bwing1

A good deal of the argument seems to be that a) specific past moral panics, like pinball, turned out to be harmless b) worrying about smartphones shares some similarities with worrying about pinball c) therefore smartphones, like pinball machines, are harmless, and it's irrational to worry about them.

But that argument simply doesn't hold. The thing about "moral panics" is that you retroactively apply that term to things that groups were worried about that seem silly in hindsight. But people also worried a lot in the past about drug use and rising obesity, which both have turned out to be gigantic social problems.

Even leaving aside the validity of the studies (I think that Haidt overstates his evidence at times), I think people can come to conclusions just by introspection and observation as to whether the impact of smartphones/algorithmic content on society is more comparable to pinball or to a new drug.

Yeah, that's bubble-specific, not class-specific. I think the most successful of the younger professionals I know are most likely to gamble on sports -- it's an excuse for an active group chat, it's something to talk with random people about, and the actual amounts you bet are easy to make trivial relative to income. Very networking-forward hobby. (Also, it's obviously as much an intellectual exercise to gamble on sports as it is to play poker.)

Broadly, though sports in particular is something different bubbles care more or less about, I'd say your perspective is entirely foreign to me. My experience is that the more intelligent groups I'm around are vastly more interested in predicting things and putting money behind their predictions.

His obsession with clarity/minimalism in communication + the (befuddling) expectation that VCs are constantly opining on things seems to mean that more and more of his tweets read tonally as though they're addressed to a seven-year-old.

I think it's a valuable news function to highlight that some of these coaches may be somewhere from misleading to fraudulent. That said, I think there's an paternalism to a lot of articles of this variety, where implicitly messages of type "thing X is bad" and "thing X should be regulated/illegal" are mixed together.

The nature of being adults with money and agency is that people will be trying to sell you things, and you will largely be permitted to give them money for their product. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. It's one thing if we're regulating something like food or drugs, where the average consumer can't possibly verify if e.g. an ingredient list is misleading, but here you're just straightforwardly getting some advice/coaching -- kinda up to you to decide whether it's worth it.