> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).

> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

Lots of bending over backwards and appeals to authority to rationalize an emotional feeling of "This time is different."

Again, every generation thinks that.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?

We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.

What is your point? I'm afraid I missed the point of your statement.

There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.

Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.

What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..

[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/medias-first-moral-pani...

What about the health and wellbeing of individuals?

Were there well studied negative health impacts from reading excessively during this very similar scenario?

I'm not a historian so I'm curious to see the parallels because right now it looks like we're talking about two completely different things.

Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).

Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.

Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.

Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.

> Again, every generation thinks that.

> This time might be different. But it's probably not.

And this is an appeal to tradition.

This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739

When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.

> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?

Some students even wish for a ban to reduce the pressure to keep up with social media.

That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.

By "his kind" you mean human beings?

Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".

Billionaires aren't human.

The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.

NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.

I agree with you.

Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.

So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.

Is building a successful business automatically horribly indecent?

What about winning the powerball?

If you had to choose the least horrible billionaire you can think of, what horrifically indecent things have they done to acquire that wealth?

If you are a terrible being, yes.

Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.

Also, winning the lottery to the extent of becoming a billionaire is neither common (that's the understatement of the millennium) nor a business. It is a gamble, and a gamble millions of people lose every day because they refuse or fail to understand the sheer improbability of "getting the big one" and the sheer degree to which said gambles are stacked against the "player".

> As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.

Not exactly true.

Andrew Forrest became a billionaire via Fortescue Metals and leveraging development of vast iron ore fields for sale to China. Since then he's focused on renewable energy to reduce harmful emissions in resource mining. He has skated some questionable activities in a humane and considered way but he's far from scum of the earth.

Gina Rinehart became a billionaire by virtue of being born to a self made billionaire. Her father got there by mining Blue Asbestos and exporting lung disease across the planet, followed up by also exploiting iron ore fields (although decades prior to Forrest). Lang Hancock (the father of Rinehardt) was a person of questionable values, Gina is a terrible human being with scany regard for others.

The same Andrew Forrest whose company were found to have knowingly destroyed hundreds of local Australian aboriginal sacred sites in its mining operations? Also, he's a billionaire. He may not be "scum of the earth", and maybe he's tried to do better in his latter days, but he still got horrifically rich off of everyday workers' sweat, injuries, and hardships (mining is no joke).

Besides, this philanthropy is largely just token restitution, at best. No one needs to be that wealthy to live more than comfortable. If he really wanted to help the world, he would use enough of his wealth so as to no longer be a billionaire.

People vastly underestimate just how much a billion dollars is compared to a million dollars, or even 500 million dollars. He could literally give away 99% of his wealth and still "only" have 10 million dollars. And as of of 2023 he had 33 times that much.

No one needs to hog that much of the world's resources. It is neither just nor equitable.

That's the one, and there's the rub.

Are you comfortable blaming individuals like Forrest for the destruction that global consumption of iron, copper, and renewables brings, or would you rather 'fess up to collective responsiblity?

The largest Copper resource in the US currently is on naive American sacred land, and the latest proposal for providing rare earth elements essntial for modern lifestyles would disrupt a river system that spans a land area similar in size to Texas.

Do you wish to blame Forrest for these things, or the end customers and their demands?

NB: I've things to attend to now, I'll be back in some hours if you've an interest in all this.

I would rather blame both.

It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it. They are just as bad, if not worse.

Also, apologies, but I edited my above comment, and wasn't able to submit it before you replied.

And no worries. Good luck on your things. Honestly, I'm kinda done with this conversation, as interesting as it has been. It feels like it's run its course. No bad blood between us, I hope. In any case, I do hope you have a good day!

It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".

The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.

In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.

If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.

For your interest, this is Jill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI

( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )

> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.

I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.

Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...

I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.

Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.

Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.

"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument

>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.

Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...

Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.

Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)

But all the middle aged people are wasting their lives on the junk information addiction train as well. It's not some generational divide.

It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.

Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.

> prohibition breeds desire

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.

It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist.

You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s

Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.

Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.

>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

> I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard [..]

I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!)

> Don't set your kid up for failure

I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)

Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.

it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell

Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.