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Kids These Days

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

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Re: Kids These Days

#91

Post by reciprocity »

moffkalast wrote: post #52
jimbokun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.

I think that in and of itself shows the broader problem: nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore. Things are changing too quickly, technologically at an unprecedented speed and as a consequence socially in unpredictable ways. We've gone from only having the TV and newspapers, to computers, smartphones, social networks, now actual machines you can talk to like they were humans, in like 30 years total. Quantifyi…

Mood.

Re: Kids These Days

#92

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

BeetleB wrote: post #23
matchbok3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados? Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt? One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

Re: Kids These Days

#93

Post by snayan »

moffkalast wrote: post #52
jimbokun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.

I think that in and of itself shows the broader problem: nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore. Things are changing too quickly, technologically at an unprecedented speed and as a consequence socially in unpredictable ways. We've gone from only having the TV and newspapers, to computers, smartphones, social networks, now actual machines you can talk to like they were humans, in like 30 years total. Quantifyi…

Yeah, our psyches evolved in times when the environment was relatively stable for your entire lifetime. Rate of change in the environment just keeps increasing, and our wiring just isn't made for that. Our internal prediction engine is less and less able to model the future based on the past. Painting with broad strokes here, but I think generally this is the upstream cause of a lot of the increased mental health issues we're seeing.

Re: Kids These Days

#94

Post by matchbok3 »

jimbokun wrote: post #33
matchbok3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados? Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.

Maybe not organic avocados but more likely to be eating produce from your own backyard garden. That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.

Absolutely incorrect. Do you really think the majority of people lived on an acre of arable land providing bountiful vegetables year-round? Do you know what a "tenement" is? Do you know how many people had indoor plumbing in 1960? How many died of the measles?

Re: Kids These Days

#95

Post by hefner1456 »

Im a layman... but how do you measure social medias impacts, when everyones algorithm is different? If everyone is on it but having a different experience, how can that be measured? I imagine some are better at being resistant to it and can subconsciencly push it to more positive direction and ignore the depression-bait it starts feeding them when IT knows they are down... I was in a severly nacassistic relationship for years, and while I'm mostly over it, those few times a year I log into facebook, all it wants to do is remind me of it and feed me all this victim crap. It can't be healthy for a young mind to be staring at this all day, its absolutely manipulating. It's kind of messed up.

Re: Kids These Days

#96

Post by watwut »

warkdarrior wrote: post #61
BeetleB wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt? One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

And those classrooms had no AC (probably), no WiFi, no projectors, no access to (almost unlimited) online resources, no fancy gym, etc etc.

Without global warming, AC were not necedsary. Wifi, projector and nonfancy gym are literally no issues - if they disappeared you wont regret.

There was progress, but these are not important parts of it.

Re: Kids These Days

#97

Post by citadel_melon »

Arodex wrote: post #65
cjs_ac wrote: post #43

One observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different pr…

It is a well established fact now that suicide is contagious. Just the mention of it is enough to cause a spike in suicide attempts. Then how do you tell people that they can be helped about it without triggering the very thing?

Reminds me of the task “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The first thing you do is think of a pink elephant.

The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.”

Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.

Re: Kids These Days

#98

Post by rixed »

EA-3167 wrote: post #53
xg15 wrote: post #51

I feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking. "Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."

If the respiratory symptom you’re talking about is lung cancer then the rate of that has dropped by hundreds of thousands. Not smoking works, but maybe people need more freedom to hurt themselves. I’d support that if society didn’t have to pay their bills later on.

"Freedom" is a valuable concept but a poor model for understanding behavior. I'd support that if there were no business incentive to spend money and research to influence people into taking the wrong decisions.

Re: Kids These Days

#99

Post by goolz »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #92
BeetleB wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt? One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

And how many of those degrees are going to result in a worthwhile job? University is a massive industry now, billions of dollars are at play, and it has never been easier to take out $100k in perma-debt to go to school. Of course more people go, a B.S. is the ground floor now, yet many degrees are barely worth the paper they are printed on.

Re: Kids These Days

#100

Post by karmakurtisaani »

matchbok3 wrote: post #13
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.

Have you ever heard of leaded gas?

Did you see the "these days" part in my comment?

Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.

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