[HN Gopher] Why some researchers think I'm wrong about social me...
___________________________________________________________________
Why some researchers think I'm wrong about social media and mental
illness
Author : YuukiRey
Score : 300 points
Date : 2023-04-19 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jonathanhaidt.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonathanhaidt.substack.com)
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt's
| rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears
| around climate change are not "energizing" in the way that prior
| crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around
| climate change is that we're already doomed in a way that isn't
| really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don't think most
| teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s;
| extensive public awareness of climate change doesn't imply a
| disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider
| that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in
| the mid-late 2000s.
|
| I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he
| discussed social media as an _accelerant_ , rather than a cause
| in and of itself. I can't think of any real reason why he doesn't
| (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same
| conclusions) other than ideological ones: he's too baked into his
| incestuous "heterodox" world to weaken his claims.
| js8 wrote:
| Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the
| dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some
| "existential crisis" among young people are BS.
|
| Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair
| hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what
| they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think
| proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media
| effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's
| on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing
| suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant
| evidence.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I have seen posters on this very website claim that they will
| not be having children as a direct result of the information
| they have received about climate change.
|
| of course, it's difficult to determine how much of that is ex
| post facto reasoning as justification for a decision that was
| already made for completely different reasons...
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly
| younger ones (and I'm in my mid-20s), who are _extremely_
| anxious about climate change. They've sought mental health
| services because of their worries. I don't think that's
| particularly unique.
|
| I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is
| the point I was attempting to make with a "weaker" version of
| Haidt's argument.
| asdff wrote:
| I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is
| because people don't really understand statistics nor
| history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't
| be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in
| that future is still a far better hand than all of your
| ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke
| your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your
| colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint
| inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged
| it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at
| least with that medical history. That's something to
| celebrate.
|
| Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status
| quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's
| from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural
| resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use
| them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or
| worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now
| exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over,
| and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding
| energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system
| will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who
| knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really
| doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make
| it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have
| distant relatives who weren't human and only became human
| due to selective pressures from the environment at the
| time. We should expect to change when the environment does,
| dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to
| fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider
| we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other
| species driving a climate change on earth previously (there
| were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and
| others), of actually being globally aware of climate
| change.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Isn't this a social media problem as well? Climate change
| is a hot topic on social media. When we are frequently
| exposed to doom-porn, we tend to develop a bleak outlook.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Read the comment again: that's the "weaker" argument, one
| that Haidt fails to make.
| burkaman wrote:
| > But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are
| anxious about and how they deal with it
|
| Many people have done that in actual studies. Here's one
| example: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PI
| IS2542-5.... It's not just people projecting and thinking
| "I'm worried about climate change so the kids must be as
| well."
| paganel wrote:
| > a significant part because public sentiment around climate
| change is that we're already doomed in a way that isn't really
| possible with social crises.
|
| That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic,
| I'd say Western people under 40 years of age (which also
| greatly matches this forum's users, I would say). But as
| Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match
| that "doom" feeling, and looking around at people my age and
| older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the
| coming climate Apocalypse is shared.
| Nowado wrote:
| Which matches the topic of the article, right?
| paganel wrote:
| I was contesting OP's point of view which was implying that
| everyone is on board with the climate doomerism, I hadn't
| read the article.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately
| many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate
| itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the
| world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective.
|
| A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it
| wasn't for that.
|
| And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't
| really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on
| ineffective things.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything?
| The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many
| areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism
| aren't helpful.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists
| is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they
| will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who
| uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern
| era.
|
| Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4
| pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and
| plastic for which there is no realistic alternative.
|
| Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive
| technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even
| become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency
| issues.
|
| Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption
| is electricity.
|
| The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can
| work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt
| generators.
|
| Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing
| wind and solar is what isn't helpful.
| jterrys wrote:
| Considering that:
|
| The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive
| amount even proportionally compared to _China_ , there's
| definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can
| be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint.
| Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered
| a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies.
| Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates
| waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I
| get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear
| and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on
| American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the
| trash like everything else here because nobody bothers
| with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned
| out because the only people even bothering to return
| plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are
| the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the
| fucking effort.
|
| The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an
| endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This
| country _had_ better public transit that was muscled out
| by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually
| privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die.
| Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a
| contributor to making the world just a little bit more
| warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of
| rail commuting and freight transport. We 're twiddling
| our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and
| become unusable, because its cheaper to move less
| material over trucks.
|
| These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum
| result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can
| definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we
| are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we
| classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to
| conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford
| cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and
| almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer
| market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are
| arguably less safer SUVs
| ThomPete wrote:
| You have to come up with a better alternative that
| doesn't take things away.
|
| Your examples are good examples of things that are not
| better alternatives, they are worse.
|
| I don't think most people realize just how unique a
| material plastic for instance is.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and
| can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten
| salt generators.
|
| You don't need to go that far. Fission and geothermal can
| work at scale _today_ and largely solve the impending
| climate trainwreck _today_. We haven 't adopted them in
| droves not because of some technological limitation, but
| rather because they're more expensive on balance sheets
| (which don't account for negative externalities) and
| because the fossil fuel industry has successfully
| manipulated the public into equating "renewable energy"
| with "things fundamentally incapable of providing base
| load".
| jackmott42 wrote:
| If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic,
| fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to
| quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom?
|
| You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian
| you aren't even making sense, as is normal.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Whether you can make sense of what I am writing is out of
| my control.
|
| However there is nothing in what I said that isn't
| factually correct. If that makes me boomer contrarian the
| so be it.
| frostburg wrote:
| OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure
| like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point
| probably unavoidable damage.
|
| There should be less emphasis on policing individual
| behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost
| completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant
| issues and provides cover from political inaction.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea
| floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me
| today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-
| branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches.
| There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.
| ThomPete wrote:
| agree, whats your point?
| jackmott42 wrote:
| That phenomena like Greta are possible all the time in
| all kinds of situations
| 1827162 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There
| is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world
| of hurt in the coming several decades.
| ThomPete wrote:
| No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically
| proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to
| deal with.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence.
| Got any?
| simiones wrote:
| > I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the
| opinions of those saying that there is impending doom.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness
|
| > It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or
| not, over the coming decades...
|
| You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already
| starting to be visible.
| 1827162 wrote:
| It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong
| when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories
| or pseudoscience.
|
| I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track
| record of being correct in the end.
|
| Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I
| might be completely wrong.
|
| And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe
| to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be
| arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity.
| Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change
| doomsaying.
|
| And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be
| simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to
| the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too,
| which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate
| change actually happening?
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will
| have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that
| its impact on human geographic dispersion, social
| organization, and reproductive patterns will be
| imperceptible to those feeling its effects.
|
| It won't be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the
| sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it
| transform things for the worse, and will our successors
| envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| What is special about the year 2012 in regard to these fears?
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the
| social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism
| was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of
| lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will
| turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of
| affairs.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state
|
| I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and
| governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a
| large part of lack of activism around climate change is also
| the people themselves who don't want to change. The
| Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections,
| nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to
| reduce response to climate change and other environmental
| issues.
|
| For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is
| clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on
| daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for
| the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life
| continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also,
| actually doing something about it takes effort/investment
| from everyone, not just government and corporations. It
| requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of
| what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller
| cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become
| less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing.
| Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying
| cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.
|
| I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most
| environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat
| less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I
| don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly
| start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is
| possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort
| and I don't see that happening either.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| > Even the most environmentally aware people around me
| pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually
| changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150
| driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.
|
| What do you expect people in general to do? Granted,
| driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly
| activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint"
| [0] by 50%. How much would that help?
|
| The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of
| greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1]
| Until we, collectively, do something about their practices,
| there's precious little that individuals can do to get us
| to net zero.
|
| Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this
| way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes
| -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.
|
| There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've
| successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the
| face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point,
| we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5
| degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what
| we do right now.
|
| I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we
| should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should
| all work on reducing our consumption, because at this
| point, the choices that are going to provide us a better
| future in the next couple of decades are essentially those
| that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are
| reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically
| increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple
| decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going
| to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the
| effects of climate change will ensure that the number of
| people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.
|
| So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as
| you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I
| don't know how to deal with that at a personal level,
| myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?
|
| ---
|
| [0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term
| intended to blame _you_ and not the actual (mostly
| corporate) actors responsible for making most of the
| emissions.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-
| wrong-pe...
| klooney wrote:
| The 100 corporations thing is silly. They aren't out
| there polluting for the fun of it, they're making stuff
| for people and organizations.
|
| If people and governments and companies stop buying gas,
| the pollution on Chevron's ledger for oil extraction and
| refining will plummet as they get stuck with smaller
| markets like plastic manufacturing.
|
| Those dastardly 100 corporations are emitting to make
| stuff for you.
| donkeyd wrote:
| Thanks for writing this, people in general seems to
| completely be missing this point. Oil companies pollute
| to provide us with:
|
| Fuel for our cars. Fuel for shipping all the goods we
| want cheaply made in Asia. Fuel for planes to business
| meetings that could be done online. Fuel for planes we
| take to mass consume alcohol in the Caribbean. Plastics
| for packaging all that stuff we're buying. Plastics for
| producing the stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing
| the cheap clothing we wear twice and throw out.
|
| Oil companies are just one example. And alternatives for
| most of this this are all more expensive, which is why
| most people don't want to switch to better alternatives,
| like:
|
| Buy locally sourced produce. Don't buy imported avocados,
| bananas, coconuts. Buy locally sourced meat. Get whole
| chickens and eat everything. Make a stock from the
| leftovers. Buy organic cotton clothing. Or figure out
| what clothing you can get that's locally produced. Buy
| furniture from a local furniture craftsman. Don't replace
| things that aren't broken. Don't go to McDonald's, go to
| a local burger restaurant that doesn't import 'Irish
| grass fed beef'. Take a train to a vacation destination
| nearby.
|
| For some of us, all of this may be obvious, but for the
| majority of people it isn't. And as long as we keep
| blaming companies and then sit back, nothing will ever
| change.
| Draiken wrote:
| But there are many ways to make all of this stuff. Many
| times there are better ways and less harmful ways, but
| those are basically always less profitable.
|
| This is capitalism and the one and only objective is
| profit. It's never going to be working towards having a
| sustainable world, getting better stuff, getting less
| useless stuff, etc.
|
| We don't need half the stupid stuff that's being sold to
| us and we keep buying it because that's how the system is
| setup.
|
| So yes, they aren't polluting for the fun of it. They are
| doing so for the profit of a few.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| They're making stuff for people who get no input into how
| that stuff is made, much of which they can't just stop
| consuming.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Of course people have an input. You can buy it from
| someone else who makes it a different way, or not at all.
| [deleted]
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Let's leave aside "not at all," because that's often not
| a viable option. Let's also remember, we're talking about
| reaching net zero emissions. For instance, where do I buy
| carbon neutral food?
|
| You can't materialize those alternatives if they don't
| exist. And, when we're talking about making things in
| more sustainable ways by emitting less carbon, because
| carbon externalities aren't accounted for, the
| sustainable way is more expensive than the dirty way. So,
| capitalist corporations being the profit maximizing
| machines that they are, inevitably choose the dirty way.
|
| Then there are the energy inputs to account for.
|
| See also this comment by another user:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630362
| tstrimple wrote:
| The fact that Nestle still exists should be proof enough
| for anyone that it literally doesn't matter how horrible
| a large corporation is. There is no activism route to
| correcting these companies behavior. Only legislation
| with teeth will work. That we'll all collectively decide
| to stop doing business with bad companies is nothing but
| a libertarian fantasy.
| pydry wrote:
| >Also, actually doing something about it takes
| effort/investment from everyone, not just government and
| corporations.
|
| This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw
| out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've
| always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more
| effective methods, for instance.
|
| The implicit message is that rather than the company being
| forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more
| personal responsibility.
|
| The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon
| taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but
| they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.
|
| Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > This is pretty much the standard line corporations
| throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why
| they've always been so keen on recycling relative to
| other, more effective methods, for instance.
|
| Yes, but this is only part of it and once again is an
| easy way to blame corporations. It's not just easy for
| them to tell people to recycle. It's also really easy for
| people to recycle and feel good about themselves while
| not doing much.
|
| To really impact climate change, we need societal change
| and that has to come from everyone. People, companies,
| government all need to change, we can't keep pointing
| fingers at each other, but that's what we're all doing.
| pydry wrote:
| >is an easy way to blame corporations
|
| It really isn't. The 100 companies responsible for 71% of
| global emissions have a massively outsized impact on the
| climate. They have got exceptional PR and have done a
| _spectacular_ job of diffusing their responsibilities and
| protecting their bottom lines at the expense of the
| planet.
|
| It's easy to buy into their propaganda though.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually
| "anti"-climatechange-sideffects.
|
| They are just more willing to invest ton of money in
| fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is
| so hardwired.
|
| Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the
| problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on
| Big Oil because they caused this mess.
| dexterdog wrote:
| > The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent
| elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties
| that want to reduce response to climate change and other
| environmental issues.
|
| But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green
| stance? I can understand people being sick of the
| mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their
| money.
| sw104 wrote:
| I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's
| clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their
| lifestyle to practice what they preach.
|
| I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus
| network, so many people come to work along the same routes
| as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.
|
| We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy
| to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even
| encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public
| transport.
|
| Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage
| for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a
| whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Regarding public transport a conductor enforcing code of
| conduct would be nice.
|
| Jobs!1!!
| Veen wrote:
| It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on
| teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two
| crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real
| risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it
| was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA
| bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age
| being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc.
| But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents,
| there was no massive uptick in mental illness.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| But you also had Samantha Fox singing "Touch me now!" while
| surrendering to the spirits of the night ;->
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles
| and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while
| climate change (in the popular conception) feels
| fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also
| fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social
| activism; the latter _contains_ social concerns but is
| fundamentally a global coordination problem that's roughly
| equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires
| nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions
| in favor of the global good). Most people don't think world
| peace is achievable, so it's understandable why that
| sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the
| time. The popular conception was that of present day North
| Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow,
| they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the
| world, and they'd successfully set up a system to prevent
| sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is
| that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who
| could not stand to let a worker's movement survive; in the
| rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system
| where the country must remain communist because the Red
| Army will invade otherwise.)
| woodruffw wrote:
| Two points stand out:
|
| * At least in the US, the fear of nuclear annihilation
| was partially offset by the belief (which was never
| officially substantiated) that the government would
| adhere to a policy of rational deterrence, i.e. MAD. It's
| hard to find polls on belief in MAD, but friends and
| family I've talked to have stated that it was a source of
| reassurance during all but the most stressful moments of
| the Cold War.
|
| * The stress of the Cold War _also_ coincides with the
| longest period of peace and greatest increase in quality
| of life in the Western world. An intuitive explanation of
| why suicides didn't increase under the stress of the Cold
| War is that life was otherwise improving for most
| Westerners in tangible ways. The relative stagnancy of
| the last 30 years is a significant departure from that.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we
| regularly tell ourselves about technology.
|
| 1) Technology is bad
|
| 2) Technology is good
|
| 3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism)
|
| 4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism)
|
| 5) Technology is an accelerant
|
| Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one
| of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in
| this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be
| aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with
| #3.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I'd say that Haidt is
| blaming the wind for the fire: he's confusing the thing that
| accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for
| things themselves. This resembles his own "map and territory"
| claims about those responding to him.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| all of these could be true simultaneously.
| scythe wrote:
| To borrow a quote from one of your other posts:
|
| > climate change (in the popular conception) feels
| fundamentally unresolvable.
|
| For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I
| have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its
| management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in
| academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that
| may be used to address them.
|
| So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is
| obviously silly to blame a _false perception_ -- that climate
| change is unresolvable -- on the real facts about climate
| change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A
| far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social
| media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying
| both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has
| absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social
| media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety
| is climate change itself and not the people who helped them
| down that road. Look at the graphs:
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
|
| >I can't think of any real reason why he doesn't (it makes his
| argument strictly stronger, and results in the same
| conclusions)
|
| Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an
| "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for
| urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus.
| It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to
| interpret than "cause".
| theGnuMe wrote:
| We need to improve our emotional intelligence by talking about
| emotions and feelings to become more resilient. We as a society
| are emotionally immature and let others manipulate us and cede
| power to them because we are scared of our true selves.
| FridLV wrote:
| [flagged]
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Mental health is an incredibly tricky thing to study. Since all
| observations are of a person says they feel and what observations
| can be made of the person and what they may say various semi
| standard questionnaires.
|
| The first problem is defining what depression is. This is
| actually hard.
|
| The present official definition can be found here:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176119/
|
| A great lecture on it by Professor Robert Sapolsky can be found
| here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc He does this
| far far better than I ever can. I include a tiny transcript
| below.
|
| Even within the medical field the term is used in ways that
| complicate matters.
|
| We find "Depression, otherwise known as major depressive disorder
| or clinical depression"
|
| This is incorrect.
|
| In everyday use the term depression is not equal to "clinical
| depression", or "major depressive disorder"
|
| In regular conversation depression is often used instead of
| "sad". or "bummed".
|
| If relying on a self-report survey that asks in part if you feel
| or have felt depression over XXXX timeline a lot of people will
| say "yes". Yet most will probably not meet the definition of
| major depressive disorder or clinical depression.
|
| If in everyday speech care was taken to only use depression for
| sad, and clinical depression was used for the metal disorder then
| things would be easier but as I showed above even medical
| professionals tend to use the term "depression".
|
| I think using the term "depression" has become a lot more popular
| than it was.
|
| 50 years ago, using it in common language was so common.
|
| This gets better in the studies when (some) people attend college
| where (some) people are seen by mental health professionals.
| However, in my personal knowledge hte above is also primarily
| self-reported, and not based on the treatment and therapy of the
| majority of the people in question.
|
| Yet we have a non-representative sample. Only people with
| privilege to attend high university and of them the people who
| have sought out help.
|
| So that is the problem of semantics.
|
| A second problem is why If a girl who spends only 1h a day on
| social media is less prone to "depression" than a girl who spends
| 8h a day on social media does that mean social media is the big
| factor.
|
| I find it likely that it wold often be the case that a person
| with a healthy social life, a good family, good activities, that
| takes up a lot of time.
|
| While someone who spends 8h on social media per day perhaps needs
| more positive activities. Which can be incredibly difficult to
| achieve.
|
| The argument has been made in different forms for a long time.
| Too much TV, too much rock music, too much video games, too much
| black metal.
|
| Yet I do think that social media is far too often a destructive
| component in someone's life. With severity than listening to a
| vinyl recording all day or playing Quake. I would be quite happy
| if it all died. It dont see that happening.
|
| Partial transcript of a lecture by Professor Robert Sapolsky ""
| So starting off, first giving a sense of symptoms. And right off
| the bat, we've got a sematic problem, which is we all use the
| word depression in an everyday sense. You get some bad news about
| something. You now have to replace the transmission in your car.
| Somebody disappoints you enormously. And you feel bummed. You
| feel depressed. You are down for a few days. That's not the
| version of depression I'll be talking about.
|
| Next version, you do have some sort of large, legitimate loss,
| setback, whatever, losing a job, unemployment, death of a loved
| one. And you are extremely impaired by a sense of malaise for
| weeks afterward. And then you come out the other end. That's sort
| of what I'll be talking about.
|
| But even more so what I'll focus on is the subset of individuals
| who, when something like that occurs, falls into this depressive
| state. And weeks and months later, they still have not come out
| the other end.
|
| Terminology. The everyday depression that we all have now and
| then, that sort of version. The second one, the something awful
| happens and you feel terrible for a while, and then come out the
| other end, a reactive depression. The third version, where you
| are flattened by it for long periods afterward, a major
| depression. And what you also see with people with major
| depression after a while is it doesn't take something awful
| externally to trigger one of those again.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > Similarly, when the Polish-American philosopher Alfred
| Korzybski said "The map is not the territory," he was reminding
| us that in science, we make simple abstract models to help us
| understand complex things, but then we sometimes forget we've
| done the simplification, and we treat the model as if it was
| reality.
|
| I think this is a very useful criticism for the subject as a
| whole.
|
| The very term, "social media" is incredibly broad. That doesn't
| mean it's _useless_ : but we should recognize that it contains a
| lot of diverse context. If there is a cause of mental illness,
| what would that look like contextually?
|
| The introduction of smart phones and social media can provide a
| long list of answers to that question. Which of those answers is
| more or less significant?
|
| None of this is to say we shouldn't be concerned about the effect
| that social media and smart phones have on mental health. What's
| important here is _what we choose to do about it_.
|
| Do we promote a different type of social platform? Current social
| media sites like Facebook and Twitter are infamous for promoting
| unhealthy behavior. What kinds of alternative behavior would be
| _healthy_?
|
| Do we encourage parents to limit their childrens' social media
| time or invade their childrens' privacy? The internet is a
| significant attack surface for bullying and assault, but is it
| wise for parents to simply take its place?
|
| Do we encourage parents to take away mobile devices, and
| reinforce traditional face-to-face social activity? Social with
| who, and where?
|
| It's abundantly clear that social media and smart phones have
| caused a significant change in our society. We can do better than
| blindly react to that change.
|
| I would argue that the most powerful tool of the human mind is
| objectivity. The more we learn about _how_ social media and smart
| phones change our society, the better equipped we will be to
| direct that change to our benefit.
| thih9 wrote:
| What about the increase in mental health awareness (including:
| better education and reducing the stigma) - is being able to
| detect more cases contributing in a meaningful way to the overall
| increase?
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I'm not sure this would account for the increased number of
| girls allegedly cutting/poisoning themselves. According to the
| graph on an older article on his substack, the number of girls
| admitted to hospital from self-harm has gone up by 48% since
| 2010. Perhaps some of these cases would have been categorised
| as accidental in the past (or not even taken to hospital maybe)
| but all of them?
| Decabytes wrote:
| I wonder how much of the negative aspects of social media are due
| to the gamification of it as well as the algorithms that boost
| certain types of content.
|
| For example, if Twitter had no algorithm, didn't show you the
| number of views on your post, didn't show you the number of likes
| on your posts or retweets, and you just used it to post funny
| memes, interesting articles, and life updates to your followers
| if it would still have the same negative impacts that it does
| today.
|
| I also wonder what a social media site would look like if the
| only way to follow someone, was if they gave you a QR code that
| was generated on their phone. That way most of the people that
| followed you would only be people you've met in real life. The QR
| code could expire in like 5 minutes to prevent people from just
| posting it somewhere to get follows. It would be much more
| private, and much slower paced, and people couldn't see any of
| your posts without following you.
| max51 wrote:
| what made the original facebook so great is that it was
|
| 1) semi-exclusive (ei. your parents weren't on it)
|
| 2) The content you saw on your feed was 100% things that your
| direct friends manually typed or shared with you. No
| recommended posts from strangers, no corporate pages, no ads,
| no games, no articles from groups that you follow to keep up
| with the local news (eg. HOAs, local politicians, news
| station), no posts from extended family members that you
| accepted as friends out of peer pressure, etc.
|
| Trying to grow and become that one-stop-shop for everything the
| internet has to offer is what ruined it. Having your mom, your
| 7 yr old cousin and the local shops on the same platform as
| young adults is more profitable for facebook, but it doesn't
| make it better for the users.
|
| The only platforms that have kept their reputations over the
| years are those with leaders that knew how to say no to ideas
| that compromises the great/unique aspects of the platform in
| exchange for a larger quarterly profit.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >QR code that was generated on their phone
|
| this gets brought up a lot, often paired with GPS/other sensor
| matching and with a flavor of PGP-first thinking, web of trust,
| etc.
|
| The protocol only allows interaction with other people that
| have swapped keys or been "vouched", depending on the multi-sig
| requirements baked into the protocol.
|
| With the correct marketing scheme, this could take off,
| ironically being fueled by FOMO/exclusionary social pressure
| and meme pressure.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| As a parent. It's a hard topic. And not black and white.
|
| For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding
| their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this
| are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part
| of the puzzle.
|
| Consider a few things:
|
| 1. The percentage of households with kids has gradually declined
| over time, while the percentage of retirees has gone up. So you
| just generally have an older population. Not everyone lives in a
| neighborhood where kids can roam and likely some other, known,
| parent will keep an eye on them.
|
| 2. Tolerance for children (esp teenagers) IMO has declined.
| Understandably, they... can be obnoxious :). There used to be
| more IRL activities for teens. I've seen, however, even movie
| theaters don't want ANY minors there without a parent. There's
| not a shopping mall to drop them off at. And the pandemic has
| REALLY hurt this.
|
| 3. The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities
| is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever
| good college / do well in life, they need to have their time
| spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting
| has really taken new heights in the last decade.
|
| Combining these, society, for a myriad of reasons, doesn't have a
| lot of opportunities for teenagers to truly be independent. And
| that too has been cited as a cause of mental health issues (https
| ://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309101330.h...).
|
| It's a doom spiral too, the fewer kids that are free roaming, the
| less likely your own kid, when kicked out of the house, will find
| friends to play with. The less likely other parents will be
| conducive to your kid knocking on their door, etc etc.
|
| So without kids roaming the streets, how do they connect with
| their friends? They use some kind of screen / video games /
| social media / etc. And depriving them of this can mean limiting
| an outlet of some degree of independence.
|
| Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord
| server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the
| same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of
| independence somewhat away from parental eyes.
|
| Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out
| in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a
| social / independence outlet?
| hackerlight wrote:
| > Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord
| server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not
| the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of
| independence somewhat away from parental eyes. Should I ban
| them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world
| with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social /
| independence outlet?
|
| Haidt says male use of social media in the form of gaming is
| categorically different to Instagram/Snapchat/Tiktok-type
| social media use. Because that social activity is less about
| performing for the camera and bullying and social comparisons,
| so he doesn't see it to be a problem in need of a ban.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| I wonder if some of the lack of teenager tolerance has to do
| with larger congregations of teens due to social media. When I
| was young with no cell phone it was a non-trivial exercise to
| get a few friends to coordinate to meet and go to a movie.
|
| Now you can start with 4 or 5 people, and if their friends and
| friends of friends start to get looped in then you have a
| larger group. Now instead of 0 or 1 obnoxious kids in a group,
| you may have 3-4 obnoxious ones and a much larger group.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| A lot of this rings true but is this a theory that explains a
| sharp bend in 2012?
| codegeek wrote:
| Great points. I was just in Spain (Madrid) and noticed
| teenagers playing in parks and even on swings etc along with
| small children. I never see that in American parks, never. I
| don't know the mental happiness of teenagers in Spain/Madrid in
| general but my wife and I thought it was interesting.
| fnimick wrote:
| > The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities
| is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever
| good college / do well in life, they need to have their time
| spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter
| parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.
|
| This is the big one, in conjunction with other comments about
| how there's "no tolerance for failure" anymore. You have to be
| on track to be a top tier performer by the time you're 10 or
| else you will never make it back up (or at least that's how a
| lot of people feel). Plus there's a sense that either you make
| it to the top, or you might as well be at the bottom, because
| the middle class is rapidly vanishing.
|
| The pressure is higher, and starts younger, than ever before.
| max51 wrote:
| >Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord
| server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not
| the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of
| independence somewhat away from parental eyes.
|
| I think not enough people here are understanding the
| distinction between a communication tool (eg. discord), doom-
| scrolling platform like tiktok, and video games.
|
| A discord server can be very beneficial for your kids and allow
| them to coordinate activities. A lot of cool experiences I had
| in high school and friendships were a direct result of MSN
| Messenger. A shared multiplayer server like minecraft is also a
| great way to make friends and learn some social skills. I don't
| think it's as good as a physical sport activity, but it's far
| better than a lot solo hobbies traditionally considered "good"
| for them.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The lumping of these together might help explain the gender
| imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well
| documented that boys play more videogames, especially going
| into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to
| smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities.
|
| If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends
| playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the
| same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's
| going to obscure the social media influence on mental health
| outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I
| struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate
| the two.
| max51 wrote:
| >The lumping of these together might help explain the
| gender imbalance in the mental health effect.
|
| I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense
| in retrospect.
|
| It would also explain why the only people I know who
| developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos
| games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to
| learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them.
| There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like
| we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was
| fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play
| games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any
| IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now
| who started their career by trying to remove the virus that
| came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high
| school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with
| the right motivation.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a
| virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we
| now know that copy protection came with malware too, most
| infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to
| have made Denuvo).
| max51 wrote:
| I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to
| use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a
| VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen
| gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped
| for the best.
|
| The viruses I have seen myself were really not that
| dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life
| not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to
| detect with task manager/services compared to today and
| it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or
| manually. There were far less things running on your PC
| in the background and internet traffic was minimal.
| blululu wrote:
| Strongly agree, but the challenge is that it is not a hard
| and fast distinction within a single product/app. Take
| Snapchat for example (popular with the under 18 crowd). It is
| both a messaging tool to communicate with friends (great) and
| it also has a ton of other doom scroll/UGC feed services. I'm
| not sure what the break down in time and profits for the two
| services are, but I suspect that they make good money from
| the doom scroll stuff so it is hard for their executive
| leadership to be ethical on this issue. I would personally be
| very supportive if the Government would take measures to
| protect people under 18 from feeds without restricting access
| to messaging. Such a law will require a bit of subtlety in
| how it works.
| kayge wrote:
| Video games are a sore subject in my house... I grew up with
| them and I turned out arguably okay (healthy, employable,
| sociable, etc). But my wife thinks they are the bane of
| society. And it wasn't until recently that I realized how
| much the "endgame" of video games has shifted since my
| childhood in the 90s. Back then, it seemed like the majority
| of games had an actual end, or they continued to get
| progressively painfully harder, or both. The number of
| mainstream games that went on 'forever' (and encouraged you
| to keep playing) seemed much lower. Now it seems like it's
| quite the opposite, and of course its the addicting, never-
| ending, always-online games that our kids and their friends
| want to play.
|
| For now I'm mostly letting my kids play on one of those mini
| Super Nintendos with a bunch of built-in games, which they
| always eventually get tired of and decide on their own to go
| do something else. When it's Minecraft... I basically have to
| peel it out of their hands.
| max51 wrote:
| yes, things have definitely changed for video games in the
| past few years.
|
| Loot boxes and the concept of being peer-pressured into
| paying money for trendy skins is not something that existed
| when I grew up. TBH, I think many concepts that are popular
| in AAA games today should require robust 18+ (or even 21+)
| ID verification to be allowed to use them. I generally
| never like the idea to banning things for everyone, but we
| can at least make it a bit harder for kids to access them.
|
| Minecraft is one of the extremely few addictive games I
| wouldn't be too worried about if I was raising kids but I
| would verify what type of server/maps they are using. They
| get to build things and interacts with other people and
| last time I checked they had relatively few dark patterns
| (no gambling, loot boxes, paying for trendy skins, pay-to-
| win, etc.). I hope it is still the same today.
| screye wrote:
| This is the inevitable conclusions of stranger danger and car-
| based suburbanization.
|
| When people only access the world via car and avoid walking
| around, they never build familiarity with their own
| neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for,
| are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also
| means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense
| areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.
|
| Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public
| trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to
| supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both
| ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something
| between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income
| households, the only location where children were safe and
| tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict
| supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or
| found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds
| dystopian even as I type it out.
|
| Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these
| children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American
| society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for
| this travesty to take place.
|
| People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of
| least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that
| path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter
| to the built infrastructure.
|
| ___
|
| I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of
| 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest
| of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small
| store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and
| that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves
| home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in
| through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get
| to know your neighbors.
|
| The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to
| check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant
| that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in
| leaving their younger children under their supervision, in
| return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent
| their time.
|
| North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores
| and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have
| completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| This doesn't explain why teenage girls are suffering from
| increased mental health issues not only in the USA, but also
| in other Anglosphere countries, Nordic countries... (etc. ?)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| As already pointed out on the other blog posts, pressure to
| "get into whatever good college" can't be the explanation when
| it is only affecting a statistically insignificant minority :
| even in the USA, roughly half of people don't go to college,
| and roughly the other half is getting accepted into one that is
| not hard to get into.
| fsociety wrote:
| Excuse me we came here to use data to dog on social media not
| solve actual problems.
|
| It sounds like you have a very healthy relationship with your
| son!
| taeric wrote:
| Wow. I both respect this post, while being annoyed at its
| direction. It is very respectful in the intro, by explicitly not
| trying to be attacks against the critics. However, it then is
| entreating the readers to pick a side for most of the rest.
|
| I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should
| look at how you can add to and learn from the data. Odds are high
| that both sides have some points that are worth picking up, such
| that picking a side is almost certainly shutting you out of some
| good ideas.
|
| My personal push would be to say that claiming mental health
| became a problem in 2010s is absurd. It has long been a problem,
| as evidenced by such easy examples as Columbine. Before that, it
| was likely a largely local problem. In that you didn't hear about
| the kids that were having trouble, but they were there.
|
| Does this contradict the assertions of the troubles of social
| media? I don't think so. Just don't think you have shielded your
| kids from all modern sources of mental ill by simply keeping them
| away from social media.
|
| This is like thinking that drinking coffee or wine is de facto
| healthy for you. Likely, the health benefits are as much on what
| you were not drinking instead. Such that, keeping kids from
| social media by keeping them engaged with others around them is
| likely a net positive. By how much of that is keeping them
| engaged in a participatory way, versus keeping them apart? Such
| that, if you can get them engaging with things in a healthy way,
| you can make everyone in that area healthier. You can see this
| with online groups that are healthy. Yes, there will be some
| level of banning, as we all have capacities. But the healthy
| crowds engage. They don't just shout down. Even when they have to
| deal with people shouting, attempts are made to moderate.
| YuukiRey wrote:
| But the author isn't arguing that mental health only became a
| problem in 2010, if I understand your post correctly. They're
| claiming it became more of a problem because of social media
| use, particularly among girls, no?
|
| If by "Columbine" you're referring to the shooting, then that's
| only a US thing and doesn't apply to other countries.
| taeric wrote:
| Right, and in that I can mostly get behind. Again, I don't
| think the researcher is wrong. I think it is wrong to "pick a
| side" and only buy in to that.
|
| You are right that I was referring to the shooting. But you
| will have to tell me why that isn't a mental health thing. Do
| I think it is also a gun control issue? Certainly, but even
| without the guns, those kids were still very mentally
| unstable. And growing up in that time, I knew many mentally
| unstable people. Luckily, they didn't have access to guns.
|
| Similar statement could be about social media. Before 2010s,
| they didn't have access to social media. My assertion would
| be that they were likely still there.
|
| Now, is mental illness contagious? I'd wager that is
| probable. But I don't know for sure. And I'm going to guess
| you need evidence and an open mind to both "sides" presented
| in this post to progress to an answer.
| YuukiRey wrote:
| I could definitely imagine that shootings and the
| subsequent drills have a negative effect on children's
| mood. What I meant was that this effect would be limited to
| the US, whereas the data presented in his articles seems to
| often cover a much larger part of the world.
| taeric wrote:
| Apologies, I meant that the negative moods and mental
| instability predating these events. I am open to the idea
| that they could be getting exacerbated by them. It is odd
| now that I have kids. I have no doubt I will change
| thoughts as years go by. In ways that I can't fully
| understand, yet. The way that anxiety clearly hits some
| of my family more than others is hard not to see.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should
| look at how you can add to and learn from the data.
|
| Haidt is sufficiently convinced by the existing data that he
| feels strongly that what is called for is action, not more data
| collection (or perhaps, action alongside more data collection).
|
| You are apparently not as convinced as Haidt. That's OK, but
| you need to consider the perspective of someone who feels that
| we've already established what is happening with sufficient
| confidence that we need to move onto action.
|
| And as Haidt says: what is the cost if the skeptics are wrong
| vs. if the alarm ringers are wrong?
| taeric wrote:
| Yeah, but I can say we should agree with his proposals
| without "picking his side." We probably should take a lot of
| the actions he is proposing. But we should not dismiss the
| "other side" while doing so.
|
| Edit: I see I should not have said "the data" in what to
| learn from. Rather, I am arguing that we can and should learn
| from both sides here. For things that are more actionable,
| taking the actions will let us learn even more. But, and this
| is huge, it could be that taking these actions does nothing.
| The "do something" attitude that is prevalent in all society
| is often wrong. Particularly about what should be done.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Kudos to Mr Haidt. I wouldn't have the patience to explain over
| and over again why being addicted to your phone and comparing
| your looks to global superstars makes girls lonely and depressed.
| People will argue over percentage points of an r-value instead of
| simply asking three girls whether using Instagram four hours a
| day makes them happy.
| iamerroragent wrote:
| Okay but how are we supposed to get teen girls not to compare
| themselves to the looks of global stars?
|
| This existed before social media. At best I can see it being a
| catalyst here and so sure limit or ban social media (at least
| for under 18s ~ 25s, whatever we agree on is a developed adult
| brain).
|
| Lowering the percentage of teens with mental health issues is a
| good thing.
|
| However that doesn't stop teens from comparing their looks to
| their peers, adults they know, and obviously global media
| (magazines, billboards, films, music, etc; what 'successful'
| women look like on cable news). How are the underlying cause
| for these negative feelings going to be addressed?
| somedude895 wrote:
| You're never going to get people to not compare themselves
| with their peers. Comparing yourself through media like
| magazines etc has been the case for at least 50 years. The
| teen mental health epidemic has really started in 2012 is
| what Haidt is talking about.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| This. Exposure matters.
|
| Before social media and smartphones came together exposure
| was infrequent. Now it's nearly constant. It's like the
| difference between going to a restaurant where smoking is
| allowed and living with a chain-smoker.
| MandieD wrote:
| More like 100: my grandmother had skimpy eyebrows that she
| penciled in her whole adult life because she overplucked
| them as a teen, trying to look like the movie stars she saw
| in the rare magazine she could buy in the Dust Bowl-era
| Texas Panhandle.
| watwut wrote:
| Well for one, it would require interest in teen girls that
| goes beyond "I need a talking point for culture war that I am
| currently waging".
| Entinel wrote:
| What culture war specifically?
| knallfrosch wrote:
| This article is about making people even acknowledge that
| social media is a or the problem. Acknowledging that one has
| a problem is the first step. Unfortunately, I don't have a
| societal solution ready.
| Entinel wrote:
| No one really talks about it but I think it is a symptom of
| bad parenting. How many times have people sat their kid down
| and explained these Hollywood types are not the average
| looking person?
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the people suffering are well aware of
| that. This sort of mental illness isn't the kind of thing
| thats rooted in logic-brain, and simply "explaining" it
| doesn't make it go away, else society wouldn't have as much
| of a problem.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Today, you also have to explain that even the pictures of
| your friends are not "the average looking person" because
| almost everything online gets fed through various filters.
| kelipso wrote:
| When you're exposed to something over and over, you
| internalize it. Explaining helps with this I'm sure but
| only slightly.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Do you have children? How old are they? Do you actually
| believe that "sitting your kid down and explaining XXX" to
| them is likely to cause substantive changes in what are
| fundamentally deeply non-cognitive takes on the world?
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > However that doesn't stop teens from comparing their looks
| to their peers, adults they know, and obviously global media
| (magazines, billboards, films, music, etc; what 'successful'
| women look like on cable news). How are the underlying cause
| for these negative feelings going to be addressed?
|
| Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their
| peers?
|
| In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to
| 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5
| being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than
| tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related.
| A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of their peers'
| perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what
| they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.
|
| [0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/
| obe...
| iamerroragent wrote:
| So if your peers have a nice fat ass that the boys all like
| to oggle at while walking between classes and you're stuck
| with a skinny thigh gapping flapjack white girl tush you
| bet your ass you're gonna start eating some cheese berders.
|
| The feeling of wanting to fit in is constant for teens.
| What 'fitting in' looks like changes over time.
|
| What's desired has changed over time in my life alone.
| Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white women
| in media shaming themselves and asking if their dress made
| their ass look fat while also trying to get boob implants.
|
| Nowadays booty is WAAAAY more prominent and desired and
| those old tired jokes about their ass looking fat a hell of
| a lot less common.
|
| From the show Brockmire:
|
| https://youtu.be/lOBjS2kzL3w
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > What's desired has changed over time in my life alone.
| Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white
| women in media shaming themselves and asking if their
| dress made their ass look fat while also trying to get
| boob implants.
|
| The "ideal body" is actually healthier now than it was 20
| years ago.
|
| But I'm not talking about skinny vs a few curves. I'm
| talking obese. Clinically obese. As in BMI over 30.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/basics/adult-defining.html
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Girls have been comparing themselves to global superstars as
| long as there has been photography.
|
| So I guess we should just ban graven images and get it over
| with. That'll clearly solve everything.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "But correlation isn't causation!!""*
|
| *causation is impossible to prove outside of STEM
| 7402 wrote:
| I thought this statement in the article was particularly worth
| celebrating:
|
| > So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned
| participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in
| public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter.
|
| I wish there were more examples of this kind of discourse for
| other hot-button issues of the day.
| freework wrote:
| If you ask 10 different people why they are depressed, you'll get
| 10 different answers. This illustrated why I think the scientific
| method is the wrong way to go about understanding the human mind.
|
| Also, if you ask a depressed person why they are depressed, they
| may not know exactly why they are depressed. I spent my entire
| high school years depressed. It wasn't until a few years after I
| graduated college before I realized the reason why I was
| depressed: it was because I had abusive parents. If you had asked
| me in high school why I'm depressed I would have said something
| like "I'm a bad person but I have no reason why". At the time I
| thought my parents treated me like I was a bad person was
| secondary to the actual problem.
|
| If you really want insight on what makes the human mind
| depressed, then ask people who have overcame their depression.
| The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is
| making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they
| probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their
| "data" is just noise.
|
| The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession
| with "data". Everything has to be on a pie chart of a line graph
| or something like that. Every "study" has to be on a grand scale
| and then averaged together to make a single conclusion.
|
| The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable. You can
| perform a "study" on a sample of people and get a result, and
| then replicate that exact same study on the exact same sample of
| people at a later time, and still get a different result. In
| order for the scientific method to be applicable, you have to be
| able to get the exact same result each time you replicate the
| study. This is not possible in psychology.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| While some psychologists might not be aware of this (like the
| Reason criticism suggests... though mostly has the overworked
| angle), it seems to be almost insulting to suggest that
| researchers at his level are not ?
| caddemon wrote:
| You'd be surprised how niche this sort of discussion is in
| neuropsych research. Is it because researchers aren't
| thinking enough about the big picture or because the NIH is
| incompetent and the researchers just go along with what they
| need to get funding? Idk, but either way it's not great. I
| suspect this problem exists in a lot of sciences but
| psychiatry in particular seems to have overcorrected for some
| of its less rigorous history.
|
| That said, I don't think it's correct to say the scientific
| method can't apply. We absolutely have to be more careful
| about averaging over many people with different actual
| disease but the same current shitty label, and we also have
| to be better about looking at longitudinal signals. But there
| are ways to do this in a more scientific manner (e.g.
| involving well-defined testable predictions).
|
| I agree that as part of this transitory period (especially
| with the sample sizes that most psych studies can feasibly
| get) there should be more synergy between qualitative human-
| focused approaches and what the by the book science people
| are doing. It's unfortunate how far behind research
| psychiatric practice can lag in some respects, and in other
| respects the psych researchers seem to not take practitioner
| observations too seriously these days.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| You cannot rely on self-reporting as an accurate way to
| diagnose someone. You need to do single subject studies and
| doing a sample studies for this is obviously not the right way
| to go about it. Data collection is very important to understand
| human behaviour.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable.
|
| I am willing to agree that it is still more art than science in
| its current state, but I personally think we are slowly moving
| towards a replicable mind after all -- a terrifying prospect,
| because it would truly prove 'free will' is an illusion. It
| currently seems impossible due to sheer number of factors with
| overlapping effects. I don't think it is impossible though.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable
| belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark
| raving mad. It would represent a fundamental phase change in
| the way an individual interacts with the world, which I would
| wager would be antithetical to effective transmission of the
| belief.
|
| Far more dangerous would be the 90% mark, where understanding
| of psychological determinism advances to a point where people
| still believe they have free will, but are wildly effective
| at influencing others. That looks like advertising today, but
| worse.
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| I don't believe in free will. I haven't really for about 20
| years or so. However, I act as if I do, as I've always
| done. It's a habit I choose not to break. Changing to act
| as I believe would be too much for me to handle. I would
| need to rethink pretty much everything I do. It's a
| completely different set of axioms in every domain of human
| knowledge, ethics, behaviour and interaction.
|
| I don't think I'm raving mad, but perhaps because I don't
| act on my beliefs, I don't fit your conditions?
|
| However, I do believe the justice system would be better
| run with this in mind.
| caddemon wrote:
| Yeah I don't think we're getting there in our lifetimes,
| especially not with how neurobio/psych research has been
| progressing lately, but I agree it is theoretically possible.
| And along the way there are many imperfect models that could
| still be highly useful - I don't think replicable is a binary
| thing at this level of abstraction.
| Freire_Herval wrote:
| [dead]
| quantum_mcts wrote:
| Couldn't it be that people become more aware of mental health
| problems because of social media?
| webdoodle wrote:
| Stop calling it social media, it's anything but social. It's
| Anti-Social Media, and it is destroying civilization.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Let's assume that it's hurting girls.
|
| Why would that be?
|
| Because we raise children wrong.
|
| Women often complain that men post photos of themselves on dating
| sites, that they do so either with buddies, or holding some
| trophy of some sort.
|
| But that's simply because men are taught from a young age that
| their value is measured in what they can provide. Girls, on the
| other hand, are taught that THEY are valuable. We can go back
| hundreds of years and find evidence for this, as arranged
| marriages were usually a transaction between the parents of the
| couple: usually livestock, goods, and land for the hand of the
| maiden. Nobody's paying for a new son. Likewise, there's no show
| called Groomzilla where bridegrooms lose their minds attempting
| to plan a wedding.
|
| In 2012, the "thigh gap" started becoming a popular trend among
| girls and women in the US. For many women, attaining such a thing
| is a nigh-impossible feat. Their bodies simply aren't built that
| way. Very few of my male friends thought that thigh gaps were
| even attractive at all. But women don't dress and exercise and
| eat for men, they do it for women and womens' perceptions.
|
| Compare that to today. Our popular media is dominated by a
| rainbow of ethnicities with bodies to match. The Kardashians are
| bobbling around with breast augmentation, butt lifts, botox,
| microblading, and lip filler to seem more "exotic" and women are
| following suit. Nowadays it's not such a bad thing to have a
| naturally big butt with thick thighs, and many more women are on
| the internet proclaiming their weight to the public to show
| people what XXX pounds looks like on a X'XX" frame.
|
| It's been 9 years and the thigh gap girls would be out of place
| today. Many would consider it unattractive.
|
| It's not social media.
|
| It's that we teach girls that their physical appearance and their
| wardrobe is what gives their lives value. That's what you have to
| fix. Everything else is just vigorous hand waving in an attempt
| to sound intelligent.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have
| two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an
| hour or less.
|
| Not that it proves anything, but the converse argument, that
| depressed girls spend more time on social media or online in
| general, should also be examined. If the data could support this
| thesis to a similar degree, there is no conclusive statement
| about social media really inducing depression. It isn't just
| about effect size in my opinion but I don't see this problem
| answered.
|
| That said, it doesn't need to be depression, there are other
| venues for negative influences. I am always ready to yell at the
| cloud for that.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| The converse argument is far more plausible.
| amelius wrote:
| It's still just guessing. Can we please go from "plausible"
| to "we studied this"?
| etrautmann wrote:
| Or the two are linked via feedback such that social media makes
| depression worse and both are causally linked. It doesn't have
| to be a one-way relationship.
| jostmey wrote:
| But that's not the basis of his argument. His argument is based
| on the timing of when social media usage started. I mint argue
| 3-4 hours or social media use alone didn't cause depression,
| but had to be combined with a causal factor
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.
|
| Yell at _the_ cloud? Nicely done.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| No, I am just German and this is a language disability.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, in English it became a beautiful pun.
| caddemon wrote:
| I agree the research doesn't conclusively show direction, but
| in my experience so many psychiatry correlates are chicken/egg.
| Depressed people tend to get less physical activity because of
| their depression symptoms, but too little activity can be quite
| bad for one's mood. Lots of bad cycles with positive (in a
| dynamical systems sense) feedback connections.
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| Something has to be behind the seemingly coordinated rise in
| depression among children globally, that's the leading
| indicator he's using to assess the problem. His argument is
| that it can't be anything other than social media.
|
| You're making the case in the micro scale: what is one person's
| relationship with depression and social media, and he's arguing
| in the macro scale. Something has caused depression to spike in
| children worldwide. What could it be?
| misnome wrote:
| > What could it be?
|
| The state of the world? Better measurement and diagnosis of
| depression?
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| It's not a strong argument to say "what could it be other
| than X? therefore, X"
|
| > What could it be?
|
| Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low.
| Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held
| society together are gone. Families are more broken apart
| than ever. It's an entire regime change, and we're still
| operating with our old instincts/hardware, which expects to
| be raised in a village by a largely familiar and empathetic
| community. The farther we get from that model, the more we'll
| be stressed out (until and unless we upgrade our hardware
| somehow, or, more likely, die trying).
|
| Social media is small potatoes in comparison to the changes
| that have happened already, and especially to those that are
| coming.
| CamArchibald wrote:
| [dead]
| tssva wrote:
| The child mental health industrial complex which started in
| the 2000's and has boomed over the last decade as parents
| have been bombarded with the message that they need to rush
| their kids off to a therapist at the slightest sign of normal
| teenage angst or they are bad parents. Schools have bought
| into this and participate in the messaging. Once under
| "treatment" kids are repeatedly told they have anxiety and/or
| depression which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What
| would have been normal teenage angst which in most cases
| resolves itself quickly now becomes a long-term issue of
| course requiring more therapy. This drives even more kids to
| think they have anxiety and/or depression because their
| friends have it.
|
| Lately I have started to see push back among my teenage
| daughter's friends' parents as they have realized that their
| kids have actually gotten quite worse since starting therapy.
| Many have started pulling their kids from therapy and quickly
| seen their kids mental state improve.
| kuschku wrote:
| > Something has caused depression to spike in children
| worldwide. What could it be?
|
| Maybe the state of the world around them? Look at the world.
| Young millenials and gen z have no future. Politicians and
| boomers are fucking us over in every possible way. The world
| is running towards a rise of 4.4degC by 2100, we'll never be
| able to retire, we're in a situation where years of training
| and a degree still only get you unpaid internships, how
| _could_ we possibly be happy in such a situation?
|
| All social media did was show us we're not alone. In a
| situation where all the adults around you calmly live in the
| fire and say "this is fine", knowing you're _not crazy_ ,
| knowing you're justified in being worried, is empowering.
| [deleted]
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| You are describing a commonly shared sentiment of today.
| This spike started nearly a decade ago, long before our
| current economic situation materialized.
|
| To your point, who largely gets to decide which news
| stories get aggregated and which don't? Who has an outsized
| influence in shaping people's realities? By many metrics,
| times are tough, but by many other metrics, we are living
| in prosperous times as well.
| misnome wrote:
| > long before our current economic situation materialized
|
| 2008 was 15 years ago
| mafro wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your statements, but the key question
| in the research is why did depression spike in children
| worldwide _after 2012_.
|
| At various points in my lifetime there have been reasons to
| be sad about the world - but what changed in 2012 that
| predominantly appears to affect teenage girls, and has been
| observed in several countries globally?
| kuschku wrote:
| I'm saying that social media didn't cause the fears, but
| that social media ended the millenia of social pressure
| to just accept everything the way it is.
|
| Cities once did the same, by increasing the population
| density you could hang out with people that had the same
| thoughts you did. But many countries successfully ended
| that through suburbanisation, isolating people once
| again.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Sounds like you could make an argument that cities make
| people depressed as well then.
|
| I wonder if population density is a driving force for
| depression, both online and offline.
|
| I'd buy that. I find cities miserable.
| dlivingston wrote:
| As a personal anecdote, I moved from rural New Mexico to
| a highly populated New England county and my baseline
| anxiety level noticeably increased.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| oooh thats an interesting thought, I really like that.
| bluescrn wrote:
| If children/teens weren't exposed to so much online doom-
| mongering, they would be finding things to live for rather
| than fearing the future.
|
| Even if the world is a bit shit, there's still plenty of
| opportunities for love, family, friendship, art, music,
| sport, and plenty more. Maybe even working towards solving
| one of the big problems we face, whether that's through
| science/tech or politics/economics?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Perhaps if they were narrowly focused on religion? It
| seems to work for the Amish and other intensely devout
| groups.
| bluescrn wrote:
| I've always been an atheist, but I'm starting to wonder
| whether the decline of religion has done more harm than
| good. We've certainly lost some of the basic human
| decency that was once passed on via religion. The concept
| of forgiveness seems to be one glaring example, and the
| rise of selfish consumerism and online narcissism.
|
| Maybe we need something to replace religion, without the
| dogma, oppression, and conflict. Something other than the
| online tribalism and activism seems to be filling that
| void for many...
| kuschku wrote:
| It's exactly this "we didn't start the fire" mentality
| that caused the situation we're in.
|
| If you want the world to change, you need to do that. You
| can't just wait for it to happen.
| racktash wrote:
| Most of the world's problems aren't solvable by everyday
| people. Better to focus one's attention on oneself, work,
| family and community, where a difference might be made.
|
| (Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to
| charity or something of that nature. But obsessively
| following world events will make you miserable and solve
| nothing.)
| bluescrn wrote:
| The Internet, through social media and clickbait news,
| encourages people to get ever-angrier and ever-more-
| radical until they attempt to 'change things' by smashing
| and burning, or justifying violence against political
| 'enemies'.
|
| I don't know what the answers to the world's big problems
| are, but I'm pretty sure that smashing, burning, and
| pushing for violent revolution, insurrection, or civil
| war is _not_ the answer.
| owisd wrote:
| If the converse were true it wouldn't explain the rise in
| depression.
| somedude895 wrote:
| The longitudinal factor is essential in this though. Teen
| mental health issues skyrocketed since 2012. That's really the
| whole point of his rebuttal of Proposition 1.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| The map is indeed not the territory. There is an insane amount of
| people who live in a fantasy world, where they believe that
| theory equals practise, which is absolute and utter nonsense.
| They do not understand the value of experience, most likely
| because they don't actually have any.
|
| 1. One can always derive theory from practise, but never the
| other way around.
|
| 2. You might have read every single book about boxing, but that
| still doesn't make you a boxer.
| [deleted]
| williamcotton wrote:
| How many of Haidt's critics have large enough followings on
| social media that they are familiar with the sweet taste of
| upvotes?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I have mixed thoughts about this.
|
| I think there are at least two or more factors and social media
| is a part of it, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum.
|
| The reason I think this is that there seems to be a small
| minority of people who have the skills and mental models to use
| social media as a tool without adverse impact, as a well as
| another minority of people who seem to be able to remain
| distanced or minimal users of social media, without adverse
| impact.
|
| These two groups seem to suggest that some kind of key missing
| life skill when combined with a need for social connection leaves
| people uniquely vulnerable to problems with social media.
|
| My somewhat clueless guess about this is that people aren't
| situated to understand distance, authenticity, and relationships
| sufficiently. Maybe part of the problem is that many people are
| so socially starved of authentic and healthy loving relationships
| of all kinds in their lives, that many people can both know this
| but still be vulnerable. In some sense, maybe vulnerability rises
| because social media is a poor but just good enough placebo for
| loneliness?
|
| I am also convinced that poor parenting compounds whatever is
| going on. Anyone who puts their 5th grader on Facebook or similar
| is a terrible parent IMO. Just the same as anyone who uses the
| iPad as a babysitter is a terrible parent IMO. But I suspect in
| many cases poor parenting is an artifact of parents who feel so
| trapped in unstable lives that hey can't feel stable or devote
| time comfortably to their kids. So maybe yet another factor.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| If Pascal's wager teaches us anything, it's that we want to start
| from a maximum-entropy prior and model the process generating the
| two hypotheses.
|
| If a guy ends up living in a gold palace with Michelangelos on
| the ceiling if those are the only two hypotheses to consider,
| that might skew his analysis just a bit.
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so
| thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental
| health.
|
| I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you
| can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence.
|
| There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a
| middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the
| concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality.
|
| Twitter show cases this best, it's prison politics in web form.
| Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will
| have a go at you.
| mock-possum wrote:
| So if social media is toxic for mental health, why am I immune?
| What's special about me?
| tmikaeld wrote:
| > Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone
| will have a go at you
|
| Is this really a modern-tech thing? More like, it's easier and
| in the open now.
| badkitty99 wrote:
| [dead]
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yes tech does fundamentally change this. Prior to social
| media, the set of everyone's gang options was defined by a
| relatively small geographic area. This means people were
| largely looking at and likely caring about the same reality,
| same set of problems, same considerations around the problem,
| same individuals in mind, etc.
|
| Now you have people forming quasi-religious conviction on
| issues that are not directly relevant to them whatsoever and
| looking at completely distinct "data" to inform those
| opinions.
|
| Elections will continue to get gnarlier and gnarlier because
| they're one of the few occasions we need to converge and
| reconcile our different realities. Between elections, we take
| refuge in completely distinct information environments than
| the people who live literally next door. This is completely
| new. Started with radio, amplified by TV, perfected by
| internet media.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| That's a very good point, social media has made it a LOT
| easier to invent issues that isn't really issues but just a
| topic for bullies to rally around.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Yeah... but alternatively you can easily find a group of
| like minded people. I suppose you could argue this just
| fractures society more though. People migrate off into
| groups of others they agree with and don't even bother
| trying to coexist anymore.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Correct. It's certainly not without its benefits, but
| even those have an insidious side.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, I used to have the same view of sports. Growing up where
| I did, it was common for folks to be fanatical on their local
| college sports team. Such that they get mean to folks from
| their "rival" schools and are generally trash talking to
| everyone else. It was so bad, that I certainly thought that was
| how you were supposed to be. Pick a side and be aggressive to
| the opponents when watching the game. Goal was to make them do
| worse, so that your team would do better. It even makes sense
| in that regard.
|
| However, that is ridiculously unhealthy. And it easily bleeds
| into other aspects of life. Heaven help you when you go watch
| some middle school team sometime, parents are being terrible to
| their kids. Worse to other's kids.
|
| Does this mean sports are unhealthy, though? I'm convinced,
| right now, that that is definitely not the case. But I can also
| easily claim we tend to have unhealthy relationships with these
| topics.
| prox wrote:
| The general mechanism is always the same : in-group vs out-
| group. My tribe is humane, your tribe is evil beyond compare.
|
| The exploit is emotional reactivity, get your in-group
| gaslighted so they are on permanent rage.
| taeric wrote:
| Interestingly, I don't think that is "correct" use of
| gaslighted. It sounds right metaphorically, as you are
| "igniting" them in a way that "lighting a gas source" would
| go. However, gaslighting is to sow doubt and confusion in
| people's self thoughts. I /think/ you could use this to the
| same end, but I think the initial was specifically not
| evoking a sense a rage, but one of dependence.
| prox wrote:
| Yeah, you are right. I think the mechanism, to start an
| outrage vs the perceived outgroup is indeed the same.
| Once ignited lots of people don't change their stance,
| unless you score high on self-reflection perhaps.
| robocat wrote:
| Most sports reduce discrimination and division, I think.
|
| Side-tracking people into unimportant (sports) in-group
| versus out-group is really good at improving cohesion between
| _important_ group differences. For example a Mexican and an
| American rooting for the same team, so they have their sport
| in common, which helps them be closer to each other.
|
| Sports can be divisive between countries. Then again it is
| interesting to watch New Zealand support Australians against
| the English (background - there is usually strong sports
| rivalry between NZ and Oz since we are neighbours). A bit of
| win and lose on that one.
|
| The most popular sports tend to be cross-class too - which is
| good. Of course there are sports that tend to be class
| oriented in some countries e.g. polo, soccer, athletics. FYI
| golf and skiing are not particularly class oriented within
| New Zealand: even 30 foot yacht racing can have a mixture of
| millionaires, factory workers, professionals and petrol
| attendants (we are weird down here).
|
| Just a theory of mine.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm still mostly inline that anything that gets people
| engaging together will increase their willingness to do so.
| If that is playing a sport, that works.
|
| I'm less enthusiastic about a lot of the big corporate push
| into many sports. Not just at large, but in the reach out
| to youth. Happy for my kids to get involved with sports at
| the local level. Annoyed at how much effort seems to go
| into funneling local assets into marketing that larger
| organizations clearly could be getting elsewise.
|
| That said, I'm almost socialist enough to have a crap ton
| of completely incoherent ideas about how those that are
| succeeding should be doing their best to make sure those
| that aren't could. With no obligations attached.
| molotovh wrote:
| Note that in your example, it's not the athletes that are
| being toxic (usually), it's the spectators.
|
| It's common for sports fans to say things like, "we're
| playing Los Angeles next week" or "we picked up so-and-so in
| the draft" when there's really no "we" about it. The speaker
| is not involved in the action in any way other than as one
| observing it. But using that language makes them feel
| included in something bigger. And sometimes the brain starts
| to believe you really ARE part of that bigger thing, and you
| start taking actions to reinforce that belief.
|
| (And I want it noted that I'm very much including myself in
| this assessment. This is not some "nerds > jocks" kind of
| thing. As an American football fan myself, I've made a
| conscious effort to stop saying "we" specifically because
| this has started to bother me.)
|
| So no, participating in sports isn't unhealthy. Succumbing to
| the delusion of participation as a spectator, that's what
| becomes unhealthy.
| [deleted]
| taeric wrote:
| Ish. Trash talking is a huge thing in sports. Similarly
| many prudish administrators go out of their way to punish
| the players for celebrations and such.
|
| Edit: And I'm curious how this relates to the topic at
| hand. Not that I think it is unrelated, but specifically
| how. We seem to be in rather strong agreement that it is
| the relationship with a thing that is unhealthy, with
| regards to sports. Why or how would that be different with
| regards to social media?
| saltcured wrote:
| The connection I see is something like "imaginary
| tribalism". The members of an audience form a one-sided
| sense of belonging that distorts their behaviors.
|
| The mechanism seems to be the "media" part. All the
| promotional content is blasted out at scale in a way that
| triggers this false or amplified sense of social
| engagement. It's not the social part of social media that
| hurts, so much as the media platform part that enables so
| many promoters to thrive.
| taeric wrote:
| How much is an amplified sense of authority? It isn't
| just that there are promoters, but many of these
| promoters really dig into the ideas that they have the
| answers.
|
| This leans into all media and aligns with how much
| credence is given to pundits. People with good ideas wind
| up digging in and pushing that they have the only
| reasonable idea.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think social media amplified trends that were there before. I
| remember when I came to the US in 2000 it was pretty
| fashionable to say "I am angry" all the time. And the hatred at
| politicians was pretty pronounced too. And the cable news was
| already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern
| media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily
| reach large groups. The internet just made it much worse.
|
| I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations
| are only from the US but the thinking that there are "others"
| who can't be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is
| quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.
| MandieD wrote:
| It's like a societal autoimmune disease - when there's not a
| real, immediate event to react to, something has to be found
| to fill the airtime that is compelling enough to keep people
| watching and reacting, and social media has the added
| "benefit" of finding that filler algorithmically.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > social media has the added "benefit" of finding that
| filler algorithmically
|
| Algorithmically, tailored per-user and without any
| oversight.
|
| Traditional media can't peddle too extreme viewpoints
| because that would alienate a large chunk of their target
| market. Social media on the other hand can tailor the
| content for each individual user as to achieve maximum
| engagement without the risk of alienating anyone.
|
| Traditional media is also subject to oversight (some people
| - or government watchdogs - can just record the TV
| programme as evidence) and regulations targeting broadcast
| media, where as social media isn't since nobody can monitor
| every individual user's feed, nor do they have the same
| regulations governing them (Fox got in trouble for peddling
| election misinformation, Facebook can promote exactly the
| same content and get away with it thanks to Section 230).
| jimwhite42 wrote:
| I think that when people are angry, they are more open to
| suggestion if you do it right. So this is a way to make
| people more receptive to buying a particular product or
| subscription, or to supporting a political cause, etc., if
| you don't make them angry about something first and do
| nothing else different, you get less conversions. And of
| all the different ways to improve in this kind of metric,
| the make-people-angry method one is relatively easy and
| requires relatively less competence.
| Mezzie wrote:
| This is a brilliant comparison.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly
| "all politicians are corrupt". I certainly don't remember
| people saying "I am angry" all the time. I wonder if this was
| a coastal thing (e.g., the 'Occupy' movement seemed angry in
| a way that I couldn't relate to having lived my whole life in
| the midwest) and social media amplified it and spread it
| across the country?
|
| I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less
| civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal
| attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc). It was
| no longer "politicians are bad", nor even "the other side's
| politicians are bad", but increasingly "Americans on the
| other side are the enemy". And of course, conservatives were
| slow to adopt social media, so (as I recall) this was mostly
| liberals and progressives punching at conservatives who were
| still trying to be more buttoned up and play by the old
| rules, but as they increasingly came online and encountered
| the new incivility directed towards them (and the
| incivilizing force of social media itself acting upon them),
| I think it caused a lot of latent anger to accumulate until
| they finally embraced incivility in the form of Donald Trump
| (to be clear, this is a very abridged version of a very
| complex topic).
|
| > I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main
| observations are only from the US but the thinking that there
| are "others" who can't be understood or talked to but need to
| eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.
|
| My hope is that the next generation will see the pointless
| harm caused by our hate/rage addiction and reject it, and
| maybe even regard it like an addictive substance (perhaps
| encouraging people to avoid social media, set up resources
| for addicted people, regulate social media companies, etc).
| marttt wrote:
| > I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less
| civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal
| attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc).
|
| Tangentially related: I wonder how Usenet groups or
| 1990s/early 2000s mailing lists compare to today's social
| media in terms of toxicity. Seems like the "netiquette"
| mostly worked those days; then again, one can probably
| easily spot ridiculous trolling or bullying in list
| archives as well (I like old mailing lists, so I think I
| have seen many remarkable rants over the years -- to the
| point that they have seemed conceptually interesting, a
| peculiar form of utterly irresponsible postmodernist
| stream-of-conciousness-literature if you will).
|
| The nature of e-mail -- free-form composition, often
| resulting in lengthy, thoroughly argued replies -- probably
| did keep some of the anger and emotional arguments at bay,
| though. Could be that 1990s/2000s hackers were also more
| eloquent people, but this feels like more of a myth.
|
| Hypothesis: if most online environments would still
| encourage barebones free-form composition (like e-mail;
| social media pushes one toward tight and thus sometimes
| overly straightforward expressions [1]), we would possibly
| notice more high-quality writing and wordsmiths in the
| internet. (Proof: go read the lengthy posts of your
| favorite HN commenter.)
|
| 1: See Uni of Chicago-Illinois communications researcher
| Zizi Papacharissi's work on "affective storytelling". An
| 2015 article with 250+ citations, analysing Twitter
| coverage during the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and online
| iterations of the Occupy movement: https://zizi.people.uic.
| edu/Site/Research_files/Papacharissi...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Toxicity isn't the only factor. USENET[0] may have been
| nasty but that nastiness was also very public and
| untargeted. Social media adds the ability to be extremely
| targeted with your abuse in ways that are nearly
| invisible to those who aren't clued into it. You can
| weaponize it way easier than you can a message board.
|
| [0] And, for the purpose of this discussion, imageboards
| and other forums with little moderation, such as
| 2channel, Futaba, 4chan, etc.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly
| "all politicians are corrupt"."
|
| I lived in VA at the time and I remember plenty of people
| who got instantly mad when they just heard the word
| "Clinton" or "Bush". Since then it just got worse with
| "Obama=Muslim" and even worse with "Trump".
| asdff wrote:
| This phenomenon social media is tapping into is far older
| than cable news. Tent revival preachers tapping into
| xenophobia and hate on supposed moral grounds date back well
| over 100 years. I'd expect you have similar feverish
| preaching by some charismatic leaders who don't believe a
| lick of their own creed their sheep flock to since we first
| had enough language to actually think in these terms. Good
| luck finding a counter for something that seems to be wired
| into our nature.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I have a feeling that we're on the way out of it now. People
| are tired of the anger and the cancelling and the extremes
| DrThunder wrote:
| Yeah the 24/7 news cycle was definitely a precursor for this.
| There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time so
| they resort to sensationalism and drudging up anger wherever
| they can.
|
| Now, that 24/7 news cycle gets carried around in your pocket
| daily and you get to see other people commenting on it.
| naravara wrote:
| > There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that
| time
|
| There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy
| things to cover. The problem is that there are limited
| resources for coverage. It's expensive to staff a desk full
| of people who can find interesting topics and tell good
| stories about them for every subject area under the sun. It
| takes a lot of people with very variegated kinds of subject
| matter expertise.
|
| It's much cheaper to have 4 or 5 people whose main skills
| are theater criticism level analysis of political events
| (i.e. how does this play with various demographics) and a
| skill of manipulating emotions to spend all their time
| speculating over nonsense instead. Just put them in a suit
| and have somber music on and we can pretend this is a
| serious matter instead of idle gossip.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy
| things to cover."
|
| Not when it also needs to be "entertaining". When you
| watch Fox, CNN and others they convey almost zero
| information about actual issues but only emotion and
| opinion.
| naravara wrote:
| What makes something entertaining or not isn't
| necessarily a property of the topic. I think you just
| need an expert who is a good communicator and really
| enthusiastic about the thing to help you understand why
| it's cool or important or interesting. The trouble is
| there are only so many Carl Sagan level people to go
| around.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger.
| Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV
| allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups
|
| And let's not forget AM radio.
| lamontcg wrote:
| That was adults though.
|
| We've had angry politics in the USA for adults as long as I
| can remember (Morton Downey Jr was my first real exposure to
| it).
|
| That doesn't explain what is going on with teenage girls
| though that started around 2012.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger.
| Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV
| allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups.
|
| I'd posit it goes even further back to shortwave radio. Cable
| TV, internet forums, and later social media made
| discoverability easier - but the mass-media bile wa already
| present for a _very_ long time.
| [deleted]
| q1w2 wrote:
| It's also important to remember that there are specific
| threat actors in other countries who spend many many millions
| on polarizing western countries by amplifying the most
| extreme voices in their online forums.
|
| AI is going to take this to a new level.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I don't think enough people realize this. Or they think it
| simply isn't common.
|
| > AI is going to take this to a new level.
|
| We truly won't be able to tell the "fake news" from the
| real.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| brandall10 wrote:
| 24 hour cable news, where news became entertainment,
| definitely sowed the seeds of this.
|
| There is a great movie from the 70s called Network that
| predicted the slide of society in this direction.
| Clubber wrote:
| When I was growing up, every weekday there was 30 minutes
| of local news and 30 minutes of national news. Most of the
| time they were able to fill all of that time with actual
| newsworthy stories, sometimes, there was filler.
|
| Once the 24 hour news stations came out, there is still 30
| minutes of national news, but much, much more filler. This
| is mostly fear peddling. 40 years of that and it's no
| wonder the entire population is a little off.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| Yes once upon a time 24-hour news meant 25 or 30 different
| news stories covered in a an our. Now it seems like 5 or
| less stories in a day, and most of it is panels and
| "experts" spouting vitriol.
| 1827162 wrote:
| And in order to compete with the other channels, news
| started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those
| channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger
| Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in
| parents becoming overprotective towards their children,
| stunting their development. When these children grew up
| into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with
| them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know
| from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's
| not stopped somehow.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > And in order to compete with the other channels, news
| started becoming more and more sensationalist.
|
| I fear the same pattern repeating with Patreon-powered
| journalism and Substack.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It is definitely happening. I used to like people like
| Taibbi and Greenwald but I feel that they have cranked up
| the outrage over the last years to the point that I can't
| listen to them anymore.
| muyuu wrote:
| It's a powerful combination of safetyism and
| concentration in urban and suburban areas that has pushed
| the American political compass strongly towards
| collectivistic priorities this generation. Basically a
| strong "europeisation" in metropolitan America.
|
| Perhaps extortionate real estate prices and telework will
| put some counterbalance to it, but I don't expect this
| trend to buckle during my lifetime.
| discreteevent wrote:
| What has this got to do with collectivism? People can
| collectively decide to do whatever they want. Germany
| collectively decide to have risky playgrounds for kids.
| Sweden collectively decided not to lock down hard for
| covid. It sounds to me like America could do with
| collectively standing up against these channels and
| rejecting the rubbish they are peddling.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| The definition of collectivism you are using is
| incorrect.
| muyuu wrote:
| That is not why I meant by collectivism. Deciding things
| collectively just means you have organs of government.
|
| By collectivistic priorities I simply meant that given
| trade offs between individual and collective orders of
| priority, the collective takes priority, often at the
| expense of individual rights.
|
| America has traditionally had classical liberal ideals of
| individualism, as laid out by Locke, Rousseau and
| Franklin chiefly, and later others. What we've seen in
| the last few decades is a stronger alignment with
| continental European mainstream thought and politics.
| Perhaps because cities and demographics have pushed
| things in that direction. But I think safetyism is also a
| strong component.
| kodah wrote:
| I don't know that I'd call Germany collectivist. Under
| your examples by the US having national laws and
| regulation, we are somehow collectivist, which is not
| true. It's a trait of society _and_ government.
|
| Collectivist societies are unique in that they _punish_
| individuality. The government decides something and
| everyone _must_ comply or face extra-judicial and
| potentially judicial consequences.
|
| Individualistic societies often celebrate individuality.
| It's not marked by the absence of collective decisions,
| but that there's tolerance to dissent, or even that
| dissent is given weight and merit philosophically.
|
| I'd summarize this as, collectivist societies are a proxy
| for government cohesion; it looks like people have power,
| but they don't. Individualistic societies retain power in
| both large numbers of people, but also individuals. The
| government is at competition with it's power to groups of
| people, which theoretically plays a role in keeping it in
| check.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| I have seen those "risky" playgrounds in Germany - they
| aren't that risky at all?
|
| Sure, you could get a splinter from the wood if its not
| maintained, or have a fall and get scraped up, but the
| risks are low, the benefits (learning to not be a fucking
| muppet, learning to cope with falls) are high.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| You're getting down voted, but you're not wrong.
|
| Another factor in parents over protecting kids came from
| John Walsh. Now, let me preface by saying no parent
| should endure what his family had to. But he nearly
| single-handedly caused what we see today where parents
| get in trouble for letting their kids walk to school or
| to the park. People today think everyone is a pedo or a
| child killer because that's what they were fed in the 80s
| and 90s.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| If anyone has ever heard, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not
| going to take this any more!", this is the movie that
| originated from.
| azangru wrote:
| > Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone
| will have a go at you.
|
| Don't you have to be sufficiently active or prominent on the
| social media to be attacked?
|
| (Yes, I remember the example of some hapless lady who tweeted
| "hope I won't get aids" before departing to Africa. I don't
| know how active she had been on twitter, or how typical the
| subsequent annihilation of her is.)
| [deleted]
| throwaway2847 wrote:
| Definitely not, if you reply to a sufficiently famous person
| in a way they dislike there's always a risk they'll
| (in)directly turn their followers against you.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean... this would happen in any place where you get to
| sound off against someone famous. Right?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Nope - look at the central park bird watcher/dog incident or
| the SA aids lady as you mention - both of them I guess had a
| social media presence, but it was along the lines of 50
| followers, probably just the people they were friends with in
| real life.
|
| But also being in a gang doesn't even protect you. Lots of
| intragang cancellations, if the gang seems you to hold the
| wrong values for the gang. Eg Lena dunham
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How is twitter a prison. You can just not use it. I've never
| had an account there, and never used it other occcasionally
| reading a linked tweet in my web browser.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for
| mental health.
|
| The social media business is _definitely_ a toxic, failed
| replacement for social discourse.
|
| Perhaps young citizens are driven to despair by this and their
| distress is an early indicator that we are failing as a society
| to provide adequate education and humanity.
|
| As an _adult_ citizen, I am almost driven to despair.
|
| Consumer enclaves do not replace _community_.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Twitter really is the worst. At least the other platforms have
| some good mixed in with the bad. It is nice to stay vaguely
| connected to people in a sort-of holiday card way.
|
| Twitter has nothing to redeem it. Even in communities where
| there's attempts at substantive conversation the medium makes a
| horrible mess to follow.
| rjmunro wrote:
| I think it depends on who you follow (which filter bubble you
| are in). Try unfollowing everyone who is not an actual
| personal friend (or use a pinned list to see only their
| tweets).
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I have Facebook and Instagram for that, depending on the
| age of the friend.
|
| On Twitter these same people are much more likely to post a
| hot take than pictures of their kids or pets. The platform
| draws out toxicity even in otherwise easygoing people.
| vehemenz wrote:
| The Meta products are more beholden to their
| demographics, unlike Twitter.
|
| Most of my family and friends stopped using Facebook
| around 2015, and Instagram is predominantly for young
| people, vain people, or photographers.
| [deleted]
| zamnos wrote:
| Not sure why you're ignoring the various official and
| unofficial accounts which use Twitter to distribute
| information during natural disasters which has saved lives,
| in a way that RSS _can 't replicate_.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Fair point.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Nah, LinkedIn takes the cake in that regard. If you wanna
| feel full on narcissism and a bunch of meaningless fake posts
| with people trying appear as something they're not...
| LinkedIn is the place to be.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| it honestly never occurred to me that there is a "usage" of
| linkedin other than putting up a profile to field offers
| from recruiters
| fallingknife wrote:
| Linkedin is the only social media which has ever been of
| any tangible benefit to me, though. It makes getting jobs
| trivially easy, and I only have to login once every few
| years.
| DrThunder wrote:
| This almost makes it worse. It's like you're expected to
| use it to get a job now.
| waboremo wrote:
| LinkedIn and Nextdoor are the two worst social platforms
| around, it's the worst kind of horrible, a sort of
| superficial rage and invasiveness, a complete disregard for
| others as human beings.
|
| Say what you will about Twitter, but at least the insults
| there are direct and tend to stay exclusive to Twitter - as
| opposed to neighbors convincing each other of the worst or
| your ability to land a job being sabotaged because your
| profile doesn't have enough keywords.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Yep, at least there are some posts on Twitter that
| occasionally make me laugh. LinkedIn just leaves a bad
| taste in my mouth, and you almost have to use it
| nowadays.
| moab wrote:
| That's not even remotely true (re: the need to use
| LinkedIn). Just quit.
| DrThunder wrote:
| It's not remotely true??? You're just off-base with that
| statement. A ton of companies look there and recruit
| through that site. Yeah you don't HAVE to use it but
| you're putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don't.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Yeah. Its not social media - its media in general
| frostburg wrote:
| I also agree that this is probably true, but it doesn't mean
| that his arguments are good.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a
| middle ground
|
| I disagree that this is a new phenomenon per se. There's always
| been resistance to some aspects of a middle ground. Consider
| the case of Anita Bryant, who advocated that not being allowed
| to discriminate against homosexuals was a violation of her
| rights as a mother and as a "normal" American. She advocated
| for homosexuals to be ousted from schools and other
| environments because in her mind being gay was a corrupting
| force on children. This was well before the internet.
|
| I also think the concept of cancellation is curious because
| it's so fickle and stochastic. On one hand the lady who called
| the cops on a black man filming her choking her dog still
| doesn't have a job 3 years later. On the other hand known
| sexual harasser comedians are selling out tickets like nothing
| happened. Hard to square that circle, and I wonder if there are
| more studies to quantify this phenomenon.
| msla wrote:
| > There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a
| middle ground
|
| There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and
| wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone
| is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak)
| and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is
| death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way
| they can meet that person in the middle.
|
| And that, sadly, is not new, either, as Matthew Shepard
| demonstrated so memorably in my own lifetime, but things are
| rather coming to a head now that sexual and gender minorities
| are forcing their longstanding plight into the public eye. They
| don't die quite as quietly now, in other words, and the great
| mass of people is more sympathetic to them now than it ever has
| been in the past. This, naturally, makes their would-be killers
| feel a bit persecuted.
|
| > and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of
| cancellation is much more power than any reality.
|
| Here we go, right on cue. The notion of being run out of
| employment for holding the traditional bigotries is a bit new,
| isn't it?
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| dbrueck wrote:
| > There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone
| and wanting to let them live in peace.
|
| A big part of the problem, though, is that the extremist
| voices/views get amplified the loudest, and then get trotted
| out as a typical example of the "other" side. And thanks to
| modern communication, you can _always_ find bizarre extremist
| voices to amplify, so it leads to this narrative that the
| extremist view is held by vast numbers of people when in
| reality the percentage of people who hold those views is
| effectively 0.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Sadly "effectively 0" includes a number of mass shooters.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Sorry, can you elaborate on your point a little bit - I'm
| not sure where you're going but genuinely want to
| understand.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Even if effectively 0% of people hold extremist views
| (and I think that is a low number), they also commit
| outsized acts of violence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Springs_nightclub_
| sho...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting
|
| You'll also note that mainstream conservatives refused to
| condemn the Colorado Springs shooting and there has been
| no change in the rhetoric that encouraged it.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > Even if effectively 0% of people hold extremist views
| (and I think that is a low number), they also commit
| outsized acts of violence.
|
| Sure, that's true. But it's always been true and, AFAICT,
| will always be true. But they are such a tiny number of
| the total population that they aren't the _gatekeepers_
| to progress on big social issues.
|
| There is a tendency today to give people like that the
| spotlight _and_ to paint everyone the slightest bit on
| the other side as being of the same ilk. Both of these
| things are mistakes that give those extremists power they
| couldn 't otherwise get.
|
| Backing up, the context here is the notion of finding
| some middle or common ground instead of splitting into
| warring tribes. When we fall into the trap of believing
| that the other side is full of people that look like the
| extremists on the other side, it eliminates the
| possibility of there being a middle ground. The result is
| a deeper divide, utter despair, a lack of progress on
| resolving issues, and often more people moving to the
| extremes.
|
| OTOH, when we recognize that the extremists are in fact
| extremists (i.e. statistical outliers), it's empowering
| and hopeful. The distance between your views and those of
| the vast majority of people on the other side is actually
| much shorter than the distance between your views and
| those of their extremists (and even likely shorter than
| the distance between _their_ views and the views of
| _their_ extremists). It really is a bell curve; don 't
| buy into the lie that it's an inverted one. There is an
| abundance of potential allies (including the main ones
| that have a real shot of deradicalizing some of those
| extremists), most of those other guys are pretty decent
| people, and real progress is plausible.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Again, there is not middle ground between existence and
| extermination.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| freejazz wrote:
| >Like is it possible for you to acknowledge that folks in
| Florida don't want to kill sexual minorities, but are also
| wary of a resurgent sexual revolution that could change the
| behaviors of kids who aren't born gay or trans? Like can
| you seriously deny that there is an emerging trend of
| sexual identity becoming a form of self expression?
|
| Sorry, but what's the problem with sexual identity being a
| form of self expression? Really struggling with this...
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| freejazz wrote:
| > Look, we are not going to agree on that.
|
| Agree on what? I didn't ask you to agree. I asked you to
| express what the problem with sexual identity being a
| form of self expression? I literally do not understand
| what your problem with this is, and knowing what the
| words mean, how it was not already inherently the case.
|
| > What we can agree on, however, is that God (or the pre-
| natal endocrine environment, if you prefer) makes certain
| people different, and that those people should be able to
| participate in social institutions like marriage
| consistent with their biology.
|
| Lol okay?
|
| >On the other hand, if you want to force a debate on
| whether sexuality should be private or public, or whether
| individuals have social roles and be subject to social
| norms dictated by their biology, that is an entirely
| different fight, and it's one you don't want to have.
|
| I don't want to force a debate on anything? I'm not sure
| why you seem to be incapable of having a conversation
| with me as opposed to some sort of globally disagreeable
| boogeyman you've invented on my behalf... I litereally
| asked you a simple question and rather than answer it,
| you came back telling me that I'm trying to force
| something? You put like 10 carts before your horse
| there...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What we can agree on, however, is that God (or the pre-
| natal endocrine environment, if you prefer) makes certain
| people different, and that those people should be able to
| participate in social institutions like marriage
| consistent with their biology.
|
| I mean, no, we can't agree on that restrictive phrasing.
|
| Even to the extent we might agree that biological
| differences might sometimes be socially relevant, there
| is no special biological privilege to pre-natal effects.
|
| (But mostly this seems to be appealing to the flawed
| "born different" premise for legal rights.)
| plorg wrote:
| >...people should be able to participate in social
| institutions like marriage consistent with their
| biology...
|
| "Consistent with their biology" is not a precondition
| that you could find broad agreement on - I don't think
| you could even find a broad agreement on what it means.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Some major headlines in Florida recently:
| "Florida Republicans Take Aim at Gender-Affirming Care,
| Drag Shows... [The bill] would treat parents as abusers for
| allowing medical care to children, and cracks down on
| parenting harder even than Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's
| notorious anti-trans child executive order." [1]
| "Florida lawmakers approve death penalty in child rapes,
| sending bill to governor... The Florida Senate on Tuesday
| passed a bill that would allow the death penalty for people
| who commit sexual batteries on children under age 12,
| sending the issue to Gov. Ron DeSantis." [2]
| "Florida to allow death penalty with 8-4 jury vote instead
| of unanimously... If the Republican governor signs the bill
| into law, Florida prosecutors trying capital felony cases
| would need to convince only two-thirds of the 12-member
| jury that someone who is convicted deserves the death
| penalty, rather than a unanimous decision by a jury." [3]
|
| I'm sorry, but we are able to connect dots. DeSantis looks
| like a fascist to many of us outside looking in. I mean,
| you couldn't be more transparent about building a legal
| framework for the state-sponsored execution of LGBTQ
| people. They're doing it right out in the open, and you're
| telling us that we should just maybe consider that the
| parents are concerned about what the liberals are teaching
| their kids about sex. Well then why are they busy passing
| laws making it easier to put LGBTQ people to death? You can
| make sure your kids are taught whatever you want without
| making the death penalty a 8/4 decision. You can do that
| without making being trans or providing trans healthcare a
| capital offence.
|
| This is just like the Dobbs decision. When that landed, you
| had assured us it was a great thing because it meant the
| states could finally decide once and for all their local
| norms based on local politics. Well here we are now and
| there's a nationwide ban on abortion medicine because of an
| ideologue federal judge with a religious bent, writing laws
| from the bench, who decided _he_ didn 't like it, so _we
| all_ have to abide by that. People who live in communities
| that support these medications will be affected, and we
| were assured by conservatives on the court (and their
| supporters) that this situation would not come to pass.
|
| So really, I can't stand any more predications about what
| restraint the right will use with these laws. Any loophole
| in there _will_ be used as such. Omissions and vague
| language aren 't an oversight in lawmaking, they are tools
| which allow for the unequal enforcement of those laws in
| whatever way the executive (Ron DeSantis) prefers.
|
| We cannot give Florida the benefit of the doubt that they
| aren't currently laying the edifices for genocide because a
| man like Ron DeSantis would never aspire to exact that kind
| of revenge on his enemies. Please. The man oozes petty
| authoritarianism. He is a walking narcissistic injury, and
| he's proven (though his Disney debacle) he is willing to
| use his power and his office to exact personal revenge
| against political opponents. He's not fooling anyone, and
| any calls to "please let's all give everyone the benefit of
| the doubt" doesn't pass the laugh test when he's lowering
| the threshold for the death penalty.
|
| [1] https://www.advocate.com/politics/florida-republicans-
| transg...
|
| [2] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-nsf-
| death-p...
|
| [3] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/florida-allow-death-
| penalty...
| rayiner wrote:
| Dude, if you want to "connect the dots" between the death
| penalty for actual _child rape_ and anything to do with
| LGBTQ people, that says more about you than the voters in
| Florida. Apart from being utter paranoia, your position
| is complete political blackmail. You 're using LGBTQ
| rights as political cover to force Florida parents to
| accept drag shows for children.
| freejazz wrote:
| > your position is complete political blackmail
|
| This is nonsense and you aren't seriously engaging in any
| conversation by typing crap like this
|
| There are no state-mandated drag shows. Liberals do not
| have the power to compel you to attend drag shows or to
| take your children there. Full stop. Get a grip.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's not paranoid to listen to a guy dehumanize and label
| LGBTQ people as child abusers every chance he gets, and
| then wonder what he has in mind when he signs a law
| lowering the threshold for the death penalty the same
| week they approve the death penalty for child abusers.
|
| Yeah sure, let's put child rapists to death, who could
| disagree with that? Until all of a sudden what you do in
| your private or with your friends or with your family is
| considered "child abuse". Until your lifestyle is
| considered "child abuse". Until your existence is
| considered "child abuse". The way fascists work your
| religion will be considered "child abuse" eventually.
| You've heard of the 9 most terrifying words, well the 4
| most terrifying words in English are "think of the
| children!" There's no limit to the atrocities people will
| commit in the name of God and in the name of protecting
| children.
|
| Do you ever wonder how a society can go from civil to
| erecting industrial scale human-death factories. It's
| little steps like these, and people rationalizing them
| along the way. We can make our children safe from rape
| and abuse without putting anyone to death. 0 people have
| to be put to death to keep children safe. And yet, here
| we are, the state is making it easier to put human beings
| to death as a matter of _law_. There should be no higher
| red flag raised than that.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| The American right has spent the last couple of years
| intentionally and systematicallly conflating LGBTQ people
| with child sexual assault by starting to call them
| "groomers". _That 's_ who's doing this dot-connecting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_grooming_conspiracy_th
| eor...
|
| Surely you've noticed?
|
| > drag shows for children.
|
| God forbid someone in a dress read a storybook. Try not
| to engage in this ridiculous moral panic.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If parents don't want their kids attending drag shows
| it's pretty easy for them to simply not take their kids,
| but that's not what's happening.
|
| What's happening is that those parents are making a fuss
| about what other parents are deciding to do.
|
| Telling other kids and parents what to do is a consistent
| position. Like forced identity disclosures in schools. It
| isn't enough that they would like to get notified, but
| every kid who asks to be called something different has
| to be disclosed, or if they don't want their kid playing
| sports with a trans kid, they would rather kick out the
| trans kid out than make choices about their own
| participation.
| peanutcrisis wrote:
| A contra-narrative to your point is that there exist a
| minority of people who hold very specific and very dogmatic
| views about gender. These people are pushing their views
| through the education system (I do not know the extent of it,
| just that it exists), and seemingly without the consent of
| parents (i.e., social transitions without informing parents).
|
| While I deeply disagree and detest the use of the term
| "groomer", the people who are doing so, are doing so in
| reaction to this dogma. Mind you, this is not about sexual
| minorities, but about infringing on child-parent
| relationships. As far as I best know (I can be wrong), the
| dogma is largely unsubstantiated, and it is not majority
| accepted in most places around the world (look at the UK for
| instance). Mind you, this is not about trans or gay
| acceptance, but the rejection of the biological sex binary,
| the conflation of sex and gender, and the subversion of
| parent-teacher relationships in favour of this dogma.
|
| Furthermore, I don't think "groomer" is the modern newspeak.
| If anything, the dogma that the terrible term "groomer" was
| meant to counter has the support of countless of mainstream
| institutions, academic, political, medical, news
| establishments, etc. Unless you live in a pure conservative
| bubble of any sorts, the dogma is word, the dogma is the
| newspeak; for starters, painting actual bigots and people who
| have compassion for these minorities (but refuse to toe the
| line behind this dogma) with the same brush by calling them
| "would-be killers". As such, there is a middle ground to be
| found, a minority of extremists such as yourself just get in
| the way.
| dtauzell wrote:
| The reaction became a chain reaction and now the details
| don't matter and the "dogma" could be anything. For
| example, singing the sone "Rainbowland" at an elementary
| school concert is now considered pushing some dogma of
| shaming on kids.
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| freejazz wrote:
| Conservatives are all for letting parents take their kids
| to churches where people play with snakes and speak in
| tongues, and you are actually pearl clutching over a man
| wearing a dress?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| And most liberals would be just as upset if a public
| school or library hosted one of those events.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Fuck no. Schools have had literal bible studies hosted by
| a teacher or student for decades!
| freejazz wrote:
| A library less so, imo. Local libraries are community
| institutions and should be serving their communities. so
| if the community wants to have a drag night, I don't see
| the issue? no one is forced to go... I went to boy scouts
| at my library
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Your whole chain of responses here running a motte and
| bailey on both sides. On the one hand, you're pretending
| that the most silly extremists on the right are central
| examples; while on the other hand, pretending that there
| exist no extremists on the left.
| freejazz wrote:
| Responding to an actual poster here isn't that. Also, who
| are the alleged extremists on the left? You are just
| revealing your personal disagreement with my positions.
| plorg wrote:
| What about drag shows is inappropriate, for what ages,
| and what intervention would you consider reasonable to
| prevent the harm of children? Plenty of drag shows are
| designed to be family-friendly, and generally parents can
| just not bring their kids to things that they don't think
| are appropriate for them.
|
| In any case, the way you write about self expression (and
| the Matt Walsh-level unseriousness of describing drag
| shows as a mockery to trans women) suggest you're not
| really looking to find a common ground that would allow
| non-conformity in public.
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| freejazz wrote:
| > Drag shows involve violating social norms as a form of
| voluntary self expression
|
| This argument is brought to you by the same crowd of
| incels and other neo-reactionaries who lament the public
| reaction to their continued efforts to be shockingly edgy
|
| > Such rejection of social norms should not be granted
| state sanction by hosting such events in public
| libraries.
|
| Why? What social norms should the state care about? All
| social norms? What about the social norms of say,
| redlining communities? Should the state sanction that
| social norm, because it's a social norm?
| rayiner wrote:
| > This argument is brought to you by the same crowd of
| incels and other neo-reactionaries who lament the public
| reaction to their continued efforts to be shockingly edgy
|
| No, sorry, standard brown immigrant socialization--which
| is why both DeSantis and Youngkin won on this issue.
| Look, my family voted for Biden but we would lose our
| shit if any of our kids got a tattoo. You do not want to
| fight us in that turf.
|
| > Why? What social norms should the state care about?
|
| If we are talking about what state sanction directed to
| children, then it should be the social norms parents want
| to impart to their kids. There id a majority coalition
| for those norms to include accepting people who are born
| different. There is not a majority coalition in support
| of voluntary gender norm breaking in the name of self
| expression.
| freejazz wrote:
| >There is not a majority coalition in support of
| voluntary gender norm breaking in the name of self
| expression.
|
| As opposed to in the name of what else? your posts are so
| weird - no one is trying to fight you, so maybe tone it
| down. Like, you post at me like I'm going into your
| community and making you do things with your children,
| it's a bit ridiculous. We are just chatting on a website.
|
| >No, sorry, standard brown immigrant socialization--which
| is why both DeSantis and Youngkin won on this issue.
|
| What?
| rayiner wrote:
| > As opposed to in the name of what else?
|
| To conform their outward presentation to the gender they
| identify with, which is a fact rooted in biology.
|
| >No, sorry, standard brown immigrant socialization--which
| is why both DeSantis and Youngkin won on this issue.
|
| > What?
|
| The vast majority of the world does not embrace white
| American notions of individualistic self expression. We
| think norm enforcement and conformity are good things
| that help kids stay on track. Both Youngkin in VA and
| DeSantis in FL won majorities among Hispanics (a group
| that usually favors democrats) by focusing on that
| disconnect between liberal teachers and more conservative
| families. https://interactives.ap.org/votecast-2021-va;
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/florida-latinos-
| turned-f...
| freejazz wrote:
| >To conform their outward presentation to the gender they
| identify with, which is a fact rooted in biology.
|
| I'm sorry but how is that not also self expression?
|
| >The vast majority of the world does not embrace white
| American notions of individualistic self expression. We
| think norm enforcement and conformity are good things
| that help kids stay on track. Both Youngkin in VA and
| DeSantis in FL won majorities among Hispanics (a group
| that usually favors democrats) by focusing on that
| disconnect between liberal teachers and more conservative
| families.
|
| This is completely non-responsive to what you offered it
| as a response to.
| msla wrote:
| > Drag shows involve violating social norms as a form of
| voluntary self expression. Such rejection of social norms
| should not be granted state sanction by hosting such
| events in public libraries.
|
| Mere assertion. Not an argument.
|
| The supposed arguments against drag queen story time are
| either unserious hand-wringing about supposed harms
| coming from drag, a form of art older than modern gender
| roles, or simple threats of violence. Neither are actual
| arguments, just argument-shaped word noises.
|
| > By contrast, trans people presenting consistent with
| their biological gender identity isn't a form of
| voluntary self expression, any more than it is for a cis
| person to do so.
|
| "Biological gender identity" is ill-defined here, to the
| extent I honestly don't know what you mean: Do you mean a
| trans woman, such as Blaire White, dressing and acting
| like a woman? The phrase "biological gender identity"
| seems to conflate the modern conception of sex (genitals,
| chromosomes to some extent, hormones) with the modern
| conception of gender (roles, presentation, identity) and
| I'm now confused.
| freejazz wrote:
| rayiner is clearly just expressing their own personal
| distaste for non-passing trans individuals. Is Rayiner
| checking the genitals of everyone that interacts with
| children, or is Rayiner just implicitly assuming their
| sex based upon their gender expression??
| rayiner wrote:
| Are you seriously comparing non-passing trans people to
| drag performers?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| You do realize in the subcontinent that transpeople
| interact with kids all the time in the street? I remember
| meeting them in my family's neighborhood in Karachi when
| I was 7 or 8. You might want to ask your dad about this
| if you don't believe me.
| freejazz wrote:
| I'm not, are you??
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > and I'm now confused.
|
| So is rayiner, I think.
| rayiner wrote:
| The premise for broad acceptance of trans rights, just as
| it is for gay rights, is the scientific fact that
| prenatal endocrine exposure controls sexual orientation
| and people's feelings about what gender they are: https:/
| /www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801....
| It's not at all "ill-defined" it's the scientific premise
| behind saying that someone is born transgender as opposed
| to choosing to be transgender.
|
| Accepting the right of people to present themselves
| consistent with their gender identity has nothing to do
| with sanctioning breaking gender norms for "art" or other
| purposes, which is the focus of drag.
| plorg wrote:
| I guarantee you that people who support the rights of
| trans people to be trans people are not doing so
| contingent on there being some kind of purely biological
| basis. Most people probably don't even know there is a
| proposed biological mechanism.
|
| In any case, for those I know who have considered it,
| most reject the notion that one's acceptance be based on
| simply having no choice in the matter of their gender
| identity, sexuality, or other identifiers like skin color
| or disability, because it suggests that their value is
| arrived at only reluctantly and it is on them to prove
| they should be treated like anyone else.
|
| Contrary to your quixotic theory, most nominally liberal
| or queer-accepting people I've met root their ethics in
| something like humanism (including for example Christian
| humanism). A person is valuable because they are, because
| they exist. Self-expression is an outgrowth of such a
| belief. It is part of flourishing and living into the
| world. It is rarely if ever a worldview of itself.
|
| Similarly, drag is not just art for the sake of art or
| transgression for the sake of transgression. It has not
| always been considered transgressive. It has a long
| tradition in gay spaces as an activity that brings people
| together and in many ways is used to show that queer
| people are not alone. It is a way of exploring the
| boundaries of what it means to be human.
|
| All of it is of a piece because people are not
| collections of independent atomic functions, they are
| bodies and minds and live in spaces.
| plorg wrote:
| So the violation of social norms is harmful to children?
| Is that your argument? Or is it "voluntary self-
| expression" that children should be protected from?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| And parents should be able to choose to take their kids
| to a private family friendly drag show if they choose.
|
| But there is a big difference between that and putting
| one on at a public school or library.
| [deleted]
| digging wrote:
| > But drag shows aren't appropriate for children, right?
|
| I mean, this is either an ill-informed or wildly hateful
| view. Many drag shows are appropriate for children. Many
| drag shows are not appropriate for children.
|
| We didn't criminalize TV writers when South Park
| contained adult humor. In fact, we started showing it all
| day long.
| msla wrote:
| > A contra-narrative to your point is that there exist a
| minority of people who hold very specific and very dogmatic
| views about gender.
|
| Yes. They're the ones who try to enforce their views at
| gunpoint.
|
| > These people are pushing their views through the
| education system (I do not know the extent of it, just that
| it exists), and seemingly without the consent of parents
| (i.e., social transitions without informing parents).
|
| You were going so well until the end, there. They don't
| enable social transition without parental consent, they
| insist upon genital inspections without parental consent.
| Looking at the genitals of pre-pubescent children isn't
| something which would interest me, but they seem quite keen
| on it. It isn't something I can condone, of course, and not
| something I can meet them halfway on.
|
| > While I deeply disagree and detest the use of the term
| "groomer", the people who are doing so, are doing so in
| reaction to this dogma.
|
| Insisting on access to the genitals of children is grooming
| behavior. Normalizing the idea that strangers get to poke
| around without consent is pure grooming. It's why I can't
| accept it.
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| nooron wrote:
| The idea that drag shows mock trans women would surprise
| a lot of trans women drag performers. It's not an unheard
| of position for trans women but it is not the norm.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| freejazz wrote:
| >What's actually going on in Florida is an ideological
| debate about how to teach kids to think about sexuality
| and gender identity more generally.
|
| No it's not and that's a completely disingenuous reading
| of what is actually going on in Florida, which is clearly
| reactive politics and pearl-grasping over every single
| culture war issue because their governor is pushing these
| kinds of policies to gain nat'l political prominence.
|
| >That's why these middle aged librarians have drag shows
| for kids. In a way drag shows are a mockery of trans
| women. That doesn't matter to them, because for them the
| overriding principle is self expression.
|
| Lol, I see what's really going on with your post now.
| freejazz wrote:
| > These people are pushing their views through the
| education system (I do not know the extent of it, just that
| it exists), and seemingly without the consent of parents
| (i.e., social transitions without informing parents).
|
| That's certainly a narrative one side sells. One does have
| to wonder though, how it is that this could be possible
| given the complete lack of power in society held by those
| individuals. Maybe it's a bit more hyped up than it really
| is.
| mold_aid wrote:
| [flagged]
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| If I just walk around the neighborhood, nearly half the
| pedestrians are staring at the phone, oblivious to where they're
| going. Sometimes I have to shout "Hello!" to get them to not run
| into me. _And these are (mostly) adults._
|
| One guess what class of app they're all staring at.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| This part seems deeply questionable to me:
|
| > Congress should raise the age of "internet adulthood" from the
| current 13 (which was set in 1998 before we knew what the
| internet would become) to 16, and enforce it by mandating that
| the platforms use age verification procedures, a variety of which
| already exist
|
| Yes, age verification procedures exist, but I don't know of any
| that are actually effective without also being privacy/security
| nightmares. Haidt's analysis of "what damage is done" seems to
| assume an idealized implementation that never incorrectly flags
| an adult or causes a leak of personal information.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Hmm, he seems to think that the criminal standard of proof
| (beyond a reasonable doubt) is equivalent to p<0.05 in the
| sciences. That is highly dubious. I'm surprised he doesn't know
| the by-now standard belief that p<0.05 is, itself, a criminal
| standard of proof (lol).
| [deleted]
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I've been noticing that I'm much more likely to argue/fight with
| friends by text rather than in person. Not talking about social
| media, just plain old chat. Maybe because we miss real-life
| signals that help us adjusting the conversation.
| 1827162 wrote:
| I think it's the total visibility that's causing mental illness.
| There is no space where you can be with your friends, screw up,
| and _not_ have it become known to everyone in your peer group.
| There 's little space to make mistakes. No space to be yourself.
| You are under the watchful gaze of your friends, i.e. peer
| surveillance, nearly all of the time. Which induces stifling
| conformity.
|
| Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up
| exerting social control over your life through social media.
|
| So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms.
| If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah.
| It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first
| place.
|
| On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily
| find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be
| helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus
| stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn
| responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make
| mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those
| mistakes.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| If this is the case, is this reflected in the suicide rate of
| small, nosy towns? Small towns are notorious for everyone
| knowing everyone else's business.
| lolinder wrote:
| Suicide rates do go up the lower the population density. I
| can't say it's attributable to this dynamic, though.
|
| > suicide rates increase as population density decreases and
| an area becomes more rural.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-
| suicide.htm...
| mjevans wrote:
| Entrapment, and a sense that there is no path to a bright
| future. Both socially and economically.
| afthonos wrote:
| There's a difference, though, between everyone having access
| to what you have done, and people in your circle of trust
| gossiping about you to people outside of it. First, you can
| theoretically figure out the gossip and exclude them. Second,
| the gossip gossips about things _they_ find interesting, not
| about things random bored trolls find juicy. Thus, the odds
| of your faux pas exposing you to abuse are naturally lower.
|
| In other words, "small towns have no secrets" is an
| oversimplification.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I left facebook a long time ago because it just felt like low
| value interaction. None of my friends on there were people I
| actually spent time with, and the whole thing seemed to just
| bring out the worst sides of people. I never specifically
| experienced the peer surveillance you describe, but I believe
| it's real or that social media has made people believe it's
| real (to a degree worthy of concern)
|
| I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your
| perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media
| is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe
| that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us
| worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and
| highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of
| people
|
| I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I
| haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people
| have learned? or just deserted it?
|
| Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of
| magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't think this is unique to social media. Try dressing
| different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had
| cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized. It
| would be even worse because there's no way to find people who
| might be different like you, unlike today where there are
| forums and other websites.
| TheMode wrote:
| Wouldn't you just be pushed into dressing the same way? Is it
| really problematic?
| burnished wrote:
| Getting into fights over it wasn't the greatest experience,
| does that count as problematic?
| bmelton wrote:
| > Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before
| people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end
| up ostracized
|
| I think that's a part of OP's point. After that, if you
| wanted, you could go away to college and buy normal clothes
| and reinvent yourself completely.
|
| Nowadays, if you're a person who agrees for whatever reason
| is a shitheel, you're that same shitheel forever, and the
| inertia required to overcome that is greater.
|
| You're right in the sense that the internet _also_ allows to
| find sympathetic others, but that doesn 't shake the stigma,
| merely exposes it to more people. (Which has the added
| benefit of contributing to polarization.)
| xwdv wrote:
| I think being able to find others like you is actually what
| really sends mental health spiraling.
|
| Back in the day, if you were a pathetic loser, that's all you
| were, and that's how you had to navigate life. This would
| force you to take an honest look at yourself and see why you
| don't fit in to larger society and maybe if you should try to
| be different. And eventually you might become a version of
| yourself a bit more acceptable to society. Even if you knew
| deep down you were a pathetic loser, at least now you knew
| how to cooperate and be agreeable with others and even make
| friends that are different from you and not total losers. In
| time you would gain wisdom about life and be content with
| yourself.
|
| But now? It's quick to find so many others exactly like you,
| and you can feed off each others thoughts and words of
| encouragement, no matter how twisted. Eventually you see
| everyone not like you as an enemy, rather than as a person
| whose friendship and acceptance you seek to earn. You lose
| your connection to the rest of society, you find yourself
| increasingly unable to relate, and find yourself spending
| your days seething with hate at the society that you feel has
| nothing to offer you, filled with people you'll never give a
| fuck about.
| caddemon wrote:
| I think in most cases this isn't true (who cares how niche
| your hobbies or style are), but when it comes to internet
| mental health discussion communities there definitely is a
| double edged sword IMO. Depends on the community and
| person, but I suspect you're right in the case of e.g.
| finding others who are depressed, there's a lot of
| overshoot in the reaction to stigma in some of these
| groups, to the point it encourages giving into some pretty
| bad lifestyle loops.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| I'd say that's not necessarily bad, more of a double edged
| sword. Many marginalized groups do need these kinds of
| support. They fall into the categories like 'I like playing
| games instead of sports, so what', 'I like watching niche
| foreign shows with subtitles'. At the end of the day, many
| ppl do benefit from increased connections. Many groups(both
| negative and positive) wont even exist with current
| technology.
|
| Personally, it's a net positive for me.
| zamnos wrote:
| That only explains the poor mental health of terrible
| people with shitty beliefs though. What about people with
| parents who managed to socialize them well but yet are
| horribly depressed due to the environment being in
| shambles? The environment has always been mistreated by
| those who make more money from that mistreatment, from way
| before the Internet was a smidge of an idea.
| llamaLord wrote:
| [flagged]
| 1827162 wrote:
| It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your
| "friends" here are in effect not _allowing_ you to be yourself.
| And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you)
| if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by
| the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it's the addicive nature of social media is causing
| mental illness. Lack of sleep, lack of time to just let the
| mind wander (=lack of time to actually lift your gaze from the
| small and take care of your bigger things in life).
|
| It can of course be a mixture of several effects.
| xapata wrote:
| > So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these
| platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social
| outcast, a pariah.
|
| We seem to have different friends. Maybe it's a generational
| thing? Very few of my friends are highly active on social
| media. At least, not as far as I can tell, because I rarely
| check the feeds.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| You can always just delete your account. Granted, that's easier
| for me to say as an adult than it would be for your average
| peer-pressured teenager. But that's where parents can help.
|
| I think eventually, teens will see social media as "uncool" in
| the same way as they see smoking cigarettes as "uncool" (in
| some countries). It takes a lot of social propagandizing to
| popularize that idea, but we did it with cigarettes and we can
| do it with social media.
|
| We need to make being _off the grid_ cooler than being on it.
| Privacy is cool!
| 1827162 wrote:
| I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually.
| It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away,
| as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than
| the benefits.
|
| However not being on social media can have real-world
| consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as
| an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.
|
| There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and
| ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this
| pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the
| children that way and also make it more difficult for adult
| authority figures to interfere with their lives.
| glenngillen wrote:
| My 6yo daughter had to create a login for various online
| things recently (e.g., code.org to keep track of her
| progress). I don't exactly when or where they taught her
| this at school, but she absolutely refused to share any of
| her personal information in any way. She spent a good 30
| minutes trying to make up a handle to use that she liked
| but didn't include any reference to her name, her initials,
| anything about her birth month or day (I'd suggesting
| adding the day of the month she was born as a suffix so
| she'd remember it given all her initial name preferences
| seems to be taken already), etc.
|
| I was very impressed that they seem to have this
| conditioned into them so young, and to a level of
| importance that exceeded even my own paranoia about doing
| it properly.
| hackerlight wrote:
| One of Haidt's points is that you can't escape by deleting
| your account, because everyone else is still online. Suppose
| you're a teenage girl. The gossip mill about _you_ is still
| going to be doing the rounds on social media, so the
| cyberbulling can 't be stopped whether or not you're
| participating. If anything, being the strange outcast by
| refusing to go online will inflame things. That's one reason
| why a ban for those below 16 or 18 is a good idea.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You say that but it's a bit tough to care if you don't see
| it happen. It's possible for everyone here to be the
| subject of a meme somewhere of a picture taken without
| consent. However, it just feels tough to care unless you
| actually see the meme and the reactions of people to it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The difference between some completely random person
| taking a picture and your circle of friends is that it's
| very unlikely for the former to reach anyone you know,
| where as with the latter it's a guarantee.
| llamaLord wrote:
| [flagged]
| Freire_Herval wrote:
| People always say correlation does not equal causation but they
| never mention how does one determine causation definitively?
|
| Unlike typical observational science, causation must be
| established by having the experimenter intervene with the
| experiment himself. The experimenter must introduce or remove
| smart phones to the population being experimented on and record
| any changes to the data.
|
| So it's actually very possible for the author to prove his own
| theory beyond reasonable doubt.
|
| These are the 2 options I can think of that can be done
| individually or together: 1. Remove smart phones
| away from people who are depressed. Measure depression levels
| over time. 2. Pick a set of humans that don't use
| smart phones and choose who will have access to smart phones and
| who never will over a period of 5 or 10 years. Measure depression
| levels over time.
|
| We have procedures in place to prove things like this with
| medicine. I think it's very possible to conduct experiments like
| this with the rigor of clinical trials given that you can
| literally remove or introduce the predicted causative agent from
| any human: smart phones.
|
| It's worth it to mention here that not all things are amenable to
| causative experiments. I believe in climate change but it is not
| possible to run a causative experiment where you remove or
| introduce the causative agent: greenhouse gases. It is
| unfortunate that climate change cannot be established as true
| beyond reasonable doubt simply because all current evidence is
| correlative.
|
| But for smart phones it is very very possible for the author to
| go far beyond a retort and actually prove his claims correct.
| standardUser wrote:
| > In social media research, we focus on "how much social media
| did a person consume?" and we plan our experiments
| accordingly...Most don't even distinguish between platforms, as
| if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different
| kinds of liquor.
|
| This is the problem I have with studies of "social media". It's
| like saying "the internet" causes problem, or "computers". These
| are overly broad categories and I refuse to believe someone
| interacting with tight-knit hobby groups on Facebook for 4 hours
| per day is suffering the same consequences as someone doom-
| scrolling photos of models on Instagram for 4 hours per day.
| Deegy wrote:
| This is a great point and it's where I struggle to moderate my
| own social media consumption.
|
| Is aimlessly scrolling my twitter feed a net benefit to my
| overall mood and well being? I'm 95% sure it's not.
|
| Is spending 20-30 minutes browsing hacker news every morning a
| net benefit to my overall mood and well being? I'm not sure.
| zajio1am wrote:
| I think that blaming 'social media' is kind of misguided. That is
| mostly passive thing. The real issue is more likely toxic social
| relations and communication with peers, which is just provided by
| social media.
| mawadev wrote:
| It is truly remarkable to which great lengths people go to
| justify their unhealthy relationship with social media. It is
| nearly the same as telling an alcoholic they have an alcohol
| problem and then hearing excuse after excuse and re-framing and
| mental gymnastics to jump around the elephant in the room.
|
| I'm glad write-ups like this one are a thing.
|
| Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are
| glued to our devices and should go touch grass.
| creshal wrote:
| > Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are
| glued to our devices and should go touch grass.
|
| And yet, their generation seems to be the most addicted these
| days, and the most unhinged when it comes to following
| conspiracy theories.
| taneq wrote:
| Well of course they are, they poor dears grew up in a world
| without it and while there are exceptions, most of them lack
| any natural immunity. Just look at people over 50 (present
| company excepted, of course) trying to use the web without an
| ad blocker.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is a good point.
|
| I suspect that one reason is that "digital natives" have been
| raised with the tech, so have sort of a "natural resistance,"
| yet the oldtimers were hooked almost immediately.
|
| For myself, I have been using electronic communications,
| almost since they were invented (BBSes and UUNet, anyone?),
| so I have "more resistance" than most of my peers.
|
| Yet, I still have to stay off of Facebook. This is pretty
| much my only social media venue. The main reason I stay, is
| because people play [relatively] nice, hereabouts.
| [deleted]
| jt2190 wrote:
| I suspect that those who grow up as social media "natives"
| will have some social norms that protect them somewhat,
| whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will
| not have learned the social norms that can protect them.
|
| We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social
| norms with alcohol. For example, it's quite common for people
| to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of the day.
| It's not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but it's "just not
| done". We can easily see the benefits of not drinking at the
| start of the workday.
|
| I'm not going to guess what kind of social media norms people
| are developing in general. For me I only follow boring,
| topic-focused people on Twitter, and I only use the
| "Following" feed. Nobody is making me do this.
| polygotdomain wrote:
| >I suspect that those who grow up as social media "natives"
| will have some social norms that protect them somewhat,
| whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will
| not have learned the social norms that can protect them.
|
| Agreed. A lot of older generations fall for a lot of satire
| and comment on things as if they're 1 on 1 with you instead
| of realizing that it's a public forum. However, a lot of
| younger generations are incredibly aware that everything
| they do and say could potentially be public or go viral.
| That brings a whole host of other problems and challenges
| with it.
|
| The ultimate problem is every incentive goes against a
| "healthy" social media. Companies don't want a "healthy"
| social media as they're focused on engagement, screen time,
| content, and advertisers. Most of the primitive portions of
| our brains don't want "healthy" social media either, as it
| craves the rush of more likes and followers. I don't think
| that the logical, self-aware portions of our psyche are
| going to change the direction of how things are going.
| jwestbury wrote:
| > We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social
| norms with alcohol. For example, it's quite common for
| people to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of
| the day. It's not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but
| it's "just not done".
|
| I find this point quite interesting. I didn't drink alcohol
| until I was nearly 30. I skipped by most of the formative
| alcohol consumption experiences most people have.
|
| And, incidentally, I don't seem to follow the same norms
| about what time of day it's okay to drink: I'll happily
| have a beer well before noon.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| The non-native social media people have grown up fully on
| in-person relationships where trust is very important. They
| apply the same trust to people on social media that they do
| to their friends and family. The social media natives treat
| social media as different things.
| 1827162 wrote:
| Likely because that generation was raised to believe
| everything they were told, starting from an early age with
| school, religion, then with television and newspapers, etc.
|
| The younger generation were raised with media that spread
| obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience,
| etc. and they learned to think more critically about what
| they are reading.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The younger generation were raised with media that spread
| obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience
|
| Except that talk radio is way older than that, and it was
| the same kind of content.
| 1827162 wrote:
| Yes, I'm likely wrong there....
|
| As a side note, one important change in the modern times
| is the ability to cross check information from a wide
| range of sources easily.
| dexterdog wrote:
| That is an awfully broad brush you are painting with there.
| It's also painfully obvious which of the two groups you are
| in.
| 1827162 wrote:
| Yes, quite possibly overgeneralization there. Thinking on
| it....
| [deleted]
| taeric wrote:
| I'm probably over indexing on it, but the nocebo effect did
| not begin and end with a generation. People are remarkably
| influenced by what they are told. Even if they know it is
| unlikely or not true.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Not according to this:
|
| Social media, gen z wins:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314973/global-daily-
| tim...
|
| Phones in general, millennials win:
| https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/which-
| generation-....
| hasmolo wrote:
| this glued to devices meme is tired. look at a picture of folks
| on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is
| reading a newspaper or magazine. i know it seems crazy, but
| humans reading information is a constant in public, and the
| only reason you didn't see more of it in the past is that you
| were part of the group consuming media, while also assigning
| intellectual value to the fact that a periodical is 'printed on
| paper' as if destroying a tree to make paper legitimizes the
| content in some way that a digital download of the same content
| can't.
|
| get a better argument
| reaperducer wrote:
| _look at a picture of folks on public transport from before
| phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or
| magazine._
|
| I know the image you have in your mind. I've seen it, too.
|
| What you actually mean is "I saw this one picture on social
| media of a bunch of people on a train all reading newspapers
| at the same time because war just broke out."
|
| Using that as a logical crutch for social media addiction is
| like the alcoholic saying "everybody does it."
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I grew up in the 1980s. Everyone sat and read a newspaper
| or a book on the bus or the train back then.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Narrative content is not the same as interactive content. The
| quality of the content is not the same. I'm not sure what
| compelled you to make your point in the presence of such
| obvious points.
|
| This is quite a big pond, my friend. The "get a better
| argument" line might go over well in your social circle, but
| HN is a big place with many smart people. Have some humility.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Newspapers and magazines didn't microtarget their audience or
| have endless streams of content. This is like saying "look at
| all the people riding horses in old pictures, cars can't be
| that bad".
|
| That's not even getting into the level of corporate
| surveillance social media and online advertising have brought
| us.
| idontknowifican wrote:
| what on earth are you talking about? newspapers have
| existed to control the narrative since inception. look at
| how they've been used, and listen to the lead editors talk
| about using their influence.
|
| it's a slightly less targeted ad, sure, but my dad only
| reads conservative papers, and they don't seem to be
| written with a common perspective
| freejazz wrote:
| > newspapers have existed to control the narrative since
| inception
|
| That's not even remotely close to what they said and is
| clearly just your own personal grievance with newspapers
| max51 wrote:
| The difference is that a new article carefully chosen to
| fit your preferences doesn't magically appear on your lap
| every time you finish reading (or rejecting if you don't
| like it) the previous one. You also can't swift quickly
| through hundreds of headlines to pick what interest you
| the most when you are dealing with physical medias. You
| are stuck with whatever you brought with you.
| switch007 wrote:
| Were you there? I was at the tail end of it - I used to take
| the train regularly in the mid 90s (to the present day). I
| remember some people with newspaper but it definitely wasn't
| everyone.
|
| And I just found about 15 pictures in a quick Google images
| search from the 70s and 80s that disprove your assertion.
| idontknowifican wrote:
| yes, but my experience is speaking to caltrain in the 90s
| [deleted]
| barbazoo wrote:
| > look at a picture of folks on public transport from before
| phones.
|
| That's a strawman, the issue is kids spending their time on
| devices rather than outside doing real play with real people.
| That sort of thing.
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's like saying there's nothing wrong with giving
| thalidomide to pregnant women, because pregnant women have
| always taken herbal supplements.
|
| The obvious difference is that newspapers contain a
| relatively small amount of information packaged in a non-
| interactive, non-targeted, and less mind-absorbing format.
| People don't read newspapers for the dopamine hit, but for
| lack of something else to do.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > That's like saying there's nothing wrong with giving
| thalidomide to pregnant women, because pregnant women have
| always taken herbal supplements.
|
| Your analogy is better than you think, because in fact
| there isn't anything wrong with giving pregnant women
| thalidomide at all!
|
| You just have to not do it within a very carefully defined
| range of time within pregnancy, but before and after that
| it's as safe as milk.
|
| Turns out, the same process that makes thalidomide horribly
| teratogenic also makes it an absolutely first-rate cancer
| drug with few side-effects even in pregnancy.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Interesting. I've looked for sources on that and found a
| couple of sites saying that the sensitive period is 20-37
| days after conception, but come up short of studies on
| anything later.
|
| This webpage seems to suggest the risks are unknown after
| first trimester: https://mothertobaby.org/fact-
| sheets/thalidomide-pregnancy/
|
| Same from this university classroom material (p.2): https
| ://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/life..
| .
| idontknowifican wrote:
| that's not true at all. the process of learning is a
| dopamine hit. the concept that phones made us antisocial is
| dumb, it's a default. arguing to end phones avoids dealing
| with the problem
| n4r9 wrote:
| > the process of learning is a dopamine hit
|
| Perhaps reading newspapers produces some dopamine, but I
| imagine it is tiny in comparison to the effects of
| smartphones, and does not provide the user with the easy
| option to keep scrolling for more dopamine.
| warner25 wrote:
| I don't think the issue with phones is that people aren't
| engaging with each other in public spaces. I'll stipulate
| that it has never been the norm to engage with strangers on
| public transport. But I see a number of other differences
| between then and now.
|
| For one, I don't think it was common for people to take a
| newspaper out of their pocket and look at it during social
| events with friends and family whenever conversation slowed
| down for a moment, or whenever it pinged with a notification.
| I observe my own wife spending far more time looking at her
| phone today than she ever spent reading a book before. Ten
| years ago, she might get lost in a book for a day or two, if
| it was a really good one. Now she walks around the house with
| her phone in-hand at _all_ times. I had to pry myself back
| from that after starting to notice the same behavior in
| myself.
| watwut wrote:
| > note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine
|
| There is one popular picture where everyone is reading
| newspapers in a bus. And just like now it is not true that
| everyone is reading on phone on public transport. It was even
| less so before, because not everybody carried magazines with
| them all the time.
| data_eng_dude wrote:
| At least with alcohol it's more socially acceptable to say to
| friends "I've seen how much you've been drinking lately and I'm
| concerned about you" - you can't really say the same for tiktok
| or instagram use.
| zamnos wrote:
| Sure you can. Well maybe you can't, but the kids these days
| even have a phrase for it - go touch grass.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Yeah, there's a whole lexicon around this sort of thing.
| "Go touch grass" is a fantastic one for it's punchiness,
| but "terminally online" is fun one, too. Add in a healthy
| dose of sarcasm, and labels like "influencer" and "gamer"
| and the like get used as pejoratives often, too.
| moi2388 wrote:
| I don't think you should listen to what psychologists say; even
| with their own studies at least 2 out of 3 times it cannot even
| be reproduced. Let alone something they _didnt_ design a study
| for..
|
| As far a common sense goes; social comparison and depression have
| already very well known links, and social media is purely social
| comparisons, so it wouldn't be a stretch to think social media
| might have an effect on depression incidence or severity.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Furthermore, when you zoom in on girls, the relationships are
| not small: girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social
| media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who
| spend an hour or less. The common refrain "correlation does not
| prove causation" is certainly relevant here, but I showed that
| when you bring in the three other kinds of studies, the case for
| causation gets quite strong._
|
| I know from long experience that saying "I got this far in the
| article and I can't be bothered to read the rest" is a good way
| to get hated on, but give me a freaking break. You have to first
| ask _why_ those girls are spending _more than four hours a day_
| on social media.
|
| The obvious inference is that the girls who spend less than an
| hour a day on social media have full lives and the ones spending
| so much time there it's like an unpaid part-time job have vacuous
| lives and they are trying to fill the void with something that
| can't do it.
|
| Social media no doubt exacerbates their issues but, no, it
| doesn't _cause_ them. Their lives are screwed up and excessive
| use of social media is more like a symptom.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Is Hacker News "Social Media"? I think it probably is. Do we
| apply the same critique of Social Media to our own relationship
| with Hacker News?
| rjmunro wrote:
| I think there is some good stuff that could be described as
| "Social media", and lots of bad. For example I think all the
| "influencer" stuff is likely to be problematic, where people show
| how great their lives are (and by implication how bad yours is).
|
| I think social media like following just your real life actual
| friends on Twitter / Facebook / having a WhatsApp group is a very
| different thing.
|
| I think that many videos on YouTube are no different or better
| than normal TV. Things like creators teaching their skills, or
| Numberphile.
|
| I'm worried that by saying "Social media is bad" we will throw
| the baby out with the bathwater.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Starting to get to the age where my oldest daughter is demanding
| access to social media because all her friends are using it.
| Surprised more parents aren't aware of the harms.
| throwaway9191aa wrote:
| I'm just moving into this phase as well. The same parents that
| said it was ridiculous kids have phones, are now getting their
| kids phones. I've heard that not having a phone is essentially
| like knowing the whole school is invited to party, except you.
| I'm really not sure what to do.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| My little cousins first started with an LTE Apple Watch. This
| allowed them to use iMessage to call/text friends and family,
| but prevented the use of any web browsing/social media. The
| downside is Apple Watches only last a few hours on LTE.
|
| They are now ~12 years old and just received their first
| iPhones. Parental controls/screen time is used to limit their
| access to social media.
|
| I personally refuse to use TikTok. But I know that is the
| main App children use today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how
| to handle that situation. A teenager without access to TikTok
| today is absolutely going to be mocked by others.
| [deleted]
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It's definitely a coordination problem. While all the kids
| might be better off without access to social media, the one
| kid who doesn't when everybody else does gets a significant
| alienation downside, probably more than cancelling out the
| benefits.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Maybe we give-in with clear boundaries and regular check-ins?
|
| Give-in and Check-in support group :)
| [deleted]
| Wensio wrote:
| I quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Never got in tiktok or any
| other social media. Our brains aren't mean to handle so much
| information at once. We can't parse it. We can't distinguish
| reality from fiction when we're constantly being told several
| things at once or youre being told a lie several times a day. I
| also can't stand that we can't just live our lives without having
| a company collect data to try and manipulate and / or sell me
| something. I understand that some people need social media but,
| if you can do without it...do it.
| kloch wrote:
| I just want to say this was one of the most enjoyable articles I
| have read in a long time. It's informative, respectful to
| critics, and exudes a "confident but restrained" tone that is so
| rare in public discourse these days.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| We must have read different articles. What I read amount to
| special pleading where the author confuses scientific and
| judicial epistemology, doesn't do a literature review, and
| comes cross as hopelessly naive.
| remarkEon wrote:
| >So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned
| participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in
| public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter. The
| question for readers -- and particularly parents, school
| administrators, and legislators -- is which side you should
| listen to as you think about what policies to adopt or change.
|
| I've been reading all the essays, and the meta-commentary is
| that the reason the debate reads the way it does is that it's
| ... not on social media.
| ycombinete wrote:
| His books _The Righteous Mind_ , and _Happiness Hypothesis_ are
| similarly well written. He narrates the former himself in the
| Audible version.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I really wish there were more essays about controversial subjects
| that would take on the tone and presentation of information in
| the manner that Jonathan Haidt does it.
|
| He really is an exceptional communicator and (to me at least)
| appears to be more interested in "the truth" than he is in "being
| right."
| thuridas wrote:
| What about monitoring variable levels of social media consumption
| with the individual levels of depression / anxiety.
|
| I have periods of higher and lower social media usage. And I have
| noticed that there is a strong inverse correlation with my mental
| health.
|
| My personal experience is just anecdotal evidence but a study
| with time variation may eliminate a lot of individual factors (
| e.g people with depressing nature using more social media) but
| leave open the question if depression causes the increase of
| social media or is there other way around. ( I think thant both)
| tokai wrote:
| Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the
| same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?
| YuukiRey wrote:
| Which period are you referring to? According to
| https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...
| this is not the case.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's a hard line drawn on that chart in the year 2012, as
| if it's some sort of significant outlier in the data, except
| that it's not. The upward trend in suicides seems to begin in
| 2007.
| YuukiRey wrote:
| That's not why the line was drawn.
|
| > In the rest of this Substack post, I offer a preview of
| the evidence that a mental illness epidemic emerged around
| 2012
|
| All of the charts have this line to highlight how the chart
| relates to the supposed theory of "problems starting in
| 2012". Not every chart will show anomalies around that time
| though.
| amluto wrote:
| One of cited objections is absurd:
|
| > I don't trust any area of research where the odds ratios are
| below 3.
|
| Then what's the point of researching even slightly more subtle
| effects? This person might as well start smoking: they wouldn't
| trust any amount of evidence that smoking causes cardiovascular
| disease -- the odds ratio seems to be 2.
| scythe wrote:
| In fairness, the odds ratio for "smoking causes lung cancer" is
| about sixteen.
| Karellen wrote:
| Yeah, that seems completely absurd. If the experiments are
| rigorous enough, and the p value is low enough, you should be
| able to trust the results, no matter how small the effect is.
|
| If, for example, research shows that social media use increases
| one's risk of depression by, say, between 32% and 34%, with p <
| 0.000001, they're going to discount a result that only has a
| 1-in-a-million chance of being a fluke simply because it _can_
| only show a 1 /3 rise in risk, rather than a 3x rise?
|
| That's not skepticism. That's dogma.
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| Yes but in very large datasets, isn't it the case that you
| end up finding correlations for many things at very low p
| values? That is (one of the reasons) why effect size matters.
| Still, the "odds ratios are below 3" requirement seems
| excessive.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Haidt's quote leaves out the following explanation:
|
| > That doesn't mean I only believe in 3-1 or greater effects.
| If you can show any 3-1 effect, then I'm prepared to consider
| lower odds ratios. If teenage girls with heavy social media use
| are three times as likely to be in the experimental group for
| depression 12 months later than otherwise similar teenage girls
| that don't use social media, then I'm prepared to look at
| evidence that light social media use has a 1.2 odds ratio, or
| that the odds ratio for suicide attempts is 1.4. But without a
| 3-1 odds ratio as a foundation, it's my experience that looking
| at any random data can produce plenty of lesser odds ratios,
| which seldom stand up.
|
| I found this a little confusing, but I think what Brown is
| saying is that if _all_ of the effects found in an area of
| research (not a single study) are small, it 's probably not a
| real phenomenon.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about
| "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into
| "social media is making our kids mentally unwell".
|
| Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling
| differ from the bad coddling?
| scythe wrote:
| Being exposed to adversity at 1 PM in the classroom is
| fundamentally different from being exposed to adversity at
| 11:30 PM laying in bed. One of those is much closer to the
| ancestral environment the human mind is naturally equipped to
| deal with.
| stametseater wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean. The ancestral environment
| is one in which danger comes at night; that's when the tigers
| come for you. That's why people are afraid of the dark, why
| even grown men run up their basement stairs after turning off
| the lights. Monsters in the dark will nip at your heels;
| that's what our genes tell us. But in the modern context, a
| child who's facing real adversity (not monsters under their
| bed) at night has serious problems with their home-life which
| they'll be poorly equipped to deal with.
|
| Daytime problems for kids are usually problems with other
| kids and teachers, but those kinds of problems are much
| easier for kids to deal with alone. Particularly if their
| home situation is stable.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Those situations are both so far removed from "the ancestral
| environment" that it's borderline comical to even mention
| them in the same sentence as said environment. You may as
| well say that someone a mile away from you is further
| from/closer to the sun.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of
| anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning
| cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either.
|
| Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer
| pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all
| your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a
| middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a
| test of ones own character in isolation.
|
| In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get
| them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might
| spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible
| theory.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is an excellent point; it's hard to square Haidt's
| precious claims with coddling unless we're to accept some kind
| of convoluted "whiplash" argument: children who are first
| coddled are then "shocked" with social media. But this requires
| a generational or chronological explanation that isn't
| evidenced: we'd expect to see suicide rates level off with more
| recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who've been on the
| Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by
| Haidt doesn't show this.
| frostburg wrote:
| The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post
| hoc rationalization for political goals.
| joenot443 wrote:
| You'll have to be more specific. What political goals do you
| think are being accomplished here?
|
| For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a
| centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar
| with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being
| politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings
| don't align with YOUR politics doesn't make the research
| itself politically motivated, it's more likely your worldview
| was politically steeped from the beginning.
| watwut wrote:
| Being centrist IS a political position. The one that status
| quo is good and those who challenge it are doing something
| inherently wrong.
| smolder wrote:
| I don't think centrism means believing the status quo is
| good. Good and bad are on a different axis from left to
| right. A centrist can believe in a great need for
| improvement that doesn't involve raising or lowering
| taxes, expanding or reducing government budget, etc.
| Corruption and regulatory capture and bad foreign policy
| and such aren't things solved by moving left or right,
| generally.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wait, what? Centrism makes it easier to propose changes
| to the status quo, because most effective and feasible
| improvements to the status quo are essentially orthogonal
| wrt. the whole left vs. right political spectrum.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The most effective improvements are frequently a disjoint
| set relative to the most feasible ones.
|
| Centrism focuses on feasibility, and on incrementalism.
| The possibility that We're Just Doing It Wrong isn't a
| part of that worldview, and so should it turn out that we
| are, in fact, doing it wrong, centrism will never address
| it.
|
| Put differently, centrism is philosophically equivalent
| to a local minimum/maximum from which any significant
| change makes things worse than the status quo (and
| legitimately so). This metric fails to note that there
| are better minima/maxima that are reachable, but only if
| things get worse for (hopefully a short) period of time.
| frostburg wrote:
| I mean in general; I assume you're aware of the jokes on
| how ancient complaints about the newer generations being
| weak, disrespectful et. are.
|
| I don't see how Haidt identifying as a centrist has any
| bearing on anything; the idea that "centrism" is apolitical
| is also untenable.
| cauch wrote:
| Am I the only one that have the feeling of seeing the
| ridiculous argument more and more often: "We should not
| dismiss scientific research just because the findings don't
| align with YOUR politics and accuse the scientist to be
| obviously politically motivated. This researcher that
| produced findings that align with MY politics has been
| criticized by scientists whose finding don't align with MY
| politics, so I'm not hesitating of accusing these
| scientists to be obviously politically motivated".
|
| Yes, I'm sure such easy accusations exist. Not long ago,
| climate change was "left-wing", and now that we know that
| it's just science, people should remember who often
| scientists that were just doing their job were dismissed
| for being left-wing.
|
| But on the other hand, on the left and the right,
| scientists are human and are biased by their understanding
| of how the world works and should work.
|
| For Haidt, I don't have a specific opinion yet, but there
| are few elements that make me think that, even if he is not
| conscious about it himself, he may be politically biased:
|
| 1) In a lot of his writing, I never really see him taking
| bias-control measure seriously. He seems, at the end,
| despite what he may say sometimes, to consider himself "too
| smart to be biased", which is not a good thing. Having
| bias-control measures (aka starting from the hypothesis
| that maybe my conclusions are biased) is an easy and
| harmless way to do good science (even CERN is doing it by
| asking members of the Atlas and CMS collaboration to not
| exchange on non-published results).
|
| 2) The scientific critics are pointing at scientific
| elements that are legitimate. They are not saying "I don't
| like these findings, so I will say Haidt is right-wing",
| they are saying "there is a scientific problem with these
| findings". The large majority of them don't even say that
| Haidt is politically motivated. The "politically motivated"
| is appearing after, when people try to understand why Haidt
| will prefer some conclusions over others while they both
| are as scientifically grounded. In particular, I'm far from
| convinced by his counter-argument. For example, "the map
| for the territory" argument seems to say "stats is hard, so
| it's ok to claim we are sure even if stats say we are
| statistically not sure", or "the pascal's wager" argument
| seems very political "dropping some left-wing values and
| reinforcing some right-wing values is just all benefits,
| because obviously we are better off in a right-wing value
| society"
|
| 3) Scientists that are "neutral" will sometimes find
| findings that are politically neutral (for example: "I find
| that butter has an impact on mental health"), sometimes
| left-wing (for example: "I find that some traditional
| values have a negative impact on mental health"), sometimes
| right-wing. But if a neutral scientist is studying
| different topic and, by chance, always ends up with the
| findings that corresponds to what a right-wing person would
| think, this is suspicious. Haidt have worked on different
| topics, as you say for 11 years, and apparently, his
| reputation for preferring a conclusion more aligned with
| moderate right-wing is not due to his last topic, but from
| the observation that a truly neutral scientist will
| sometimes align with right-wing, but sometimes with left-
| wing too.
| voldacar wrote:
| What political objective is accomplished by not coddling
| children?
| frostburg wrote:
| That's the point; children would die otherwise, by the very
| biological nature of our species.
|
| What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is
| determining the details of what should be allowed to
| traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > is determining the details of what should be allowed
|
| As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove
| the boundaries that have been established over the past
| couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at
| here that are part of that supposed plan to shape
| society?
| frostburg wrote:
| Apparently social media is a step too far but other
| things that he likes should be common again. He might not
| even be specifically wrong about some practices being
| harmful, but the given arguments are weak and
| incidentally they map to a certain kind of reactionary
| wishlish.
|
| More generally, the discourse tends to boil down to "I
| was spanked and I turned out fine!".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't think that fairly represents Haidt's position at
| all.
|
| Yes, there is an inconsistency in his writing regarding
| why social media specifically is something we should
| protect children from. But Haidt is not suggesting that a
| return to a corporal punishment regime, or anything like
| it, is desirable. His concerns are things like free play,
| independent movement, negative (not only positive)
| interactions and so on.
| js8 wrote:
| As others have explained, there is a middle ground. You won't
| make people tougher by throwing them to lions, but by creating
| a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that
| can help them in that situation.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed
| skills that can help them in that situation.
|
| He literally wrote a book calling for Universities to stop
| creating "safe spaces".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Haidt considers safe spaces to be a step too far beyond
| "don't throw them to the lions". You can disagree with
| that, but please do understand and represent his position
| accurately.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think the more people are coddled the more that fairly
| tame environments look like lions.
|
| When the expected university environment is considered too
| hostile (considered to be too lion -like) you get safe
| spaces (more coddling)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| It's not inconsistent. Social media feeds distortion, and has
| no conquerable obstacle. "Toughening up" means facing
| reasonable challenges - they are not equipped yet to habdle
| algorithmically designed cocaine.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And
| wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?
| frostburg wrote:
| I think that coddling weakens middle aged social
| psychologists.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Psychologists are notoriously ridden with mental illness.
| As they rarely gather enough hard evidence for evidence, if
| the overall mental state of the population their research
| turns into complete bullshit.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted
| to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you
| see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.
| zzbzq wrote:
| Seems perfectly contradictory to me, "We need to shelter our
| kids from the big bad social media because they are too
| fragile to handle it"
| kelipso wrote:
| Right and "We need to shelter our kids from crack cocaine
| because they are too fragile to handle it" is perfectly
| contradictory too.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If the person saying that had been previously famous for
| calling for the legalisation of cannabis, and wrote a
| whole book about how the war on drugs was misguided and
| led to terrible outcomes and then never addressed the
| obvious overlap between the two stances, that would also
| be strange.
| walrus01 wrote:
| What's funny is that it's the baby boomer generation that
| _created_ the concept of giving out participation awards to
| their kids and overly helicopter parenting them, and then 25,
| 30 years later complains "all these young people are so
| coddled and soft and wants recognition for the smallest thing!"
| spacephysics wrote:
| "Anti" coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation
| trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning.
|
| Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out
| discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing
| that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you.
|
| Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your
| circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt.
| Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it
| and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back.
|
| Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that's
| okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can't know
| happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.
|
| Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A
| stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide
| you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that
| provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better,
| and sees potential in you and sets you up for success.
| Sometimes people don't have this structure, refer to the above
| point.
|
| It's odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream
| rhetoric, but that's the Overton window at work.
| watwut wrote:
| > Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your
| circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt.
|
| Basically, gaslight yourself into believing that other
| peoples actions are your fault? Sometimes you are in fact a
| victim of something, no matter how uncomfortable that thought
| makes Haidt feel.
|
| > Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and
| that's okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can't know
| happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.
|
| Effectively, be passive. Do not try to improve things.
|
| > A stable household which has a motherly figure there to
| provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure
| that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do
| better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for
| success.
|
| And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not
| empowered to provide structure making them dependent on
| father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that
| comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you
| for mistakes during the day.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << Effectively, be passive. Do not try to improve things.
|
| This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If anything,
| parent is saying that staying engaged and not giving up
| just because an issue came up, is a positive, valuable and,
| most importantly, not passive at all. In other words, if
| you can't even deal with the problem you received, how are
| you even begin to 'improve things' overall? You can't even
| handle your own circumstance to a reasonable degree.
|
| It is easy to generalize ( see? ) and be cynical.
|
| << And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are
| not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on
| father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that
| comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you
| for mistakes during the day.
|
| Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?
|
| Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept
| those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are
| bad ones as well )?
| watwut wrote:
| > This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If
| anything, parent is saying that staying engaged and not
| giving up just because an issue came up, is a positive,
| valuable and, most importantly, not passive at all. In
| other words, if you can't even deal with the problem you
| received, how are you even begin to 'improve things'
| overall?
|
| It is not uncharitable interpretation. It is exactly what
| it means. What the cultures that internalized "can't know
| happiness without sadness, light without darkness" have
| in common is that they are not trying to improve those
| things. Often for good reasons - the political system or
| powers to be prevents improvement. But, what cultures
| that improve things have in common is that they are not
| happy about stuff they want to improve.
|
| > Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?
|
| They did not. Societies with "father is the
| disciplinarian mother is not" thing had larger social
| issues then us - juvenile criminality, alcoholism,
| smoking, you name it. Fun fact: it was prevalent in
| Weimar Republic and they were as disordered as it gets.
|
| > Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept
| those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there
| are bad ones as well )?
|
| This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the
| realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both
| parents does not imply what you wrote at all.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Parent statement:
|
| >> And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are
| not empowered to provide structure making them dependent
| on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat
| that comes home after being absent whole day just to
| punish you for mistakes during the day.
|
| Response:
|
| > Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept
| those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there
| are bad ones as well )?
|
| Statement:
|
| << This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the
| realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both
| parents does not imply what you wrote at all.
|
| Response:
|
| Is it uncharitable though? I maintain it is a valid
| interpretation.
|
| You explicitly said gender essentialism[1] explains why
| mothers can't seem to get the same results ( "they are
| not empowered enough" without actually explaining what
| would that entail I might add so you may want to expand
| on it a little ) and I simply followed that thread out of
| sheer curiosity of your frame of mind and responded with
| a clear counter which suggests that positive outcomes
| seem to be common to family units that are not, lets call
| them 'unstructured'.
|
| << "completely twisting what I said"
|
| It is possible I am misreading you. What are you saying,
| exactly?
|
| << Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at
| all.
|
| How so? It seems the few studies that were done support
| that notion[2]. Granted, it is not enough to simply have
| two parents. They need to be engaged, stable, have decent
| income so there are other factors at play, but I will
| boil it down to something really simple. Raising valuable
| members of society is hard work ; having kids is not that
| hard in abstract. It is doubly as hard for one person,
| because there is no one to share that burden with.
|
| There is also some empirical data suggesting otherwise
| including amount of parents, who stay in otherwise 'bad'
| unions for the sake of the children suggesting rather
| instinctive understanding that it is not exactly a 'one
| man job'. Now, that is being countered by individualistic
| nature of US, but that is a separate conversation in
| itself.
|
| In either case, you may want to expand on your thought
| process to convince me. Right now I don't really see an
| argument.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism
| [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553416/
|
| late edit:
|
| << But, what cultures that improve things have in common
| is that they are not happy about stuff they want to
| improve.
|
| I somehow managed to miss it. Can you elaborate a little
| further on this? I am genuinely curious about examples of
| such cultures.
| spacephysics wrote:
| > Basically, gaslight yourself...
|
| No, it's empowerment to make change to improve yourself and
| not wallow in it. Life's unfair, everyone has their own
| circumstances with which to grow from. Unfortunately some
| have much worse to grow from. But staying stagnant and not
| taking the first step will keep you in that state.
|
| > Effectively be passive...
|
| Not at all what I mean. You should try to improve things,
| but during such improvement the work might suck and that's
| okay. That's what people mean when they say something is
| hard.
|
| > Gender essentialism...
|
| There's a multitude of studies that show if a feminine and
| masculine role are not present cohesively in a child's
| life, they do not grow up in the best situation.
|
| I never mentioned threat, but there has to be an
| authoritarian aspect of parenting. You cannot have cookies
| before bedtime, no matter how loud you're going to cry.
| Benevolence is desired, but having both parents be
| pushovers sets the child up for drastic failure. This does
| not imply abuse. It's called socializing a kid.
|
| Single parent households on both sides of the equation are
| horrible. Yes people persevere, but much of the issues we
| see in inner city are due to single mothers and men leaving
| their family or being incarcerated unjustly. No amount of
| money injected into those communities counters this.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Ignoring part of the problem is ignoring part of the
| solution.
| frostburg wrote:
| Your model of a nuclear "stable household" is very recent,
| very untested compared to standard practice during most of
| human history and societes. Putting is on a pedestal without
| any quantitative evidence isn't wise.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Assuming you mean nuclear family as having two married
| parents, and not also that these parents are geographically
| isolated:
|
| Lots of quantitative evidence that having two committed
| parents means healthier kids (IQ, emotionally, physically,
| etc.)
| frostburg wrote:
| I've answered this in another reply to the same post,
| please refer to that; that wasn't my point.
| cmilton wrote:
| What do you think it is?
| frostburg wrote:
| I'm not sure about what you're asking, but taking a
| guess: I think that it's safer to have children raised by
| a larger amount of figures (primarily the parents, but
| also grandparents in a multi-generational household,
| other relatives if they exist, family friends - this
| would have been other people in the tribe or village
| traditionally - etc.).
|
| Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly
| unsupervised, inexperienced people is fragile and
| "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.
| cmilton wrote:
| I think most would agree that more is better than fewer
| caretakers. This works well when families are located
| close geographically, but not so much when spread out.
|
| I would also argue, why does the community automatically
| bear the responsibility for a decision made by two?
| frostburg wrote:
| They also pay taxes for schools etc. - we're talking
| about society-wide outcomes. Personally I have no
| intention of reproducing and even think that a managed
| but very significant reduction in population would
| alleviate a lot of issues, but this doesn't mean that I
| want existing children to be mistreated.
| spacephysics wrote:
| My view of life and society drastically changed for me
| once kids were in the picture.
|
| With all due respect, Given that you're on the path to
| population control and all that's implied with that, I
| find it difficult in myself to take what you say
| seriously.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| The issue with humans is that when everyone has the
| responsibility, no one has the responsibility. The moment
| those kids are 'raised by a village' or however many
| participants of the family, it automatically becomes a
| lot harder unless, somehow, the tribe is much more
| cohesive and can reinforce effectively the same rules
| consistently.
|
| << "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.
|
| I would personally argue that the "traditional roles"
| seem to help the offspring on several levels, but I
| didn't see many studies ( as opposed to non-traditional
| that is ) to that effect.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| You make no sense.
|
| "Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences
| which form and harden their characters.
|
| You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by
| your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking
| about.
| dang wrote:
| Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this,
| please.
|
| We've had to warn you at least once before
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537) about
| breaking the site guidelines. If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
| the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
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