I hope you're right but I think you're dead wrong. Social media has not only affected the mental health of millions of people negatively, it has brought about social, political and economic harms that will affect the planet for generations.
Right, the thing it reminds me of is the long-term impact of reading to your kids at a young age, it has measurable effects equivalent to expensive professional education choices you could make later on in life, although I forget the exact comparison.
But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
Neuroplasticity wanes as people become adults. I'm not saying it's impossible, but changing ingrained patterns of thinking as an adult can be difficult or require deliberate effort and perhaps help of trained therapists.
In the absence of any evidence, it is really unclear why anyone needs to catastrophize about generations of harms.
Is there any reason to believe that "social media existing" is a worse and more enduring harm than tens of millions of people dying in the Second World War, the trauma of the survivors, the vast destruction of infrastructure,or the start of the risk of nuclear war?
Yet the post war baby boom seems to have led a remarkably fortunate life, overall.
> The effects of social media usage are surely reversible by stopping using it and then some retraining of the brain
This is a reasonable, but optimistic take. The effects of social media on developing brains will need to be studied to be sure the effects are reversible. Furthermore, how extensive is the damage and how long does it take to reverse? Are older people less likely to recover?
The best thing a smoker can do is quit smoking. At any age. It's not just the long term risk, there's all sorts of short and medium term effects. I think the comparison is more apt than you're giving it credit for.
Neuroplasticity. Seems better than the damage caused to your lungs and cells from smoking.
I mean, do you have any evidence that the brain is irreversibly damaged by social media? I have not seen any, but I have seen evidence that there is permanent cell damage from smoking.
To play devil's advocate, there are good studies linking social media use to depression.
While you can somewhat mitigate the negative health effects of smoking by stopping and then making healthy decisions like doing sports and paying attention to what you eat, depression isn't something you can just stop having.
But are you saying that social media causes irreversible and permanent depression that neuroplasticity cannot ever reverse?
There is also a healthy side to social media, but not really a healthy side to smoking.
Social media helps me make and keep in touch with friends. I have not found any negatives personally. My feeds are pretty much just posts from friends. I have removed everything else by now.
This who conversation seems a bit simplistic and reductionist.
Sure the brain grows and changes but just pointing to 'neuroplasticity' -- a concept none of us really understand and saying 'it's all good' -- isn't that insightful because it's too one dimensional. At the end of the day we can say that this must have some permanent effect on the brain because people remember their time on social media, right? Yes, it's a mixed bag with some positives from social media but at the end of the day there's an opportunity cost for the time that they spent on social media in the form of times shared with loved ones, the formation of positive relationships in the real world, and perhaps career opportunities.
With that said the bigger issue to keep in mind is that the people who push this kind of technology on society do so knowing that it has negative consequences for individual users and society as a whole and yet they push it anyways for personal profit. And more than just pushing it they actively lobby the government to change laws or prevent regulations from being enacted that would stop them from doing so.
This is odious behaviour and it should be stopped and the people involved should face personal consequences for damaging society so casually.
Definitely not universally true. I was a big introvert in high school and college, but now as an adult I am way more extraverted and have more friends than ever.
I just put a donate button in my free apps and make a little every now and again from the kind souls who decide to send money.
I was always afraid of some sort of implied level of support or quality from something that I charge money for, but maybe I'm overthinking it.
I feel like if I release it for free then there can be no expectations.
My hobby projects were created mainly to serve a need for myself or a close friend, or to create an opportunity to develop my skills, hopefully both at once.
I am speaking about this all from a pre-LLM world and mind, so I realize that LLMs can change this somewhat.
Watch apple secretly defining 1000 charge cycles as 1500 10%-80% "normal use" days.
(Remember the "full charge in 8 minutes fiasco? Well, I searched a reference but I didn't find any :/)
"But age verification requires identity verification. Identity verification requires digital IDs."
Um, no? iOS is doing age verification just by your credit card. I never saw people all that upset about giving their credit card info to their phone wallet app or even to a bunch of websites.
It's not necessary to give it to every website. Verification to the website can be a true/false from the OS. In fact that's how it already works now.
I would say it's not really an ID no, which is the point. The post is claiming that a digital ID is necessary for age verification, but clearly it isn't.
The next likely tokens for a response to a question that can't possibly be answered from the context should be "I" followed by "don't", followed by "know".
How about instead of blaming the user for not understanding how AI works, the AI makers stop letting their chatbots answer questions so confidently that they clearly can't answer...
If I ask the AI about some health issue, it says something along the lines of warning I'm not a doctor etc. So if I show it a picture and ask it to tell me the carbs, how about a warning telling me it can try, but that it probably wont be very accurate.
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