Earlier quoted context omitted.
>he gets it What is there to get?
The systemic repression of non-white-males for many, many decades/centuries?
Which he had no part in. This treatment of kids is disgusting.
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Why do the richest most stable countries feels so insecure?" This is the question I keep asking myself. There seems to any number of answers but I'm not sure we've any definitive ones as yet. If we had then we ought to be able to do something about it. Perhaps the uncertainty of not knowing is the cause.
I think it’s partially unresolved cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and reality - “you can do / be anything you want” (which is true in theory, but not so much in practice). The “happiest” societies - the Nordics - are rated that way because they start out with low expectations. Happiness is a measure of the delta between expectation and reality. When that delta is negative, mental health crises ensue.
"I think it’s partially unresolved cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and reality..."
I'm almost certain you're right, cognitive dissonance is a key disrupting factor in many of our lives. Not only is there so much more information for people to process these days but much of it conflicted in ways that doesn't allow one to come to definitive conclusions.
As you say, 'happiness is a measure of the delta between expectation and reality' and in this regard we've seen better outcomes in societies where expectations are low.
I remain pessimistic about us being able to resolve this in the modern world as everything around us conspires to make one's expectations as high as possible. Essentially, our whole economic system is geared to making us believe that the more stuff and junk we accumulate the happier we'll be.
I see no easy or practical way of breaking this circular problem. Year by year, advertising and commercialism gets more intense and the problem only gets worse - moreover, technologies such as the internet have only made matters worse.
Promoting these high expectations is now of itself a huge part of the economy that if undone would alone cause hardships. One only has to look at Google and Amazon to realize that.
It's really all very depressing.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#993I wish these studies would stop working with the base assumption of “we know social media is bad, we just have to prove it”. I’m not saying this conclusion is wrong, but when you start with that biased view, you end up doing bad science. It’s not enough to prove correlation, you need to prove causation.
Kids who are depressed have more time on their hands, fewer friends, fewer activities, it’s almost a given that their social media consumption must be higher even if there is no effect.
But the studies never seem to spend much time considering this because they aren’t trying to figure out if social media is bad for mental health, they already decided this is the case and they are just gathering ammonitikn for their predefined conclusion.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#994Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you contributing content to what you consider a disgusting business model? (You do understand that Hacker News is many thousands of times more potent an attention predator than any of the Big Tech ad platforms, right?)
HN does not derive its profits from "growth and engagement". Unlike most social media, HN actually discourages spam and prioritizes fewer but more thoughtful posts/replies.
To be very cynical, HN isn’t a nonprofit we all donate to either: it’s the wholly funded pet project of an organization who teaches growth and engagement (and in fact from what I hear is quite strict with its companies on expected monthly growth rate)
That HN is a thoughtful garden unconcerned with the ugliness of ads and growth targets is also unsurprising to me, in the same way that a lot of open source and other charitable giving comes from companies who are already comfortably profitable.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#995Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive gov…
The world is pretty awesome. Imagine the technology our ancestors could never dream of that is now in our hands everyday.
The reason you think of the terrible place is because you've been brainwashed to think so. Social media and the news constantly tells you only bad things.
But if you actually step outside, you'll realize the world is an amazing place.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#996Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you on something: too many discussions mention 'screen time' as if anything done on a screen was perfectly equivalent. I really feel that playing a videogame/coding/doomscrolling/watching ads/reading/... are all very different activities with different consequences.
There’s a huge difference between video games as well. I wanted to show my nieces what I was playing as a kid, so I bought them aladdin and lion king pack on a Nintendo Switch that I bought for them, but they just want to play Mario Kart, which I think is boring, as it contains so many random elements, that they don’t really have to put in the effort to go through the levels.
I agree that there is a difference between video games.
However, I do not agree with your example. Elements of randomness don't mean a (video) game is trash, and I personally think Mario Kart requires effort to be good at. :)
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#9972014 is a curious date, because it's when I first understood that my utterly optimistic outlook on what the internet would do to at least western culture/society was misdirected. It's when I first noticed how loud, oblivious and frenetic online interaction became at large and how - by self-selection - sociopaths took the lead on the stage that big central platforms provided them. But what I found/find even sadder wer…
HN is also extremely tiring to read. Constant sour venting about office politics and how it's all futile, and everyone is out there to get you, the darned sleazy manager abusing the developers, the dark government surveilling the people etc etc.
I mean even this very discussion is quite dark. I'm not saying these aren't realistic issues, but it's probably better to quit HN too. Almost all front page stories are some form of grumbling about the unfixable dark state of the world.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#998Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a common misperception that "everyone has their entire lives uploaded", because humans are subject to availability bias. I recently spent some time living with young university students in a non-English-speaking European country, and most of them had one social media account (generally locked or pseudonymous) plus text apps. Data brokers are not able to collect and resell anything they please in most civilized co…
What do you think they’re doing in text apps? Why do you think Facebook bought WhatsApp Sure, your WhatsApp conversations are end to end encrypted. Except if you’re in a group conversation. Or if you have the on by default backup turned on.
IME, mostly one on one chats with people they know IRL. Several of them are very serious about not being photographed without consent and time to prepare.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#9992014 is a curious date, because it's when I first understood that my utterly optimistic outlook on what the internet would do to at least western culture/society was misdirected. It's when I first noticed how loud, oblivious and frenetic online interaction became at large and how - by self-selection - sociopaths took the lead on the stage that big central platforms provided them. But what I found/find even sadder wer…
HN is also extremely tiring to read. Constant sour venting about office politics and how it's all futile, and everyone is out there to get you, the darned sleazy manager abusing the developers, the dark government surveilling the people etc etc. I mean even this very discussion is quite dark. I'm not saying these aren't realistic issues, but it's probably better to quit HN too. Almost all front page stories are some…
Hehe, it's gotten better I believe. I'm browsing it somewhat less than I used to so my sample may be off.
Eventually you numb slightly to it, and with a couple interesting pieces sprinkled in, the overall utility is still positive to me.
And more generally: Controversy is never going away, I just have to get better at detecting silent consensus that fits my ethics (i.e. where the gap between world models is not so large to make conversation impossible). These days this mostly entails belief in some form of shared reality and basic human rights; how the standards have fallen!
And on some occasions we simply like to scream into the ether. Personally, I don't hold it against anybody, even though it may be against community hygiene when overdone or inappropriate. But at that point there's moderation.
The IT crowd will manage. It's what's happening "outside" that worries me...
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#1000Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet was certainly a lot lower stakes and fun in the 90s and early 2000s. We had fun taking over the mic and singing karaoke in Yahoo chatrooms, watching albino black sheep, and playing flash games on kongregator. Even early Facebook was just making funny groups and posting in each other's walls. None of those activities really had me envying anyone else. I remember the first thing that made me feel worthless…
And here it is, perhaps the actual issue: TED talks. And everything else, that is, all of the information of the information age, including social media. Life for kids and everyone is drastically different from what it was just a few decades ago, because we have drastically different access and exposure to information, in general. This has changed the human experience. I suspect it is because I have not looked hard e…
The value of knowledge has not decreased, and I would say that knowledge is more valuable than ever. What has decreased is the quality of much of the information that is widely available. For certain searches or websites people are likely to be driven towards misinformation and sites promoting conspiracy theories. The signal to noise ratio of much information is now more noise than signal.
Click bait is the perfect example of this. You see an ad telling you about a story that sounds interesting, so you click the link. Suddenly you are drawing in to a website with 1 sentence of text per page that you want to read surrounded by crappy ads and pop-ups. You want to know how the story panned out, but are overwhelmed by the garbage. Lesson learned, but how do I teach Google to stop showing me that crap?
Personally, I think this all comes down to the cost of publishing. When a publisher had to shell out real money to print a book by an author, there was an incentive for the publisher to hire editors that did a good job of making sure the books they printed were of value (the same applies to newspapers). When the marginal cost of putting a news story on a website is $0, there's not really any point in hiring an editor anymore.
The same parallel exists in the phone network today. Back in the 1980s when it cost $0.34 per minute to make a long distance call, the people calling you probably thought twice before calling. Today's VoIP networks charging less than a penny a minute have enabled farms of robocallers to harass you with garbage calls. The near zero cost of international calls means that call centers in poor countries can profitably harass the elderly in rich companies with endless new scams.
Again, the same pattern exists with videos. 20 years ago a slickly produced video took time and money to produce. Now any teenager with a phone or laptop can throw a bunch of clips together, add some voice over and hit publish without spending a penny.
The only path I see forward from here is that this entire situation will get worse. Technologies like GPT-3 are amazing, but they come with a cost: it becomes cheaper to write walls of text. People will use it or perhaps are using it to create websites devoid of real content. Search engines that are already having trouble distinguishing between real thoughtful content and the wasteland of content farms will have an even harder time to produce relevant results for search requests.
I hate to say, but we were better off when the cost of people's attention was much greater than $0.