We grew up at a time where SMS was a thing when I became 16. I know that keeping up is cool, but social media is a disease. The amount of dumb and uneducated people that couldn't even listen to expert advice during a fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
I'm annoyed mainly because people around me make bad decisions that have an influence on my own life.
If you stay home and others don't, it doesn't affect you. If you're isolated and safe, why would you care if others go out and do what they want?
A commenter in a sibling thread asked why "people are so nitpicky" and "why people are so hostile to each other". This comment is why. It's exemplary even. You should look inward and figure out if you're part of the problem.
Meanwhile, it transpires that the outside world is full of people who I am sure are upstanding and willing to self-sacrifice for their fellow man in theory, but will point blank refuse to bear the mild inconvenience of a piece of cloth over their face in shared spaces for the comfort of those around them in practice.
I mean, it's not news; most humans have never cared much about the welfare of strangers; people doing what they want and ignoring the externalities happens all the time - smoking in public spaces, drink driving... the pandemic simply served to viscerally ram home just how self-centered we all are.
And thus we come full circle to the start of the thread. Hell is other people. The more we interact with other people, the more obvious this becomes. As our world becomes more connected, no room is left for illusions on the subject; it's little wonder teens end up holing up in their rooms avoiding everyone.
The core problem is the ostracization of opinion on social media. It also doesn't play very well when social isolation has had other consequences, such as the proliferation of viruses and the broad economic impact. Plus, COVID is now integrated in our society, thus giving more ammunition to those who thought that social isolation was pointless (even if it wasn't at the time).
We need to move on from the isolationism and vitriol of others with differing opinions.
To be clear, I'm not arguing whether the lockdowns were good or bad. I do think they were necessary. I'm more arguing that we shouldn't suppress and ostracize people who disagreed with them. It's okay for people to disagree.
For arguments sake, let’s call it - individual only scenarios vs collective scenarios.
Individual only: What thoughts you say at home in the privacy of your house.
Collective: The vote.
In collective scenarios, the median/average choice dominate.
Eg: The chemical expert knows that chemical X is going to kill humans and avoids it.
The collective votes Yes to elect a representative who advocates for chemical X to be added to all food packaging.
——-
This is a very common trick question where Free Speech argument proponents falter.
Free Speech is a principle for ordering the world. With the internet, this principle needs to be applied to people who would skew or influence collective decisions.
The best solution to this problem in general is social welfare. One such choice that countries did during the pandemic was to encourage or force work-from-home, and reducing the economical friction of sick leave. When the situation is so bad that people have to choose between externalities and major negative personal impact, society can help by stepping in by pushing the right choice while at the same time reducing that negative personal impact. It is a social solution to a social issue.
People as a group can be good and evil, just as an individual. Society can choose to ignore those logistical and financial problems while at the same time expect people to act altruistic. A major reason for that will ironically also be the logistical and financial situation of that country, so they may as an alternative choose an better than nothing solution to it. Sub-optimal as it is.
It does, because there are places I have to go to and I am at higher risk there.
Because they'll get sick and fill up the emergency room. If I have a heart attack or stroke at home, that's a problem for me now.
To answer this question:
Because almost nobody was isolated. Most people couldn't stay at home exclusively and indefinitely. You gotta get groceries, lots of people have to go to work, lots of people have partners and family members that can't work from home, you gotta receive parcels, you had to receive food deliveries, and some people had to be the ones delivering parcels and food, some people could get OTHER diseases. The list goes on.
Take this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0?error=coo...). How many people on HN will agree with the ranking of those interventions? Early restrictions on travel and preventing people from gathering are the most effective measure to prevent an pandemic, but what people want to form sides around are the discussion around masks. Shutting down airports and imposing general self isolation are not in alignment of what either smart and dumb people believes in.
I don't believe in completely forbidding access to everything when my son is older but there's a time to introducing things like this and it's not this young.
My nephews school allows basic 'dumb' phones but not smart phones which seems a fair compromise.
Dumb phones is definitely a smart compromise...
Elsagate videos got many tens (hundreds?) of millions of views at the time. If you know where to look you can see the cumulative engagement of babies in front of their tablets.
There's also this hypothesis I saw the other day, that the above is a misattribution: it's not the working-age women who somehow have time to play so much, but rather babies and kids playing on their mothers' devices.
I also wonder what the breakdown of Netflix streaming hours is. I suspect a huge chunk of it is just toddlers and pre-schoolers watching the same episodes of Cocomelon over and over again.
50M views with lovely comments such as "Ujhgjjgfgk", "ĤĎĎ hcl jdjdsewi10000000000", "nnnmkkk", etc.
This sort of shit gets billions of views...
Yes, expert opinions do change as new data comes in, and yes, public policy is as much influenced by politics as by science. But during the beginning of the pandemic, the OP is absolutely correct that a shocking number of people showed very poor judgment based on social media.
And this has not changed. Social media continues to be a cesspool of conspiracy theorists and deliberately provocative content that increases "engagement". Please don't dismiss this point by putting "expert advice" in quotes.
It is shameful that citizens had to sue for the release of the partial protocols in the first place, for sure, but the conclusions are more than hasty. Anyhow, you seem to have made up your mind, so I'm leaving you to it.
So, like smoking in restaurants?
The amount of dumb, educated people that blindly accepted everything that was fed to them during the fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
"Just two weeks to flatten the curve!"
Sorry, I see this a lot but: oh well? They'll get over it. Social media on the other hand gets its hooks in deep.
If every teenager were guzzling gallons of soda everyday and telling them to stop "alienated and ostracized" them, I'd still do it for the good of their health.
Alienation and ostracization is not something to be taken lightly.
We know that kids on social media are suffering depression and etc.
So… if you keep your kid off of that drug, you are saying they’re not going to be accepted by the addicts and peers that are suffering?
Ok? Good?
We know what conformity to the group of damaged friends can do to a kid.
I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
We know it raises likelihood, that doesn't mean they're all depressed and anxious across the board, and those afflictions are on a gradient. Younger generations appear to be optimizing for it more effectively.
It doesn't make sense to cast society at large as "suffering and addicted". Downstream from that, the downsides of sheltering your children from society loom larger than their being socialized among peers who use social media.
> I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
You do that.
> You do that.
You don't hear really about Amish kids killing themselves. Maybe there's something there.
Kids having problems because of social media sucks.
Kids having problems because they don't have social media and gets peer pressure because of it also sucks.
I'm just saying what happens when you force "individual responsibility" onto parents and children, without addressing the root societal problem.
I agree 100% that using social media is unhealthy.
The parent commenter propose that you can not escape the negative consequences of social media, even if you fully restrain yourself, as you have the second order effects from your friends using it.
The parent commenter says that this is not an individual problem and cannot be solved on an individual level. It is a macro issue.
Just like you stopping eating meat will not really make a dent on global warming.
I think that is very insightful.
Its easy to say, that's the parents responsibility and that is a correct statement but most families require 2 working parents these days, most of whom are not tech savvy enough to understand how to limit social media or access to questionable sites.
Social media is an addictive, mind altering poison by design. Through the pervasiveness of echo chambers and intentionally addictive features such as endless scrolling and recommendations it seeks to do nothing except turn its users into revenue by keeping them online and seeing / clicking ads.
I lost my sister to it as she became so wrapped in the political side of it that any belief besides hers and those she followed meant you were a borderline nazi.
if thats the case, then surely it would be reflected in the studies? (assuming that the studies are reproducible....)
If you run against convention too much, even when convention is wrong, you become the zealot guardian, which conjures a family situation with its own distinct pathologies.
Yep. The other problem is that not having social media and mobile devices can be alienating and ostracizing, especially for teenagers.
Avoiding the problems of social media requires skills and restraint that even most adults don’t have.
It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.