real world social networks have agency if you define ephemerality as agency. It's an accident of digital platforms that nothing is ever forgotten, not a feature inherent to normal human relations. In the real world you drop phone numbers, you forget events, unused relationships atrophy. And that's not a bug, forgetting is a feature. For anyone who isn't convinced of this, Black Mirror did an admirable job in its first season putting the pathologies of social technologies on display that record everything.
It can be argued that humans actually hate forgetting things. That's why we invented writing. Spoken language lets us share arbitrarily abstract thoughts with others. But human memory is imperfect, so spreading knowledge or memories through word-of-mouth is unreliable. Writing lets us preserve that information as intended by the original author, potentially indefinitely. That's also why we always wanted to be able to record and play back what we hear and see, and our civilization only fairly recently, in terms of history, got advanced enough to have technologies to do that.
>It can be argued that humans actually hate forgetting things
I agree with you, I don't even think that needs to be argued, we without a doubt hate forgetting things, but we also hate eating our vegetables. We do hate a lot of things we probably shouldn't. We are perpetual hoarders, as a species we have the bad habit that we're not very grateful for the problems we don't have as a consequence of things we don't keep. We're not very good thinking in terms of absence.
That's why Marie Kondo sold a ton of books and got a great Netflix deal simply by teaching people how to throw stuff into the garbage. Civilization is great at record keeping but not doing too well on the social bonding front, or in the words of George Carlin: https://youtu.be/MvgN5gCuLac
>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country
there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.
We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.
If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.
I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.
>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.
Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.
Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.
> Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes?
Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.
Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.
No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.
That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.
My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.
>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?
Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.
Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.
This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.
>One heuristic for spotting when you might be wrong is that you hold a very uncommon belief.
this is only the case in a 'wisdom of the crowd' world where people hold uncorrelated, authentic, self-formed opinions. If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator. In that environment its not truth that determined popularity of a belief, but how transmittable they are. In a world where gigantic companies produce sociality being anti-social in the most literal sense is a very real survival and truth-finding strategy.
And of course it's more important to be right than happy. Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism. If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
As Cormac McCarthy said in his last book: “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it's a bad bargain.”
> If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator.
Not really. It continues to be an indicator, just a less reliable one. As I said, it's one heuristic. It increases your probability of being right more than it decreases it, but it isn't an absolute rule.
Fundamentally, science itself relies on this heuristic to some extent. The idea that an experiment be reproducible is essentially the idea that the majority of testers should agree on observed reality. You just have to be careful not to conflate opinion with observed fact, or to treat it as more than a heuristic evaluator.
> Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism.
Not at all.
You do not need to be correct to be happy, and there is no correlation at all between your ability to correctly understand the world and your capacity (or worthiness) to experience joy or to help others experience it. You are allowed to be wrong and happy, or apathetic and happy, or ignorant and happy, or even nihilistic and happy.
> If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
There's more than one type of happiness. The kind you describe is hedonic. The other type is referred to as Eudamonic, and it comes from connection, service, and a sense of purpose.
You'll never get to experience the second type if other people don't want to be around you because you've decided that your own narrow perspective is the One True Perspective (TM).
Don't get me wrong, I reject post-modernity and the horrifying idea that there is no objective truth. I just also reject the idea that any of us are valid arbiters of that truth, or that we must know the truth before being allowed to experience happiness.
Nobody said you can't. They said the happiness is "decoupled from truth", which isn't ideal if we care about objective health of a society.
Your position seems to imply support for society-level submission to religious dogma. There's no point ignoring actual examples of all these ideas.
Hold an "uncommon belief"? According to you, it's a sign you're wrong. "the world isn't crazy, it's you who's missing something"... and you even say "let people continue being wrong for the sake of being social."
I don't think you meant to express support for strict religious rule and population submission, but that's how I'm reading it.
Your argument supports those who seek submission from the population. You don't require objective truth to play a role in happiness. You have found value in submission that serves to neutralise dissent. Dissent when coming from the few, isn't worth your time. Peg those few dissenters as "probably wrong" and call it a day.
A lot of folks seem to be interpreting my heuristic is if it were a hard and fast rule here. Thats not what a heuristic is.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows for quick decisions based on "most likely" outcomes. Its a statistical tool.
In my case I said it should be enough of an indicator for you to double check your work, not that you were automatically wrong. I stand by that.
That said, you're getting into epistemology now, and its important to differentiate between the observed facts and the biased interpetation of them.
I mentioned before that reproducibility in this way is important to science, and the reason it works with science is that we decouple the observation from the interpetation.
When most people observe that 2+2=4 and you get 5 it is likely that you're wrong. You should invest the time to double check your work.
If 50% of the world then tortures that observation through convoluted and error filled reasoning until they can interpret it to mean magic sky daddy wants you to let the priest touch your special no-no place you should ignore them.
Observed reality being in agreement is a much more reliable heuristic than agreement of interpretation, which is often filled with bias.
> They said the happiness is "decoupled from truth", which isn't ideal if we care about objective health of a society...
Happiness is an emotion. Imagine if I'd claimed society should only be allowed to feel lust on Tuesdays. This is no different. You are allowed to feel however you'd like to feel whenever you'd like to feel it.
Making up arbitrary rules about when you're "allowed " or "deserve" to feel good will make you miserable, and you don't have the right to tell the rest of us we have to abide by your misery making emotion rules.
You might consider asking yourself where this idea that you must meet specific prerequisites before being allowed to feel specific feelings came from, and then seriously considering whether it has merit, or if it even actually works.
Are you also restricting when you're "allowed" to feel negative emotions? How does that work? Are you really able to just... not be sad if you dont deserve it? Do you always feel happy when you DO deserve it?
I think the Protestant ethos is soo deeply embedded in you that you might not even know its there.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
no they can't, as showcased by the countless of people who don't. This isn't how human beings work. If you give someone a tool that facilitates taking mental shortcuts they will abuse it.
You put a code generation tool or even just stackoverflow in front of programmers, they will mindlessly copy-paste. You put the slop generator in front of journalists, they'll write slop. You put the tasty snack and the healthy snack at equal distance in front of someone, guess what they'll eat.
The vast majority of people will pick laziness and speed over correctness, always have. So we need tools that if anything slow down work and encourage thinking, not the opposite. You want a better programmer you hand them a debugger and not a chatbot because then they'll be forced to think.
it's far more than that. By giving into the television like hyper-reality they create you're giving up base reality. That power and legitimate institutions are derived from the people and due process.
To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities. War department, thugs with badges pretending to be police etc. The provocations are intentional and the offensiveness is the point, if you're just opposed to the concrete violence you're missing the forest for the trees. You have to reject their entire grammar they're trying to impose on you.
It's as if I put on a robe, went to Rome and claimed I'm the Pope (taking bets on this happening in the US too). You shouldn't then try to argue with me if I'm a good or bad pope or if I'm committing bad acts, but you should reject the entire non-reality circus I'm trying to pull you in.
> To surrender to the rhetoric is the entire point of the obscenities.
No, this is what I am complaining about. The obscenities are the point, the rhetoric is cover. Ignoring the rhetoric does not stop the obscenities, and treating the problem as 'they are using the wrong name' rather than 'they are doing the wrong thing' dismisses the real harm being done.
If you claim to be the pope, rejecting your constructed reality is the way to help you out of your delusion. If you do so while leading a crusade to sack Jerusalem, it's not the priority.
>Presumably the vast majority of OTC painkiller usage is for short-lived and low-severity pain
which is far from harmless given how many people use them as a replacement for treating underlying symptoms and changing their life. Case study my dad. Kept taking ibuprofen to get rid of 'harmless' headaches and back pain because he was 'too busy', few years later he couldn't ignore it any more, turns out he had completely messed up disc in his cervical spine from years of physical stress, bad posture, no treatment or exercise etc.
just look at the sheer amount of back pain diagnoses. About a third of Americans report back pain at any given time, IIRC 10-15% of the population go to the doctor any given year for back pain. There's likely millions, if not tens of millions preventable cases if you replaced the liberal use of OTC drugs with actually solving the lifestyle problems.
It's not clear to me that a large portion of people are using them as a replacement for treating underlying symptoms. I suspect in a large portion of cases, treating the underlying symptoms is difficult and/or costly, and thus the choice is merely whether to treat the pain or not.
the Israeli military did a study about ~15 years ago where they looked at soldier suicide rates after they had enacted a policy of leaving the weapons at base over the weekend and if I recall correctly it cut the rate of suicides by 40-50%.
And on the flip side, the US Sec Def recently allowed US soldiers to carry loaded weapons on base (when not in a role that required it, which was previously disallowed). I expect this will increase suicides on US military bases. All for some "rah rah, 2A, mah rights!!!" bullshit political posturing.
The US Veteran's Affairs agency makes a free app to help with insomnia; it has all the usual advice that would apply to anyone - plus advising veterans not to keep a loaded gun by the bed, even if it makes them feel safer going to sleep.
>Except availability of chargers is spotty in most of the country,
the UK is a small country. The average British driver drives 20-30km per day. One full EV charge almost gets you through England South to North. If you're putting a bunch of charging stations next to workplaces for people to charge once or twice per week that's going to cover most drivers.
What do you suggest? That people spend most of their time on the road going to and from (very expensive) chargers across the country? That is such a prospect it makes our decrepit railways look good.
unless you're in a jurisdiction that has anti-surveillance workplace laws, which if you don't should probably think about before Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to monitor to your body temperature from below the waistline
without a doubt liberty and privacy don't seem to be particularly high up on the list of priorities in the land of the free. Although if the American founders had 24/7 surveilled, compliant, worker drones at mega corporations in mind for an extra check might be worth pondering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
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