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How getting richer made teenagers less free

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Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#161

Post by squigz »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #126
squigz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.

We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ edit: ah finally; through another HN comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944 ) I was able to find the original link to the article ( http://www.randsi…

We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?

Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.

That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#162

Post by fallinditch »

antonymoose wrote: post #143
fallinditch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend is one of those 'overly involved' parents with his daughter: tennis lessons and competitions, sailing lessons and competitions, skiing lessons and competitions. He sacrificed a huge amount of time to give his daughter every opportunity. I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?" He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's…

Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though? I understand that it worked well for your friend and I am not knocking athletics, my own daughter is doing gymnastics, but that seems like either a post-hoc justification on the part of your friend or a strategy with a low rate of success such that it seems a bit odd to go for as a parent. Personally, I’ve seen far more of my helicop…

That's sad. There are so many factors at play. I would say that with my friend and his daughter, one of the reasons it worked out well was because they spent so much time together: traveling to competitions, driving to the mountains for skiing every weekend. They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences, and things like introducing her to the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#163

Post by HexPhantom »

komali2 wrote: post #3

> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward. This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are…

What really stuck with me is how delayed the correction was. You didn't get immediate feedback that "this is not how people actually relate to each other" until college, and by then the social debt was already there. That's a brutal way to learn norms

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#165

Post by Loughla »

dlisboa wrote: post #134
Loughla wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really an answer though. My kid walks home from his friend's houses in the woods at night alone all the time. He has never once been eaten or kidnapped. Statistically your children are more likely to be victimized by you than a stranger. So by your logic, you should probably keep them away from you. Right?

That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right? It's just a zero insight use of numbers.

That's literally my point. I did exactly what you did, just in a different context to point out the absurdity of the statement.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#166

Post by Aeglaecia »

squigz wrote: post #153
Aeglaecia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while intelligence does tend to result in overfitting from my observations of smart people , nobody here grew up glued to short form content that has the same crash as cocaine

Then complain about short form video (which, I should add, is probably more culturally relevant than whatever we were consuming on the Internet growing up) Complaining about the Internet in general and how kids are "disconnected from reality" isn't going to solve anything, and will just result in more crazy ID laws that won't actually solve anything.

I specifically mentioned a culture disconnected from reality and at no point complained about the internet in general , since you're out here commanding me I command you to consider that commanding a particular behaviour tends to encourage the opposite behaviour

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#167

Post by Loughla »

mgraf1 wrote: post #160
dlisboa wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them? When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.

Your analogy is missing something. Not letting a child explore the world has an opportunity cost. They miss out on opportunities to develop independence and psychological resilience. The book "The Anxious Generation" covers this in detail.

I work at a college, and can tell you that (while everyone views their childhoods with rose colored glasses), at my institution, statistically kids today are less able to cope with difficulty than they were when I started my career.

When I started, the top three reasons for students leaving the institution were a) family priorities (work), b) transportation, and c) grades (overall GPA less than 1.5).

For the 2024-25 academic year, the reasons were a) anxiety, b) grades (overall GPA between 2.5 and 3, with less than 2 'd' or 'f' grades for the final semester), and c) unstated reason related to interactions with faculty or staff (difficult conversations about study habits, or realistic major/timeline conversations).

In other words, they hit one small barrier, or have to shift gears even slightly, and everything goes to pieces.

We don't let them make decisions when they're kids and the stakes are low, and then don't understand why they can't make decisions when they're adults. . . Or, there are a minority of parents that seem to enjoy making every decision for their kids. It's not great.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#168

Post by ninkendo »

CalRobert wrote: post #43

For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards. Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked…

> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently

Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.

Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.

Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#169

Post by joncrane »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #125
dlisboa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cultural shift. Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. Not that yours were necessarily bad parents for that time but there is way more information today of the issues with the world. I certainly wouldn't let my kid walk home alone in the woods at night: are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk? I'd al…

> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our frac…

To be fair, one of the reasons for the decrease in crime may be the steps taken by average people to minimize it, due to anxiety.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#170

Post by elif »

pbmonster wrote: post #113
elif wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your analogy, swimmers may have gone down 90% but kids are still being submerged in water as much as ever if not more. The vast majority of traffic deaths are people INSIDE cars.

Pedestrian deaths in the US are up 78% since 2009. [0] [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so-many-pedes...

That data shows a local minimum in 2009 and suggests that pedestrian deaths were higher during the "golden age" the commenter is referring to than today, and that is in spite of many more cars on the road today
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