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Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

arstechnica.com

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Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#441

Post by astrobe_ »

FireSquid2006 wrote: post #422

I was in eighth grade at the start of the pandemic (college freshman now. Insane how the pandemic was 5 years ago). For a lot of people like myself, it was when I got into programming and found my career. However, I know lots of other people who basically sat on dopamine loop apps all day. Our habits from then continued on. While I can't prove this, I would suspect that this isnt due to any lack of vice, but because…

I think the pandemic had nothing to do with that except maybe that it served as a trigger for you or others. Plenty of people got hooked on programming in normal and peaceful times, with plenty of addictive distractions around - be it chess, reading, popular sports, Pokemon, movies, etc. Not everyone is interested in, or has the patience for, programming. You see its potential and what you could do with it, they see it as a chore better left to people who like that kind of stuff.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#442

Post by beedeebeedee »

chaps wrote: post #430
tremon wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

> "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#443

Post by kortilla »

bitwalker wrote: post #245
legitster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had the opposite observation. Millenials and older Gen Z have extremely pessimistic takes on the future. Our childhoods were some of the most materially comfortable in human history, and everything in comparison is downhill from there. But high schoolers I know today seem more even keeled about things. They are graduating into a world where fast food jobs start at $17, no one needs to go to college if they don…

You might not need to go to college, but you're going into significant debt if you do, so now one has to decide which disadvantage they want to start their career with: no degree, or crippling debt. A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr, not to mention other basic costs like groceries, rent, and buckle up if you have to go to the doctor. Pay has simply n…

> A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr

This is probably the worst example. In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/hr. https://www.creditdonkey.com/gas-price-history.html

> Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic

No, your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#444

Post by dasil003 »

sevensor wrote: post #416
tirant wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs. I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to b…

Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute. 1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being. 2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfee…

LOL at “mainlining cable news and AM talk radio”.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#445

Post by siva7 »

jader201 wrote: post #439
qwertox wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for…

Please no. While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact. Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children. EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.

Sometimes there is no choice when both parents must work so better raise the child by AI rather than TV.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#446

Post by ghaff »

cluckindan wrote: post #420
ghaff wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.

Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.

Maybe, though that would surprise me a bit. My first personal webpage was probably around 1996 or 1997--and I assume that was fairly early for that sort of thing. As I said, I had been using BBSs for a while and also accessed usenet and FTP sites somewhat later. (I would have only had access from work to the Internet for quite a while.)

For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.

(My dates may be a bit off but not by a lot.)

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#447

Post by etimberg »

qwertox wrote: post #431
tirant wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs. I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to b…

> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for…

I assume you don’t have kids because as the parent of a toddler this is a terrible idea. The last thing a toddler needs is AI hallucinations “teaching” them

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#448

Post by chaps »

beedeebeedee wrote: post #442
chaps wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

> "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy. That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

You've deeply misunderstood my comment.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#449

Post by knome »

chaps wrote: post #430
tremon wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use. But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

I disagree entirely, and I have personally witnessed people lose themselves to drug use.

Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.

Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.

The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#450

Post by jader201 »

siva7 wrote: post #445
jader201 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact. Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children. EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.

Sometimes there is no choice when both parents must work so better raise the child by AI rather than TV.

If you have a nanny/preschool/daycare that is letting your child be raised by TV, the solution isn’t instead have your child be raised by AI.

The solution is to replace the nanny/reschool/daycare with a better nanny/preschool/daycare.

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