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I agree with you, but ultimately you can't impose your values
| on other people (at least not without force), and so we gotta
| just let people be people.
| Jolter wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is. Should we stop discussing
| problems we see in society? Will the problem go away, then?
|
| Of course I can't (and wouldn't) force people at gunpoint
| to log our of their social media. Nobody is suggesting
| that.
|
| The article ("ledger") attempts to make an argument for a
| societal change. How would one start changing society, if
| one is not allowed to start gathering arguments/evidence in
| favor of the change one wants to see?
|
| "People be people", sure; if there wasn't a trillion-dollar
| industry profiting from people being hooked on social media
| and applying every trick at their disposal to keep people
| hooked, then you would have a point. No, it's not in
| people's nature to be hooked on scrolling Instagram. It's
| an entirely artificial problem that we have created
| together.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I feel that a lot of these aren't necessarily harms, just a
| change in how things are done.
|
| > Children who have been cyberbullied are 3x more likely to
| contemplate suicide compared to their peers.
|
| > Children who experienced cyberbullying during their adolescence
| were significantly more likely to engage in risk-taking health
| behavior as adults.
|
| Yes, bullying is bad. Now kids can get bullied online. Such is
| the way of things.
|
| > About 40% of 13-17 year olds reported it was "normal for people
| my age to share nudes with each other."
|
| .. so? People used polaroids before. It was harder so it was done
| less often, but done it was.
|
| > Children who see videos of child influencers holding unhealthy
| foods consume significantly more calories than those who see
| influencers holding other types of objects, as clearly shown by
| experiments using randomized control trials.
|
| In other news: researchers rediscover priming is a real effect.
|
| > More than half US middle-schoolers cannot distinguish
| advertising from real news, or fact from fiction.
|
| That's how its always been. Don't most people have a memory of
| being a kid around that age, and have your parents blow your mind
| by suggesting that not everything you see on TV is true?
|
| > 77% of teenagers get their news from social media, with 39%
| stating that they "often" get news from celebrities, influencers,
| or personalities, according to a survey of over 800 teens aged
| 13-18.
|
| Ah, so they should get their news from the TV or newspaper
| instead. Much more reliable, right? All news is dogshit, and
| various levels of lies. If you've ever been the center of a news
| story, you know that they literally lie and pull stuff out of
| nowhere constantly. Its made my jaw drop before.
|
| > 30% teens report that they pay "very little attention" to
| considering the source from which they are getting their news on
| social media.
|
| So 70% pay more than "very little attention" (phrasing!). I'd say
| most teens are actually better at discerning scams/obviously
| misleading content online than non-techie 50+ year olds, as long
| as it doesn't align with their biases (but that's a universal
| problem).
|
| > Several self-harming videos have been circulating on TikTok,
| from the "Skull breaker" challenge to the "Cha Cha Slide"
| challenge (which involves repeatedly swerving a car across a road
| in time to music).
|
| BREAKING NEWS: what do the bracelets around your child's wrist
| mean? Could they be engaging in secret parties where they take
| drugs and suck dick?
|
| This is fearmongering.
|
| > The number of US teenagers who are online continuously is
| increasing at a dramatic pace, almost doubling from 2015 to 2018:
| 24% to 45%.
|
| Because the internet is taking over the world.
| tremon wrote:
| Fully agreed, except for this one: _All news is dogshit, and
| various levels of lies_
|
| This is just first-grade populistic crap. Yes, there's various
| levels of lies and shit, but that doesn't mean they're all
| equally bad. Being able to discern the quality and
| trustworthiness of a source is an important skill, and it
| doesn't seem you are willing to master it.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Quality is rare. As they say, 80% of everything is shit. If
| you want actual news, you need to talk to lots of people,
| preferably in person but also by (e)mail, who are close to
| the event in some way. That, or they have extensively studied
| some topic close to the event you want to inform yourself
| about.
|
| This is really the only way to even get close to the truth.
| Every time I have read a news article on a subject I am an
| expert on, or about me, or about my family or friends, it was
| so glaringly wrong that anyone else who read it is now less
| informed than before. Sometimes not just in the facts, which
| might be mostly correct, but in the false narratives they
| present.
| mistermann wrote:
| It depends if you're looking at it on a relarive or absolute
| basis (how journalism _could_ be), but ya that seems a bit
| extremist.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Seconded. From half a century's experience I can confirm: kids
| are stupid and gullible, and will go to great lengths to
| achieve remarkable levels thereof - regardless of technology.
| Nothing has changed, it's just different.
| grapist420 wrote:
| yeah. This is the "I hate social media" equivalent of the daily
| mail's pop science coverage. Most of it's wrong, and the parts
| that aren't are totally uninformative.
| Jolter wrote:
| It's not wrong, it's all based on scientific evidence. That's
| kind of the point of the list.
|
| You got a big list of arguments for one viewpoint. You might
| want to point to evidence of your opposing view instead of
| dismissing the science without addressing any of its claims.
| zepto wrote:
| It takes more than a single study for something to become
| 'science'. Especially in the social sciences, where
| replication is a real problem.
|
| I'm strongly in agreement with the goal and the sentiment
| of the project, but not with its execution. We need a lot
| more epistemic humility and contextualization for this to
| not just seem like just another political project.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, if they'd read and critiqued at least some of the
| papers, we would all be more informed rather than
| outraged.
| zepto wrote:
| Right, and compared the stats with other harms etc.
| Jolter wrote:
| I think this argument is disingenuous:
|
| > > About 40% of 13-17 year olds reported it was "normal for
| people my age to share nudes with each other."
|
| >.. so? People used polaroids before. It was harder so it was
| done less often, but done it was.
|
| You state that social media makes it easier, but that is
| exactly the point of the OP article. If it is harmful behavior,
| and social media makes it easier, then social media is
| contributing to harming kids. Right?
|
| If you want to shrug it off, at least state your argument
| honestly, like "I don't think it's a problem that 14-year-olds
| share nudes between them, so it's not a problem that social
| media makes it easier".
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Sure, I'll state my point straight: I don't think there's a
| problem with teens sending nudes to each other. Nor is there
| a way to stop them, even if there was. Nearly every one I
| know has produced some form of pornography for their SO at
| some point, so expecting young people who are at the height
| of their hormone craze not to is a bit silly.
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