"The human species can change its own nature. What will it choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice Age adaptations? Or will it press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity ...?" - E.O. Wilson "On Human Nature"
Dopamine Fracking
411–420 of 446 posts
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#412>actual fracking, ... is immensely harmful to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is applied to This is wrong, obviously. No ecosystem exists at the depths where fracking is applied. >Maybe. But it's not a strawberry anymore. But it allows poor people to actually have some taste of strawberry in their morning meal every day, and not once per year.
apparently you enjoy drinking from permanently poisoned aquifiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_used_for_fra...
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#413I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators’ parody work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and behold its content for kids who are too young to know any better[1]. Another one: AI voiceover…
It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the vi…
What we ended up doing: download a few dozen videos from the channels we think are good for kids. I hate CocoMelon’s fast-paced videos, but find SuperSimpleSongs agreeable, so we now have a Jellyfin section for toddler videos that teach him something.
Screen time in general is highly advised against, but for that odd moment where we need extra entertainment, at least he’s watching something we’ve vetted. YouTube Kids is a cesspool of content, and your ability to block bad channels is ineffective since they pop up like moles.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#414I love this term - I think it beautifully describes the direction that at least, YouTube is heading towards. Take for example, this racket where a channel copies popular (non-kids) creators’ parody work, splits the screen in half with the content on left, adds a completely random DIY type video on the right half, and lo and behold its content for kids who are too young to know any better[1]. Another one: AI voiceover…
The problem of 8yr olds watching too much YouTube is definitely not one for YouTube to fix. We're quickly getting to a point where all parenting is delegated to people and institutions that have nothing to do with raising children. And then we complain that our kids are not being raised properly. We don't even know who to blame for this any more.
Screen time is not great but it’s widespread. The best we can do is steer it towards better places. We’re not asking YouTube to parent our kids, but rather want it to be as accountable as other media have always been, specifically in its ‘Kids’ app.
If a TV channel back in the day had the kind of crap that YouTube Kids has, it would pay a heavy fine.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the vi…
Agreed. We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done, it’s pretty relatable. What we ended up doing: download a few dozen videos from the channels we think are good for kids. I hate CocoMelon’s fast-paced videos, but find SuperSimpleSongs agreeable, so we now have a Jellyfin section for toddler videos that teach him something. Screen time in general is highly advi…
Certainly is, I can't get around this sometimes in order to do chores either. This is why I have a variety of kids movies, shows, series on disk. Plenty of variety, but all vetted.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#416This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs. Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robust…
I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done, it’s pretty relatable. What we ended up doing: download a few dozen videos from the channels we think are good for kids. I hate CocoMelon’s fast-paced videos, but find SuperSimpleSongs agreeable, so we now have a Jellyfin section for toddler videos that teach him something. Screen time in general is highly advi…
> We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done Certainly is, I can't get around this sometimes in order to do chores either. This is why I have a variety of kids movies, shows, series on disk. Plenty of variety, but all vetted.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree. > Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted…
>French cultural pessimism Specifically Jean Baudrillard describes copies of copies with decreasing relavence and quality. But more sinisterly, the loss of knowing what is real, important, safe, efficacious. His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and Deleuze's concept of the Simulacrum.
> His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and Deleuze's concept of the Simulacrum.
Not really, Baudrillard is far more nuanced than "it's all fake", doesn't say much about "quality" (actually, hyperreal is "more real than real", and simulation is better than thing being simulated - that's why it is so pervasive), and he takes much more from Debord than Plato.
I apologize, but your comment seems to me based on YT video essays or LLM summaries, not on Baudrillard's writing.
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done Certainly is, I can't get around this sometimes in order to do chores either. This is why I have a variety of kids movies, shows, series on disk. Plenty of variety, but all vetted.
We were strictly no-screen parents until we were both super sick and the toddler was his usual energetic self. “Just let him watch some videos…” </3
Re: Dopamine Fracking
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree. > Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted…
When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the stories classic aristocracy told about itself. I’m American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at some point I asked, well, what then? What’s better? Sauce made slowly…
It shouldn't be surprising - people conflated leftism with liberal progressivism, but they are not synonymous.