Good thread here that provides a counter-balance. https://twitter.com/nireyal/status/1443882540868063241?s=21
Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#22> Facebook annotated the reports, appearing to downplay the results. Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse,” the company added that the headline was imprecise. Instead, it wrote, “The headline should be clarified to be: ‘Teens who have lower life satisfaction more likely to say Instagram makes their mental health or the way they feel about them…
I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#23> Facebook annotated the reports, appearing to downplay the results. Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse,” the company added that the headline was imprecise. Instead, it wrote, “The headline should be clarified to be: ‘Teens who have lower life satisfaction more likely to say Instagram makes their mental health or the way they feel about them…
I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.
> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities.
That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect, though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#24Good thread here that provides a counter-balance. https://twitter.com/nireyal/status/1443882540868063241?s=21
> Good thread here that provides a counter-balance. https://twitter.com/nireyal/status/1443882540868063241?s=21
By the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nir_Eyal:
> In 2014 Eyal published his first book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which became a Wall Street Journal best seller.[12][13] The title reflects Eyal's idea of the "hooked model", which aims to "build products that create habit-forming behavior in users via a looping cycle that consists of trigger, an action, a variable reward, and continued investment."[14]...
> Eyal has spoken out against proposals to regulate habit-forming technologies, arguing that it is an individual user's responsibility to control their own use of such products.[2]
Somehow I'm not surprised someone like that would be writing desperate yet underwhelming apologia for Facebook.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know an American civil engineer who has one of these rings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring Wikipedia says the oath that goes with it is: I am an Engineer. In my profession I take deep pride. To it I owe solemn obligations. As an engineer, I, (full name), pledge to practice Integrity and Fair Dealing, Tolerance, and Respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession, consc…
Those other engineering professions some harmful things too. Didn't engineers design prisons, casinos, nuclear weapons, land mines, plants that manufacture harmful chemicals, etc..? The only way to believe that these oaths make a difference is to ignore all those things. Anyway, at my university (CS/computer eng. major) everyone in the engineering school goes through the same induction ceremony that I think had a sim…
All of the things you've listed aren't universally bad. Prisons keep bad people out of society (and yes, I'm aware that some folks shouldn't be in prison, and I wish that'd change, but majority are in the clink for violent crime). Nuclear weapons ensure superpowers can't attack each other - that's why we haven't had a world war in the past 76 years in spite of some pretty crazy tensions. Land mines make land invasions difficult and protect those who installed them. Harmful chemicals usually are not made just for the harm - they have their own useful functions. So I'd draw the line much further than that: somewhere near biological and chemical weapons which have no useful function at all, and do not help with maintaining peace.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers used to be offered an "Iron Ring" (or other similar token) to symbolize their responsibility to human welfare, even at the cost of personal achievement/merit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring Maybe we have to teach some of these upstarts about Therac-25 and depress another generation just to keep the harm from spreading :(
It's possible that United States engineers still do this... but software "engineering" is famously (and self-deprecating-ly) not really "real engineering". I say this as someone who programs, teaches programming/computer science, and has worked professionally as a software development engineer - the comment isn't made to denigrate anyone, but because software "engineering" doesn't have any certification / professiona…
It certainly does, just not in US.
https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi...
No Portuguese university is allowed to call their computing degrees engineering without their approval, and in certain kinds of state related projects, the one putting their signature into the legal contracts has to have the professional title acknowledged.
Germany and Switzerland have a similar process for those carrying engineering on their title.
Either that or you have done it via a trade school, and people on the job have to have a kind of teaching certification for the school to approve the company as teaching place.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers used to be offered an "Iron Ring" (or other similar token) to symbolize their responsibility to human welfare, even at the cost of personal achievement/merit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring Maybe we have to teach some of these upstarts about Therac-25 and depress another generation just to keep the harm from spreading :(
It's possible that United States engineers still do this... but software "engineering" is famously (and self-deprecating-ly) not really "real engineering". I say this as someone who programs, teaches programming/computer science, and has worked professionally as a software development engineer - the comment isn't made to denigrate anyone, but because software "engineering" doesn't have any certification / professiona…
I agree that 99% of software developers are not engineers, not because software engineering isn't engineering, but because they are not doing software engineering. You can, and should, apply the principles of engineering to your development process, but hardly anyone does. Generous planning and foresight, objective measures of performance, an intimate understanding of the system you're deploying, etc.
A software developer glues together 400 node modules they don't understand and ships to Other People's Computers, then hands them their debit card when the load goes up. A software engineer knows that every line of code is accounted for, because they've actually done the accounting, and knew the scale requirements in advance (with error bars) and provisioned the infrastructure accordingly - with a budget.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#28Irony is Facebook will not attract the talent it needs to work constructively on these unsolvable problems. It will attract thd clueless and the most ambitious. People who are ready to defend it for their own profit. Its a trap where the hole they are in just keeps growing deeper.
Sadly there's always enough smart sociopaths willing to work for a fat pay cheque or to learn "interesting" tech.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,"says Wernher von Braun."
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#29Good. Facebook should not be able to "quell" anything. It should suffer the full consequences of its actions every single time.
Re: Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effect on Teens
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that angst you teen is a trope but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. You can just spend most of time loitering. Also hangover passes super quickly so you don’t waste a whole day after a party.
> but where I was most teens were quite happy. School ends early, plenty of time and zero responsibilities. That's the kind of thing that seems happy in retrospect , though. Kids don't appreciate many of the benefits of youth until they've lost it, and until then, small dramas and angst can often have an exaggerated significance.
There's been some fMRI work done on this[1]: if you pose various moral dilemmas to adults and teens under fMRI, they'll give you similar answers. But: teens have dramatically higher frontal cortex activation then adults do while giving the answer.
Frontal cortex is associated with high level reasoning: the interpretation is that while teenagers are able to resolve the same sorts of issues as adults, they're spending a lot more mental effort to do so - it's taxing. Hence the phenomenon of teenagers tending to oscillate between "mature and capable" and "complete breakdown" when the stress gets dialed up (not that this doesn't happen to adults, but relatively we handle more better).
Not unsurprisingly, the frontal cortex is also one of the last regions of the brain to undergo maturation: the neural remodel you get at the onset of puberty starts from the back of the brain and moves forward.
In short: adults take an observation of adult-like behavior at face value and presume it implies adult-experiential reasoning, then get surprised and angry when the environmental stresses suddenly collapse the entire facade.