471–480 of 514 posts
Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.
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It used to be good, but my guess is a modern kid, particularly a middle class one, doesn't get as much out of it. Minimum wage has stagnated, but also people these days have their eyes on internships that will secure a career. There's simply no point in pursuing burger-flipping if you can't find a way to hang around a law firm or a hedge fund, and those firms won't care at all that you worked hard in a menial job. Wh…
What high school kids are interning at hedge funds? Jobs like life guarding, painting, tradesman’s gopher, fast food, etc are still great jobs for kids to learn a work ethic and make some cash. Trying to kick start a career in high school is beyond silly for most kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Harms_to_Mammali...
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If the latter then it'd affect boys and girls equally. The simplest explanation here is likely the right one i.e. the increase in mental disorders is real.
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are real differences between how we treat men and women. And the actual effect we’re seeing isn’t even addressed — if it’s because college campuses won’t tolerate dissent, why wouldn’t that affect men?
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So you can? (serious question not sarcastic)
Well, if you had completely ignored the news circa Feb 2020, you would have had an unpleasant shock when you ran out of toilet paper and tried to buy more. Forewarned is forearmed.
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Nuclear destruction wasn't the same in key ways: - It was only a possibility. You also knew the nukes might not launch, the world might not end. - If the nukes did launch, it wouldn't be due to a moral failure of your own. - Although you may sometimes have felt scared or depressed about the USSR and MAD, you weren't being constantly told by your society that optimism was illegitimate thoughtcrime. Climate doomerism i…
I have no idea what you mean by "climate propaganda". I just lived in a place that experienced 8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area and which will destroy the regional economic livelihood. A totally unprecedented event, which we know with quite a bit of certainty will begin to occur frequently. I have no idea how you expect polite society to accept that without distress.
"8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area"
Yeah, where is this? I doubt it's actually true. For sure it was reported as true, but one of the many reasons to call it climate propaganda is that that reporting of "records" doesn't mean what you think it means. Government agencies and other parts of the climate lobby continually adjust past historical data such that records become made and unmade without anything actually happening. They also like to change definitions and seriously truncate datasets at convenient places to create the appearance of endless trends when longer term data exists showing otherwise. This is so dishonest people think it can never happen, but it does.
Here's an example. Retraction Watch is a blog that follows retractions and bad scientific publishing:
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet"
In this way they get to announce "record breaking temperatures" that were lower than previously announced temperatures.
You also have to watch out for lots of other problems and tricks, unfortunately. Even if they aren't doing that specific trick here, there can be others, even simple things like asserting patterns and trends in noise.
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I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb. I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local pe…
I think social media - which is not so much about media but about performative competition - is just part of the problem. Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it. At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in l…
I believe a large amount of the negative effects is that people take themselves too seriously. Every quote on social media is put on the scale and becoming a pariah is basically random. The haunting is mostly done by people with a lack of self-worth and confidence themselves.
But some values also changed for the worse in my opinion. Confidence is valued much more than humility and seen as leadership material. I don't believe it prudent to encourage people that actually do look for strong figures out of fear.
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Note that miscarriages are counted as spontaneous abortions in most medical statistics, which was super confusing to me when I first saw similar data.
Miscarriages are abortions. Often times if the miscarriage happens late enough, a doctor must intervene to assist in the removal of the dead fetus, which is the same medical procedure as one may remove a viable one.
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We've seen much worse wealth inequalities in history, we've seen much worse job markets, we've seen much worse wars and pandemics, history was a lot more violent. Really the only thing different there is that "instant access to compare yourself to millions of others". Which is essentially social media. I'm sure there are other factors and everyone can speculate what they are, but "the world is terrible today" is hard…
Things may have been worse in the past but in the past everybody was in the same boat. Famine? It affected everybody. Plague? It affected everybody. Drought? It affected everybody. War? It affected everybody. Nowadays the systemic problems that are an artifact of modern life do not affect everybody. The richer you are, the less your affectation. This a winner-takes-all and loser-gets-nothing is a byproduct of the neo…
Famine (often with Drought)? What do you think the alleged "Let them eat cake" came from? The nobility and the bourgeoisie weren't affected, only the peasants.
Plague? The motto was cito, longe, tarde: quickly travel far away from the city, and return late. Guess who had that option to leave the plague-affected town for their country estate?
War? While not as clear as the others, it's similar: besides a few sons of nobility, it was the peasants that did the dying, not everybody.
When is the last famine that saw millions dead in the USA while the rich lived lavishly? Because that's what the past looked like, so "winner takes all" was obviously much more true back then. Society used to be much, much more unequal, capitalism was much harsher.
I might be mistaken, but judging that you're on HN and likely work in tech/STEM and had the money to pay for years of therapy for your daughter, I assume you're part of what would previously be called the bourgeoisie -- so there's really no factual reason for you or your daughter to be worried about an increasingly unequal wealth distribution, because you'll have more than your "fair share". I'm not judging, and I don't want to say that her pain isn't or wasn't real, but maybe it's not a rational response to the state of the world and her role in it.
If you look to Western Europe, we have similar issues, yet "winner takes all" couldn't be further from the truth here, we have strong welfare states, we have high taxes, yet teens are still struggling, apparently more than usual. We have very few school shootings, we're lifting any restrictions on abortions, we're constantly making it easier for trans people to transition etc etc etc, so lots of things are fundamentally different. Yet we still see something very similar, and we do have cellphones and social media.
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I find the "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right" defense not really useful, as it really doesn't say much about how evenly you apply moderation. You could be a hair's width away from being a fascist, and some full on fascist would complain that you're too left wing, and both a centrist and a leftist would complain that you're too right wing. I don't want to complain about people doing it (b…
> "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right" I haven't said that and try to be careful never to imply it. Rather, my point is that these complaints about moderation bias (which come in from all political angles) are so isomorphic that there must be a common mechanism underlying them. (People sometimes interpret this as an argument in favor of centrist politics but that's a misunderstanding. It's…
Maybe there's a secret part of HN where they're posting and they're all banned, but I doubt it. Your house, your rules, but it certainly looks like these rules are a bit bendy, and having banned some crazy person with a Bernie quote on his profile makes you believe that you're applying them evenly when you also ban someone like this here, who just comments from a somewhat right-wing position and is rejected by some part of the community because of it.