Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the evidence points the other way. Giving younger people a drink with their meal during adolescence leads to more drinking problems later in life.
As far as I know the evidence points to getting drunk younger leads to more drinking problems later in life. Drinking moderately younger leads to fewer.
The kids with phones are alright
381–390 of 458 posts
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the positive effects of Social Media is understated, and probably on purpose. Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. A generation has already grown with full distrust on what they learn from traditional media. With that picture, addressing the (undeniable) negative effects of Social Media is only the sales pitch for introducing new legislat…
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
Then again, as I’m writing this, how much of that was due to manipulation and promotion by adversarial powers… almost nothing is truly organic anymore, or at least you can’t tell if it is, and I suppose that’s what you’re getting at.
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Social Media allowed ordinary people to challenge on a global scale the oficially-sanctioned narrative. Hasn't been true for a while. Now it grants people with money and state actors unprecedented control over what ordinary people are allowed to see and mold them to desired narratives.
It still cuts both ways. Almost seemingly the entire internet was talking about the Epstein files non stop for months on end. Pre social media that anti establishment narrative wouldn’t have taken hold to nearly the same degree in my opinion. Unfortunately a lot of the discourse was complete nonsense, and misinformation was rife, but it still put the US government under A LOT of pressure, to the point where the AG wa…
Yes, but over time, even pre-Internet generations have learned to be skeptical of everything watched or read online. Children growing up in this environment will almost certainly adapt and learn to do the same.
So, at best, laws restricting Social Media are a nanny state overreach, and at worst dystopian Big-Brother-style narrative control.
We have witnessed a similar overreach in the distant past with printing-press regulation laws [1]. But at the time, they power structure was different so they could instate an outright ban without hiding behind "think of the children" or the Red Scare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now...
> But email is not centralized, and it grew when Internet was really different. Mastodon - which was born in this new Internet - is used by a very small fraction of Twitter/IG/TikTok/Facebook users. I mean, TikTok and Mastodon started both in 2016 and see the difference now... Email and mastodon and pixelfed and peertube are all federated. Everyone can run their own server, pay others, or join others. Federated servi…
Now, how to properly regulate and enforce it in a way that's not going to undermine other rights and freedom, that's not an easy task for sure.
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#385Re: The kids with phones are alright
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Triangulate this: I grew up in a listed house with twelve fireplaces and a stable block with coach houses (plural). There were three crown princes in my boarding house at school. My godfather's house is a tourist attraction and my godmother was on the board of ICI. My mother's garden is on the horticultural circuit. My sister got married in Westminster Abbey. One brother used to play polo and the other just made equi…
Aha! So you "hated the rich", now you turn around call people who say something negative about them as a class antisemites, basically using Jews to defend the rich against your own straw man / phantoms of the past. Anyways, your quite pedestrian life story changes none of the data, e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce... Being aware of said data is not "hatred" or seeing things black and…
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know the evidence points to getting drunk younger leads to more drinking problems later in life. Drinking moderately younger leads to fewer.
Is that data from kids who drank without adult supervision? It's hard to tell without more context if you're proving or disproving the point that's been made, which is that maybe learning how to drink responsibly with parents could lead to better outcomes than binging with buddies at parties when there are no adults around, which is a lot more common when adult are super strict about it (I'm saying this as someone wh…
I definitely think it is a result of learning more responsible habits from adults, with supervision of what and how much they are allowed to drink. There is a huge difference between having a glass of wine (and maybe starting with diluted wine as mine did) with a family meal and spirits with mixers with friends who themselves do not have good habits.
I think this applies to a lot of other things too: kids need to learn good habits and behaviour from adults in general. I sometimes wonder whether the worst effect on kids of phones is that they get less attention from distracted adults.
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab. Why do people get so weird about the shorts tab? There are perfectly good videos in there, they're just tilted weird. You can fit quality content into 3 minutes. And remember Elsagate? That was entirely landscape videos.
You can post short regular YouTube videos, I have dozens of favorites that are under 30 seconds long, some are only a few seconds long. The YouTube algorithm didn’t always punish short videos. The method of ingestion for short form video content is what I dislike, it encourages endless consumption. Each video is immediately followed by another video. It’s very hard to critically consume that style of content when you…
Yeah but I don't control the people posting.
> you don’t have time to think about what you’re watching or just watched once another video starts playing
Mine doesn't go to a new video until I tell it to, which is the same for shorts and non-shorts.
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's an example of Westmidlands police bragging about arresting a 12 year old for racist posts. There are 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. It's not heavily reported for some reason but it's very real. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr... https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416
If you walk through a town shouting racist stuff you'll get arrested too, and rightly so.
Re: The kids with phones are alright
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the same way we know most things. We know it affects us and we extrapolate.
And every generation thinks the tech that the next generation grows up with is harmful. After all, novels were once considered harmful [0] but we now consider not being able to read a novel to be harmful. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
1. Novels and phones are not the same tech. This is not 'generational quibble'; I am simply stating a fact. Just from pure historical perspective, written words were, correctly mind you, called out in that they will likely result in people not being able to commit as much to memory[1]. Move from written to printed produced even more of a change[2]. I am not saying those changes are ( were ) automatically bad, but it is important to recognize where they do fail. Surely, you would not argue that phones did not change the way people ingest information -- and if you wouldn't, the only question becomes whether you are honest enough to say what their particular failure modes are.
2. The nature of the tech in question is different. Written word is static and literally placed upon a page with the intent of the words staying there. Revisions result in a new physical book. The book does not suddenly become unreadable, because someone sent its publisher an order. The physical book does not track your progress to determine what passage made you most entertained to make sure next book is even more entertaining.
I will stop here, but surely you can see where I am going with this...
Novels by themselves are not harmful the same way using a phone by itself is not harmful. Apart from everything else, as noted in previous paragraph, you can use the phone for more than reading. The comparison is simply not complete or close to exhaustive to allow for a proper comparison.
[1]https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html [2]https://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Making-Typographic-M...