381–390 of 937 posts
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Sure, we complain, and complain, but have we done anything about it? If anything, we've relaxed our attitudes towards having a 24/7 propaganda box shouting in our living room.
The vast majority of people I know (38m,Germany) don't regularly consume broadcast TV. Even my parents and their peers don't (but to a lesser extent).
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People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of th…
What about the public influence campaigns that are ran openly on television? How well have we managed to quantify the effect that has on the public? They also take place without any oversight.
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elf on the shelf is a frighteningly common indoctrination to a life of surveillance
I have the related theory that the whole Santa Clause and Easter Bunny lie thing makes children more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain, why wouldn't politicians and media personalities conspire to lie to me about the earth being flat or climate change if there is profit or power to be had?
Some adults enjoy playing pretend with kids, and some kids enjoy playing pretend with adults too. I would not characterize it as a no gain situation.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new.
None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s.
Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco.
If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
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Our society is teaching us to seek money, power, intelligence, beauty, bodily satisfaction, all of which will never satisfy us. “If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die…
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
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This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean…
…but the character of that effect depends almost entirely on the specifics. Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000 Hz, whereas most of the new RF noise is about 6 orders of magnitude higher frequency. To understand why 6 orders of magnitude matters, if you go up a further 6 orders of magnitude you get slightly more than the entire range of visible light (red light is ~500e12 Hz, violet is ~800e12).
What might genuinely affect our brain chemistry is the 50-60 Hz range of the mains grid… except we've had that all over the place since electricity was introduced, so this trend wouldn't be new in developed nations, it would be a thing that shows up in the statistics from the interwar era when we got electricity, and the only places that would get this trend now would be places that are finally getting electricity for the first time ever.
If there is a signal for this, I've never heard of it. That doesn't mean there isn't one, but that's what you actually need to look for, not a statement that's technically so general it can be said about literally everything in the universe including spacetime itself, but even with more generous interpretations is still general to the point of trivially applying to basically everything you ever experience.
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>We will probably won't find a culprit It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for
> It's capitalism We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
Social media is an amplifier of negative aspects of social interaction. We've not had anything like that before. The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new . None of today's teenagers are impacted by the V…