61–70 of 77 posts
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> execs of SM companies heavily limit access to these services for their own children. Well, any responsible parent should do that actually...
Parent trying to limit addiction vs. addiction-focused megacorp, and the irresponsible one is the parent who inevitably loses?
The answer seems to be yes, all the way through to a dose-dependent response [1]. I'm cautious to label people as evil. But Adam Mosseri working to addict younger and younger children to the dopamine hit of ad-driven social media challenges me on that restraint. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278213/
I always say: the most qualified people in the world are currently trying to get one more second or one more interaction out of you
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C-level execs of SM companies heavily limit access to these services for their own children. They know much better than the general public knows by publicly available research. To them it's a cash cow, and who has the minds of the kids has the future. TikTok ans SnapChat specifically entered the market by attracting attention of ever younger users.
> execs of SM companies heavily limit access to these services for their own children. Well, any responsible parent should do that actually...
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This may be an unpopular opinion but I believe the constant focus on what we call mental health and body image issues is making the problem worse. I know those words are supposed to alleviate stigma and normalize, but if you're telling kids going through regular adolescent issues that they have mental health or body image issues, you're not helping them. And naval gazing is going to make things worse. Maybe I'm a pro…
To me at 51, looking back at my own experiences, I think the things we tell ourselves work in a similar fashion to software; programming our identity. The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect yo…
One of the mental models I gained from that book was (paraphrasing):
Society (other people) will try to program us with their own accumulated poison, and our job is to
(a) resist these poisonous worldviews/ideas/patterns instead of unthinkingly osmosing them "because a grown-up or peer said so", and
(b) not pass our own poison(s) along to others.
When I was in college, we studied and analyzed the case of Megan Meier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier It was tragic how she was bullied and felt compelled to suicide in a method that's often invisible to parents and other responsible adults. Even more appalling, in Megan's case, is that a supposedly responsible mother posed as an underage boy in order to bully her, and wound up in federal court…
How disgustingly pathetic that a grown woman felt the need to harass a 13 year old.
It is much less likely that random strangers could so effectively bully a young girl like that, much less know exactly how to drive her to desperate acts.
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I think it is a tough balancing act. I am a product of the 90s also. I was severely depressed all through high school and probably could have been helped in some way. Instead I got nothing. Just suffered in silence and I didn't even know I was depressed. Any statistics from the 90s on mental health I wouldn't be counted in other than being a mentally healthy, happy, normal kid even though nothing could be further fro…
What would be the alternative if you were suffering the same fate today? So you think you would have been better off medicated? Or some kind of therapy?
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That book is a fiction. We really really should stop using events in a work of fiction as arguments about real world.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss such comparisons. Fiction can be a great tool to explore very real truths.
Suicide is the extreme tip of the iceberg, and thankfully still rare. But the rest of the iceberg, comprising teens suffering mental health and body image issues - not to the point of suicide, but still serious - is staggering. Teens are self-medicating and sorting themselves into echo chambers that reinforce their negative feelings, entering an illness-to-identity pipeline, where they cannot see any other way of bei…
This may be an unpopular opinion but I believe the constant focus on what we call mental health and body image issues is making the problem worse. I know those words are supposed to alleviate stigma and normalize, but if you're telling kids going through regular adolescent issues that they have mental health or body image issues, you're not helping them. And naval gazing is going to make things worse. Maybe I'm a pro…
Constantly bringing up things like sex abuse and other traumatic issues causes problems for sure. It looks like the often maligned "push it down, bottle it up, pretend there's no problem" is better strategy than we pretended. It even seems to be partially adopted by the industry.
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Despite claiming the opposite, teenagers are sponges for whatever floats in society around them. When most of the highly valued voices in society tell them that they should be sad and anxious and traumatized, is it really surprising that it's exactly what they turn out to be? There's a reason the amount of self-described gay and lesbians has dropped massively in regions where it is no longer transgressive at all (but…
> There's a reason the amount of self-described gay and lesbians has dropped massively in regions Statistics vary, but I can't see any evidence of this? > It could be that homosexuality was actually just a mask for a trans identity, but that's odd because it would invalidate virtually everything that has been said in defense of tolerance of gays and lesbians. What? None of this makes sense? > However, basically nobod…
A huge percentage of people with ADHD don't receive treatment; bear in mind the modern approach of not treating roughly half of patients with ADHD. In other words, they do pretty much nothing at all and tell you to get lost.
So the reality is that they are always under and over treating the condition and there should be awareness of this reality. Success should include working with patients and not relying on over-prescription, or scapegoating people as lost causes.