> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky.
I agree with them.
It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mistake is thinking that the ability to concentrate on something non-entertaining is the baseline. One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.
We had the same anxieties about radio and TV. Those anxieties were right and wrong. Technologies do change how people behave but it's always the same story. There will be entertainment freely available and you'll have to choose to concentrate on things that aren't entertaining that you consider worthwhile.
I think many of your examples are of times we failed to counter problematic tendencies as a society, gave up, and then even worse (in this case, more addictive time consuming activities) things come along. It's basically the realization of a slippery slope, where failure to stop one problematic trend is used to justify an even worse trend.
Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when American restaurants were full of cigarette smoke, and rivers would get so polluted they'd catch on fire. People still survived, even thrived. If we had ignored those problems, probably someone today would be saying "Opiates? Global warming? Just more moral panics, the way a few decades ago everyone was worried about the environment and smoking."
The dangerous thing is that once these trends become part of your society, it's hard to imagine the world without them, and hard to see why people make such a fuss about them because they can become an immutable part of your reality. You become blind to them. I'm sure, given enough time, we'll become blind to new negative trends in society just as we've become blind to previous negative trends. But that's not a good thing.
Totally agree. When I hear the argument "People always say this, they said this before with TV and videogames", it just makes me think that people are discounting some of the huge negative impacts these technologies have had (or at least contributed to).
Just look at the overall physical fitness of, say, an average 18 year old in 1950 vs today in the US. By loads of measures (obesity, muscle strength, cardiovascular fitness, diabetes, etc.) there is an enormous degradation in the physical fitness of America's youth. I'm certainly not blaming this all on TV and videogames, but at the same time I think it's a huge mistake to pretend our technological advances haven't had other, large negative side effects.
Slight tangent re: fitness. Over Christmas my dad and some similarly aged people (70’s) were reminiscing about their childhood, and pointed to the lack of Doritos as memorable. Junk food was neither the product of decades of addictiveness-enhancing R&D not cheap.
A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.
Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals
Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience.
Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.
Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.
I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.
Another complicating factor of all this is "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" in a society far from what humans are adapted for.
From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
Except if like a great many in the U.S., your only source of nearby groceries within reasonable walking distance is a gas station. In that case a bag of Doritos is $40+ cheaper than hiring a cab to take you to the grocery store and back for a bag of beans and rice. Also saves you a couple of hours of travel and cooking.
When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.
One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.
> Developped countries share the same technologies, but this obesity and diabetes problem you're talking about seems largely rooted in North America.
In France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you), obesity rate was multiplied by 3 since the 80s. Overweight rate raised by 50%.
Diabetes has also been on the raise: double or tripled since the 90s.
You know, in general all the crap that develops in the USA reaches other countries after a while. Depending on which specific 'crap', it is just a matter of variables delays and variable intensity, but it surely comes one day.
To many people, Italy would first evoke pizza and (the huge amount of Nonna's) pasta :-)
"Gourmet", "Chef", "Cuisine" and dozens of other terms: even in the English culinary vocabulary, the French words have a predominant role. It ruled the world of 'proper' cooking at some point. But I was more thinking about how, from the USA, the French are presented as having a balanced diet, eating a bit of everything but not eating too much of anything, cooking by themselves and not resorting to mostly ready, industrial, over-processed meals, how they would be a sort model in those matters related to food.
What was very fashionable at some point in the discourse on healthy food (10-15 years ago, maybe), was the Greek/Cretan diet; which was often extended to the whole Mediterranean, including Italy indeed, and south of France. Traditionally the butter & cream you mentioned are associated with northern France: the South was supposed to be a land of oil (olive oil in the most Mediterranean part, other oils in other parts) and the North a land of butter.
With Southern France and maybe Paris being the exceptions, the eating habits of the average Frenchman are closer to those of the English and the American than to those of the Southern European.
Said that, obesity is largely a problem of the Anglo-sphere, it has many causes, including a severe lack of food culture (eg adults who think it’s proper to eat candy bars or to eat at McDonald’s). It is not inevitable that the horrid American food habits will become the norm everywhere, the US is not the teleos history is moving towards.
The U.S. was economically recovering from World War 2, the Great Depression, and other things. Most working class Americans had a hard time affording food because of that. So, it was not like they could easily get away from being skinny, anorexic, etc. during that time. They were too busy saving or investing money for their bills, children's futures, and careers to improve the U.S. economically before younger generations got spoiled rotten by America's improved economy. Now, the younger generations of America today are barely affording food because of increasing wealth inequality, increasing cost of living, and decaying infrastructure decades ago. So, working class Americans are economically screwed again, but it is to benefit antisocially greedy oligarchs only. So, you better expect skinny people, anorexic people, and starving people to become a bigger population in the U.S. The ruling class in America are kind of doing what Nazis did to Jews in concentration camps by starving them to death. Except America is the concentration camp for working class slaves with the illusion of freedom disguised as the democratic party, republican party, human rights, etc. Overall, the ruling class has exclusively cut-throat power that lets rich men live in luxury during this pandemic while working class Americans suffer more with each new year rather than suffering less with each new year.
Technology does not respect biology. There is a mechanical view of man, that is similar to what hydroponics is to gardening.
You look what are the required nutrients etc, and provide just that in a very sterile environment.
Of course, the results are quite garbage. The fruits are tasteless, and the problems it brings (e.g. insect infestations) require a lot of pesticides.
The technological vision is to solve these problems with new technological solutions.
If modern life has become unbearable, it's not a worry because there are pills, wondrous cannabinoids, etc, to fix defective individuals. Quite a society!
Well put. In addition, biology can't really be patched. CRIPSR nonwithstanding. We are stuck with the bugs that developed many thousands of years ago. Our bugs will continue to be exploited.
Someone posted "The bicycle is the slow death of the planet" not so long ago. It's not meant to be taken literally, but this is not very far from some people's line of thinking.
There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.
Respectfully, these examples- radio and TV aren't even in the same league as the manipulation and engagement that comes from the algorithmic feedback loop that backs these services. The comparison is dangerously dismissive.
As far as I've read, based on research around attention and focus behaviors, the context switching element of it is the most dangerous part in terms of developing ADHD type behaviors, and I agree that TV and radio doesn't even scratch the amount of switching that happens with modern social media. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them make you switch context every 30 seconds or less, often for hours on end. I think we're making the mistake of looking at these older technologies like TV and radio, thinking "we survived that, we'll survive this" and that is incredibly dangerous.
Dr Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, does some excellent lecture-like podcasts on the subject that are well worth a listen.
Conventional broadcast media such as TV or radio can't get real-time feedback on the user's attention/preferences/behavior nor can it deliver uniquely-personalized content to each individual user. The "best" it could do is provide an average form of content that is likely to be appealing to the majority of their user base and would be subject to scrutiny as everyone can see what is broadcast.
In contrast, modern media not only knows much more about the user and their behavior but can fine-tune each individual expereince in real-time to maximize view time and "engagement" per-user without any oversight as it is impossible for a watchdog to see what each individual user is presented with. This is much more dangerous as the content can be fine-tuned based on each user's individual profile and weaknesses/addictions.
Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership. Facebook and Instagram do the same but in realtime with more knobs to turn. I personally don't quite understand how somebody can get addicted to social media but I understand video games and I would support some kind of government bureau that determines the addictiveness of a game and puts a label on it.
For example games that are story driven, you play them for 15h and then you're done and there is no cliffhanger should get a very low addiction rating. You play them, you finish them, you liked it and then you can stop with no problem.
Then the addiction rating should get higher if there is more endless endgame content, more multiplayer content, boxes to purchase, etc.
You get the idea, if the industry is so determined to find the bliss point of a game/food item then the governments need to evolve with that challenge.
> Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership
What do you mean by this? Until very recently, TVs and radios never had the ability to report feedback on what people were consuming or whether people were watching ads. There were some surveys like Nielsen ratings that involved a small sample of people installing special hardware. TVs and radios have never served personalized results to individuals, even if there were “algorithms” involved — the targeting was toward the entire population at once, not to each an every person viewing. For most of TV & radio history, the “algorithms” were people and not computers, people manually sifting through data for weeks just to see if a show was popular.
It’s pretty odd to suggest that TV & radio was historically similar to what’s going on with today’s social media. Serving personalized results and gathering instant personalized viewing habits (“engagement”) is what’s fundamentally different than TV & radio, the feedback cycle fundamentally changed from a slow group feedback to a fast individual feedback, and that’s precisely why social media is more engaging and more dangerous.
Yes absolutely TV and radio use algorithms to boost engagement. These are still dangerous, just less. The difference is the speed at which these sources collect and use information and the volume of data collected. It isn't just that these new mediums have more control, but that they can exercise the control in real-time.
With your video game idea, what's the difference between this and other software? Some social media seems like the game that never ends.
Chess is very addictive, and certainly endless. Same with cardgames. I'm sure your government bureau would quite grow fast, coming up with ever more warning labels.
You're getting downvoted for a perfectly reasonable question.
No we don't - because chess is a super-minority niche interest. The danger of social media is that it's social mass media - designed to be as addictive as possible to as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible using as many different techniques as possible.
And that's before getting into the dangers of targeted micro-niche ads used for political ends and/or individual belief and behaviour modification.
Without regulation it's an absolutely toxic medium.
But isn't chess one subset within that network, which would indeed be covered by any law regulating addictiveness of social media? Or will you allow people to be caught up on their own "otaku" like obsession with whatever niche area, but it is simply verboten to notify them of the existence of a different niche?
I also don't see how people can separate "optimizing addictiveness" (e.g. making your junk food too yummy or whatever) versus simply trying to make a better product that gives your customers what they want. The main criteria for who gets described in this way seems to be the corporate structure of the seller.
Novel reading, it was 'the womenfolk are spending their time with ~frivolous~ novels instead of caring for their children and reading the BIBLE as God intended', and bicycling was 'the womenfolk are wearing pants to cycle and traveling without a male escort! I say!'
No liking things. The Protestant work ethic demands no fun. Only anger and work. Play is of SATAN.
This is a fascinating argument. I like the perspective of a game like poker having greater similarity to true war than traditional war games like chess or go due to ever-increasing information. This adds another dimension to the game.
On the other hand, TV, radio, the printing press, and rock-and-roll music have all been called a "monumental change", "unlike anything before it", in the past.
An "unprecedented new thing" comes around every generation, and every time, there are fancy arguments touted about why this unprecedented new thing is unlike all the other "unprecedented new things" in the past.
For what it's worth, I'll say this: when I watch TV or a movie, it appears that the producers, writers, and set designers work hard to make sure that my attention is captured during every moment of the theatrical event. Movie studios perform A/B testing to see what kind of cinematic techniques are more engaging to audiences. Music studios use computer software to mathematically model what kind of music the masses will enjoy. Newspapers engage in yellow journalism.
All I am pleading for is a higher standard of proof and some contrarianism when people claim that whatever modern thing nowadays is unprecedented even among all the other unprecedented things of the past.
All this talk about "algorithmic feedback loops" is overselling the quality of said algos (eg. I get more interesting suggestions when I open YT incognito then I do when I'm signed in, I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I have 0 interest on FB when I open it, etc.) and their importance.
It's completely missing the actual attention grabbing factor here - there's a huge amount of content for consumption on demand in those networks. Unlike TV or radio where at most you could have 100s of channels simultaneously available, there's billions of articles/videos/posts/songs/articles/etc. available with a few clicks.
I used to browse Instagram casually. Like, once is a blue moon. I would see updates from my network and spend a few mins here and there. This was probably like over year or two back. (not 100% sure)
And then a few months back I just could not take my eyes off of Instagram reels. This feature wasn't there before I think. I was just completely hooked. It was pretty interesting. I had to delete my instagram off of my phone.
They definitely are figuring out the formula to retain people's attention.
I go on Facebook about once a month. I’ve noticed that Facebook’s friend recommendation engine now sprinkles in some beautiful women, with whom I have no friends in common. I don’t know if someone tuned the algorithm this way, or if it tuned itself. It feels like the desperate move of a platform that realizes it’s losing control of someone.
Perhaps you just got lucky. Mine suggests tons of people from India and the middle east who I couldn't possibly know. I also check it very rarely. Presumably the algorithm must be picking the (very-slightly) best from many many low-probability guesses.
>And then a few months back I just could not take my eyes off of Instagram reels. This feature wasn't there before I think. I was just completely hooked. It was pretty interesting. I had to delete my instagram off of my phone.
Sounds like they started showing you different kind of content. I never got into Instagram because I'm just not into the kind of content that gets published there. Not arguing that content presentation isn't a factor here, but I would argue it's the content that's addicting and even if you remove the suggestion algorithms and just did social sharing/recommendations you'd still end up with similar results - viral stuff got shared in chats/groups/mail chains/etc. now it gets served up to your feed directly.
Not saying suggestion algorithms don't improve the experience if they work, but I wouldn't really attribute that much value to them, ultimately we have an industry of influencers trying to create content that will grab your attention.
I had the same experience - they’re incredibly addictive, far more than your standard Instagram.
I think this media is different because of the short duration of each item and the endless novelty. You say to yourself you you will just watch another YouTube video - it’s just a few minutes long and before you know it you’ve wasted half an hour. Where as with a TV programme you have to commit to 30-60 minutes.
It has the opposite effect on me, I barely open facebook anymore because of how irrelevant it is and I skip the landing page on YT and just search what I'm interested in.
This doesn't require algorithmic feedback loops. People simply would seek out (and create) content which provides inconsistent rewards. A slot machine simply needs a random number generator with a certain small chance of jackpot. The null model here is what can be achieved without individualization.
I'm not sure "randomness" is the general property, but rather unexpectedness. The content-provider may well be following a "formula" like with fiction plots, that give the protagonist setbacks and victories. Facebook uses approaches which try to profit within the constraints of a relatively small group of programmers trying to make money off billions of users. It doesn't mean these approaches are the best overall at serving the most desirable content to any given niche of users. Or even the best at making money qwithin those constraints. If are to believe in "network effects" (the other popular basis for calling for a breakup of Facebook) Facebook is simply succeeding because it is there first. Rather independent of this claim that they are winning by being the most competant.
Dono what's with your strawmen arguments here or what your point is besides being argumentative, but I didn't say anything about best. I'm gonna just assume they all see some value in it and you don't have any inside knowledge.
The point of the thread is that these algorithms are not a special new threat, but it's the availability of content itself, targetted or not.
Since we're analyzing each other's psychology now, I do think that insecure and defensive behavior like your post is a real problem with social media. I am not trying to bully or hurt you personally, but simply share some thoughts on a topic.
Have you tried TikTok? In my experience their algorithm is phenomenal, strikinga good balance between delivering extremely relevant content and trying new content you might like
I'm not sure how much that actually changes about the discussion, for the better.
If this is an addiction, then it will be one that's gonna be very difficult to break for most people.
In most places it's nowadays near impossible to go about your day without some kind of online activity or interaction. Especially as during this pandemic a lot of "in person" alternatives for it have been phased out of use.
So in practice the addicts are regularly forced to interact with their source of addiction. How are we supposed to fix that?
More transparency around algorithmically prioritized newsfeeds seem like an obvious place to start. According to what little insight we have they’re mostly prioritized for “engagement” which in some cases has intentionally come at the cost of people’s moods (according facebook’s own internal reporting).
Large companies have psychology/sociology experts working on this stuff in favor of the respective companies, but any consumer advocacy on the same level is hampered by lack of access and lack of funding.
Social media went from a communications platform where people could post content and subscribe to receive other people's content (in a chronological feed) into something where the social platform decides what content you receive (via the algorithmic feed) in order to benefit the platform by maximizing engagement and ad views.
Conventional newspapers did the same for decades and have been bound by some laws and regulations as a publisher. Social media should be bound by the same laws since they've long ago switched from a "neutral communications platform" model.
Video games are immensely addictive. The burst of adrenaline some of the recent online FPS' give me doesn't compare to any other feeling or experience I've had as a human being. They didn't just happen to be this way. They have been designed to be so thrilling that normal life cannot compete.
> They have been designed to be so thrilling that normal life cannot compete.
Maybe today's normal life, at least for us in the developed world. But I'd wager that spear hunting a wild animal in the woods with your fellow tribe-mates is far more thrilling and rewarding than any video game.
That could be the issue, our brains don't differ from our ancestors who did things like those, regular life today lacks life-threatening thrill which could be the reason of growing addictions.
I know of a phenomenon present among some peoples in Siberia, the part of the tribe that lives out in the wilderness following reindeer live a tough life but depression among those tribe-members is non-existent. While those living in the towns have substance abuse problems and high suicide rates.
I’ve never gone spear hunting but I did play paintball once. It was thrilling, and when I woke up the next day I was more sore that I’d ever been in my life (including playing varsity sports). I realized that’s because it was the closest I’d ever come to ‘running for my life’.
FPS mimic the pleasure of this experience, but without the physical engagement. It’s like the refined carbs version of hunting.
Really wish CQB paintball was more popular in the US. I’d love to play the equivalent of SWAT or Rainbow Six with paintball, but most of it these days seems to be “spray thousands of balls at large inflatable barriers on a tennis court hoping to mark a bit of your opponent’s elbow”. The CTF events seem fun, but I want something more like a Battlefield round if it’s going to be like that.
Try rock climbing, snowboarding, kite surfing, mountain biking, etc…all quite popular among my friends and colleagues in the tech industry and all quite thrilling.
Luckily, there are still tons of accessible activities with choose-your-own levels of risk and excitement that involve physical effort instead of focusing on a screen.
I have friends who dropped out of college to play video games all day and that was years ago. The games today are even more addictive. They eventually learned that was a dead end and got their lives back on track but the addiction did active harm to their lives in the short run and cost them/their parents thousands of dollars for sure.
Edit: TBF this is a chicken/egg problem, people have been dropping out of school forever and maybe the video games were the outlet for their stress, but I don't think we can simply act like all is fine while making games targeting adolescents as addictive as possible.
EVE is a very special game. I’d attribute the rush more to all interactions being unscripted, fights to occur relatively rare and having pretty tangible value on the line.
It definitely doesn’t compete very well for attention.
Personally, it was quite effective at garnering my attention - so much so that I cancelled my subscription when I returned to college.
While I've enjoyed many FPS' over the years the rush just doesn't compare with my own physical experiences. I cited EVE because - in my personal experience - it did manage to very briefly simulate that sense of danger.
Is adrenaline really involved significantly in addiction, other than in specific people who enjoy that sort of thrill? As far as my own experience goes, adrenaline is uncomfortable and something I avoid all else equal.
Isn't for a game to be thrilling usually the ultimate goal? I'm not concerned about games being fun to play, that's what they are for. I'm more concerned about the dopamine exploiting patterns implemented in modern games, especially those targeted at younger gamers.
I think it depends on the person. I am an avid gamer (have all consoles and a high end Pc) but despise all multiplayer games! I love RPG and strategy games… the less frenetic the gameplay the better! For me it’s all about the story, the immersion in a new world and the mental challenge! I don’t understand how people can waste time shooting around at random people!
I find the online games very addictive but for a lot of the time they aren't very enjoyable and then for a brief period they are very exciting (the adrenaline I'm speaking about). The game that resonated with me most emotionally was The Last of Us: Part 2 but I couldn't play it regularly or I think it would lose its charm. I generally feel quite conflicted about gaming because of this: there are games (like TLOU) that I'm glad to have experienced, but the ones that I spend the most time playing are only enjoyable some of the time (usually when I win). I think this is what I define as my own addiction: continuing to do something that doesn't bring me pleasure.
I think you actually pointed out the true reason of the addiction! It’s the victory… the need to feel like you achieved something… the satisfaction of winning… it doesn’t matter if to get there it was a chore as long as you feel accomplishment! When I play I don’t look for victory… I look for entertainment (a good story, nice lore, good characters) and a challenge with myself! If the game is not fun all the time I just abandon it! My time is precious… and since I am content with my level of accomplishment in life I don’t seek validation in games! (Mind I do not imply you are not accomplished… it’s about self perception)
> The burst of adrenaline some of the recent online FPS' give me doesn't compare to any other feeling or experience I've had as a human being.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu matches up. Various forms of racing will also hit the same pathways in the brain.
Hard to achieve for sure.
One thing that happened to be though, is that once I got really skilled at physical things, going back and playing games was a lot more boring. It is like the artificial reward loop didn't work anymore once I'd tasted the real thing.
(Either that or I got old enough that my reaction times dropped sufficiently so I wasn't one of the top bad asses playing FPSs so I wasn't having as much fun! ;) )
> Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply.
Except some of the past moral panics were about reading books, they worried that kids were reading the wrong books, voraciously!
Reading popular fiction didn't used to be considered something that took discipline, it used to be considered escapist entertainment, people did it because it was entertaining.
Millions read books and newspapers (not sure if that's what you meant by 'papers'), only a couple decades ago. On the subway in NYC for instance, you would be surrounded by people reading both paperbacks and newspapers. Not very long-ago, in the adulthood of people currently middle-aged! It's not true at all that this was a rare thing undertaken only by people applying discipline.
It might be no big deal that this attention has shifted to social media, just another shift in the particular mediums used for cultural production and consumption. Without even getting into that debate -- just the fact that you believe that reading things on paper is something that takes discipline that few have ever developed -- is astonishing to me. It has definitely not always been that way. It was not that way literally only 20 years ago, not very long ago at all -- it is remarkable that things have shifted so quickly you now believe reading books has always been a thing only for those with discipline, to be done distastefully like eating your veggies.
(It could just be a shift in mediums, but the essay tries to illustrate the deleterious effects on our lives of the new mediums, which I recognize from personal experience and observation, myself).
Anecdotal evidence etc.
I have been having a feeling that my attention span is generally lower than before.
I don't have a smartphone, no TV since more than 10 years ago, but there's the internet.
Unfortunately working as a programmer requires constant connection (at least to be available to colleagues on chat, even non-remote).
We've been experimenting with cutting off internet entirely for some days (e.g. yesterday), and I feel much better already.
It's really magical how the nagging compulsion to check notifications disappears. No need to do any complex software setup, you go to the router and turn it off.
So I think that quite clearly even with some mental fortitude and knowledge of the issue, you cannot really be immune to the attention-lowering effect.
Another possibility: the moral panic about comic books / rap music / low brow culture was justified and its ubiquity has done active harm to our society.
I don't necessarily mean a problem as a matter of taste, more a destruction of shared cultural values, in particular those that are good for "society" like a belief in the value of work, family unit, deeper concerns than material wealth (e.g. god/spirituality) etc at least in the west / America.
I will never understand how people can suggest a specific musical genre or a medium is responsible for ruining society or "destroying values like the value of work" with a straight face. When I ask for empirical proof of such things, there never is any, just anecdotal statements.
As if country music never touched upon these sorts of topics. Or books. Or ...
Moral panics come from old people who don't like anything that's different from their youth. "Kids these days!" And in America, especially so if that thing happens to be dominated by black people.
Moral panics also come from normal people who have felt the effect on their and their families' lives. For instance I am neither a prude nor a tea-totaler but I can see how many hours or my own life porn and alcohol have taken, hours that I sure enjoyed but that would have been better and as pleasantly invested in other activities. I know people that have sunk into porn addictions and lost their lives, including any ability to enjoy normal sex. And we all know what an alcoholic looks like. So is the ubiquitous availability of porn a good thing or a bad thing or something with nuance?
If you had a loved one disappear in world of Warcraft or a porn spiral you will start to question whether those are normal things that should remain so openly available without limits.
That has nothing to do with people erroneously blaming the "decay of society" or the "loss of traditional values" on things like rap music or videogames.
We can talk about how the internet has made things like porn ubiquitous, and how certain games are intensely addicting. But that is a wholly separate discussion.
How do I provide empirical proof? Survey data or something over a 30 year time span? Gallup has some interesting confidence in institutions data you can parse but doesn't really strengthen my point IRC in case you are interested.
I didn't get into porn even which I thought of after the fact, the lowest brow culture possible and it seems likely its pervasiveness and how future adolescents will learn about sex through consuming it will have profound impacts no?
The spread of low brow culture might potentially come at the expense of traditional local cultures, but any cultural expansion means the creation of a new shared culture, no? In which case the issue then becomes what the values does this culture valorize.
Yeah and it's not all bad for sure, I think the general acceptance of homosexuality has been a good thing and large cultural shifts certainly made it happen. I do wonder if these shifts are universally good or a mix of positive and negative developments, and the people warning us years ago had some good points.
I don't know about "low brow culture" but comic books and rap have some fantastic material in them. Consider works like Promethea from Alan Moore or In Her Magic Box by Atmosphere.
To take an example - one of the most popular songs of my childhood glamorized smoking weed (literally had the lyrics “smoke weed everyday”!).
Stripping away all the justified opposition to prohibition, it’s really not good for most people to smoke weed everyday. Pointing out any potential harms became deeply uncool. It’s not difficult to imagine people probably smoke weed regularly as a result.
> more a destruction of shared cultural values, in particular those that are good for "society" like a belief in the value of work, family unit, deeper concerns than material wealth (e.g. god/spirituality) etc at least in the west / America.
This is what conservatives have been crowing about since the 40/50's when black music started dominating the airwaves. It's a really old argument that is literally moral panic with no proof. I thought maybe you had some new thoughts to add, but you don't.
If you think only 50s Conservatives find some parts of rap questionable I propose an experiment. Show some NWA lyrics without attribution to a young, progressive audience, there's some interesting takes in there about homosexuals, jews and women.
Of course we don't even play 90% of that stuff any more because any radio station would be cancelled within five minutes and not by conservatives.
> One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.
Speaking of which: has anyone had the experience where they sought to be evaluated for ADHD and the professional they went to said "nope, this doesn't look like ADHD"?
I'm wondering if there are criteria people use to exclude ADHD as a diagnosis, or if the assumption is that if people are seeking diagnosis/treatment that they're experiencing something enough like it and should be given ADHD interventions (and of course, the incentive under fee-for-service would be to provide the intervention for a fee).
Yeah, usually people who lack the executive function navigate the healthcare system. It’s like they have a lack of focus pathology, so they can’t get an ADHD diagnoses.
Can confirm. Lost every single object I could lose, dropped out of school, forgot I had prescriptions to pick up for a year, constant messy room, spent an entire year literally doing nothing and still feeling nervous every day, failed jobs where I couldn't cherry pick interesting things out of JIRA and then spent 2 hours in hyperfocus, followed by 6 hours of faking being busy because I simply couldn't focus anymore (but in practice, nobody minded, and I was considered to be overperforming. getting paid based on hours sucks for me).
My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind). It got substantially worse. I can't remember the last time I managed to enter hyperfocus.
So I've made a new-years resolution and made an appointment online (thanks, low friction tech) this week. It'll only be... 9 months until I figure out which side of the ADHD battle this doctor is on. (I've had bad experiences getting trans healthcare, and only got treatment through a lucky incident, so my expectations are rather low). I've known for years that this is likely what it is, but only doing it when absolutely neccessary is on brand for it too I guess.
> My job turned from amazing with coding every day to maintaining broken things last year (mostly black boxes others left behind).
You generally have more control over your job description than anyone will acknowledge to your face. If you’re miserable maintaining broken black boxes, then stop doing that. Figure out what you’d be more productive doing, tell your boss, and start doing it.
You may have some uncomfortable conversations. Stand up for yourself. There’s a huge gap between what your boss will complain about vs what they’ll fire you for. In most cases it’s incredibly difficult to fire someone who is doing something (almost anything) valuable.
Another thing you might consider is to pick one of those black boxes and dive into it. Tell people this thing is broken and you need to fix it and they need to cover the rest while you do so. If the company doesn’t have the resources to do so, that’s the company’s problem. Then focus on it until it’s not broken and not a black box (at least to you) anymore. Now you have job security as the person who understands the thing, and it’s a nice job to have because you made the thing nice.
The black box is GitHub Actions Self-Hosted runners. Recently a very large blast radius Keycloak got added (we're a go team, we have zero experience running anything Java/JBoss).
GitHub Actions was used to sell GitHub somewhere way above me, a Microsoft enterprise contract might've been involved too. GitLab wasn't even considered. Rejecting GHA outright as a team is something we all agree would be right, but not politically feasible.
Keycloak is another team running off. The entire tribe is massively understaffed because limitations to salaries (also from higher up) are slowly eating away at all the performers.
I like my team and the tribe in general, but even if we could hire more people, we've become the least desirable team with all the broken shit and hiring is always for all teams, so long term I'll probably ask to do something else.
I don’t know about adults, but parents are often told their children don’t have ADHD. Various estimates place prevalence at around 4% which is common, but not that common.
Quality of the estimations is extremely shitty. I've heard everything from 1% to 5%. And for persistence into adulthood, anything from 40% to 15%.
This is mostly because diagnostic criteria are extremely up for interpretation, and it usually comes down to the doctor if you get a diagnosis or not. I read one particular study that attempted to correlate location with ADHD incidence, and then it turned out that it came down to how the local specialists felt about it.
Reminds me of the reason the DSM comittee rejected cPTSD from inclusion into their officially-opinionated manual. "If we add this, too many people would be affected, we simply can't pathologize this many people at once".
Never… I have always been capable of extreme focus! Even now at work I regularly zone out for hours on a daily basis ignoring my phone and the company chat (people learned that of I don’t answer is because I am focusing and filtering out all distractions so just wait for me to answer when I can). Even most of my ho bows are about continuous focus on one single activity they leads me to ignore all the distractions!
The ease of access of today's distractions leads me to disagree.
It's so easy to take out your phone to check a social media app, or open a tab on your laptop to a social media website like Reddit, versus turning on a radio or getting up to turn on the TV.
A comic book doesn't fit in your front pocket, but a phone does; there's just so much less friction for distraction today.
And still, very few people read social media till they sleep deprived themselves. Very few people end up yelling at everyone around when something does not work out in game. Both of these are fairly common for gamers, but computer games are always defended here.
So yeah, it is pure moral panic, except about something average HN commenter does not think he do.
Tiktok is the most accessed web resource in 2022, with only a small number of people using it. Worst of all, it is the teenagers that lose their lives there. A grandma playing candy crush - sad but not a societal problem. Teenagers that miss out on school, or young moms that don't anymore look at their kids, or young workers that can't focus - enormous societal problem.
Computer games have had a counter-backlash for the past few decades against moral panics such as they cause violence. But with the advent of loot boxes and the like, the new angle of addiction and games might turn that tide. The old inapplicable moral panic has come and gone, and one based on more easily-quantifiable reality will give way to a more broadly acceptable moral panic.
As for your point on social media, the past year’s spate of articles on revenge sleep procrastination would seem to refute that suggestion.
It's less about entertaining, and more about interesting, which is how I know you completely misunderstood ADHD. Discipline can only compensate shitty neurotransmitter levels for so long, eventually it becomes painful to even start trying to focus and it'll even cut into your productivity with things where you'd usually get hyperfocus without issues.
I really hate how contentious and polarizing ADHD is. Reminds me of being trans. There are people who benefit greatly from being medicated, much more than the risk they take. That should really be the end of it.
That wouldn't work with ADHD. You'd probably sit down and think about all the things you could do with that time without actually doing them while continuously scolding yourself for not doing them, and then get up 5 hours later, 3 of which you felt hungry and 2 of which you felt like going to the toilet.
Yeah, when we are lucky to have a several days long Internet breakage at home (we don't use cellular Internet), all of a sudden things which had been 'not possible' or 'so hard' or 'so tiring' for months or years suddenly become possible or normal or even obvious. We even manage to do things together with family members. Imagine!
What if this is a moral panic like prohibition or the red scare more than like comic books. Was American drinking culture in the early 1900s insane and were there soviet spies in the 1950s? Actually yes, and that doesn't justify McCarthy or make Prohibition a good idea.
And this is the challenge. How do we respond proportionately without going "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN" or blending the actual problems with our other phobias?
This opinion is respectful of nuance. Multiple social changes are converging, it is not just one the scapegoat of screen proliferation among toddlers, it is a re-examination of existential pillars unlike anything I've seen in my 50+ years (e.g., what is work? what is authority? what is worthy of protecting? what should one believe? how does one believe?).
I wonder if the new Satanic Panic of ADHD/OCD/Screens/Internet is a reflection of how children (hell, and adults) are internalizing the shakiness of what we had been taking for granted for so long. This proposal fits the reams of anecdotal reports from parents and teachers about kids becoming more difficult than they were in the past decades (and it also fits the past decade of bizarre social and political shifts across the globe).
Ironically, we won't be around for the historical analysis of WTF is actually going on because it'll take generations to parse it, distill it, and make a narrative out of it. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau all saw the French revolution coming. In hindsight that is survivor-bias because we don't read the works of people who were wrong about the political state of France in the 18th century! So we can't even look around today and say: who's right? It has to happen before we can judge it.
Of course, that's not to say we should throw moderation and discipline to the wind when it comes to child-rearing. Seems like the age-old cure of moderation is all we have: if you only do something occasionally, how can it cause long-term negative consequences (barring meth, of course)? Any better ideas?
There is no threshold, no effect size where this tuns net negative, etc. We took these 10 steps, were worried and nothing happened, we can do more steps.
Thank you. Some perspective is warranted. If society can cope with crack and meth without completely falling apart it can survive Facebook. What I do think is that this is covering up for more fundamental problems, like people being worked to death and have no time to form meaningful bonds with people in healthier ways than Facebook. It's like fast food for the soul. People are not eating Taco Bell rather filet minion because they like Taco Bell better. It's because they don't have any money and need something quick that they can eat in the car on their way to their second job. People are extremely isolated. Social media is the shit alternative to being completely alone.
Fair point, it may turn negative at some point but we're not there yet. It's a moral panic. We're not talking about war or genocide, we're talking about the young people staring at their phones too much.
That's another type of fallacy. If there is no obviously horrific consequences, there is nothing. Either/Or Reasoning.
My position is that we don't know yet. Some harms may be transitory and people adult. Making arguments for or against without good data and reasoning is not helping.
Making your mind up prematurely makes it harder to change the opinion when the evidence comes in.
What drives me nuts personally is how nobody is asking the adults that ALREADY grew up online as kids what impact it has.
This is hardly the first time we've had a panic about kids on the internet; the first one I remember is the freak out that led to COPPA in the late 90s. At the time, perhaps people could be forgiven for not asking us since we were the first generation of kids who had unrestricted Internet access and we were still kids (nobody wants children's opinions), but now there are plenty of formerly Too Online Children that are adults.
If having unrestricted information/internet access at an early age does change your brain, why aren't we comparing people in their 30s who grew up online with people in their 30s who didn't? That would be super interesting, and there are many aspects of growing up online that definitely did change my experience. (E.G. being able to pretend to be an adult and be addressed as an equal based on my ideas online made it very hard to function in the real world where acting like an adult's equal was inappropriate, I had access to information that many adults did not and that caused problems, I had access to information that my local culture considered 'inappropriate' but was acceptable online [information about female puberty is one], etc.)
Lots of people deciding what our experiences did to us without asking us.
The author of this article (and you) think one thing. I think another. Calling my thought a "fallacy" because I've made up my mind prematurely makes no sense. You (and the author) have made up your mind too. We can't endlessly defer our opinions, that's epistemic nihilism.
To me, this seems like just another old vs. new turf war and I predict it will turn out like the previous ones. "Everything must change for everything to remain the same".
I'm not saying "it couldn't possibly" be a problem, I'm describing what I see, like you, and like the article.
> Calling my thought a "fallacy" because I've made up my mind prematurely makes no sense.
Fallacy can be determined by your argument alone.
> You (and the author) have made up your mind too.
In fact, I'm more inclined to side on you on the issue. One should not accept bad or fallacious arguments just because one has inclination to agree with the result.
I’m pasting the last lines of that exact same paragraph for the people who will not read the article before commenting, as so many have admitted before in other similar discussions about attention:
> If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.
Please take with a grain of salt because I am no expert here: IIRC, ADHD is caused by brains that have too many dopamine transporters, resulting in dopamine being transported faster than normal, causing increased anxiety and impulsivity.
But then there's addiction, which can hijack one of your brain systems like your dopamine or endorphine systems. In the case of internet addiction disorder, reading endless feeds must be related to dopamine for sure.
I agree and I’d add that until 20-30 years ago having an attention disorder wouldn’t prevent somebody from having a normal life, so, I think, many cases went undiagnosed.
Today, almost everywhere in the West, you need a professional job to have a decent lifestyle, and these jobs require some minimal capacity to concentrate that the average man doesn’t have and never had.
tldr: It's down. But why? Did everyone wise up and decide watching as much television was not good for them so they started to do more productive things? No, of course not. Time was simply shifted to other entertainment mediums, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and so on.
In another 10 or 20 years, it wills surely shift several more times, too. And so it goes...
There is a veritable war going on for your attention, and the battlefields are your eyeballs, your ears and ultimately your brain. Psychologists have been enlisted, as they are in every war to try to win it for 'their side', be it one of the big silos or some dying TV or newspaper era behemoth, there is no reasonable way in which you can withstand that kind of frontal onslaught. The only way to really deal with this is to not participate.
Beware or you too will be collateral damage on the balance sheets of these media conglomerates. Unmediated reality is still there for you to peruse, but 'augmented reality' will be the next big wave for tech and I'm pretty sure that it will end up being used mostly for advertising purposes.
Recently my son (8) was talking about how cool his uncles vr headset is and made the leap to what if that was in your brain! I was impressed he made that connection. Then I reminded him how all the games on his iPad forced him to watch ads, wouldn’t that be a similar situation, only in his brain? His eyes got wide then he got a disgusted look on his face. He agreed that would suck.
I personally think there have always been distractions, maybe what’s different now is how some people get positive validation from their social media interactions, certainly an author would. A lot of people don’t though.
I hate to be that person but I must point out that there are studies that show that children less than 10 years old using VR can have impaired head-trunk coordination. See this study for more info: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96866-8
Thanks for the link, I think modern VR's paint is still fresh in everyone's mind (well... mine at least) and you brought a scientific article. I'm now wondering if the effects could be made beneficial for physical therapy.
If you install and adblocking app on the iPad, your son can see fewer ads (e.g. AdGuard, AdBlock) on these games. Alternatively, you could set up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi to block ads across the network.
This isn't something you need to explain to people here. It's like responding to someone's comment about unpleasant weather by suggesting that they could wear different clothes.
Yes. People talk about addiction to social media or other attention-farming software, but not many people really take it seriously. People think they are unicorns and while some can get addicted or manipulated-- they think "not me. I am too savvy." As long this issue just keeps getting shrugged off as a new version of tv-is-bad hysteria 'media' companies will keep making their dollars and enslaving the minds of the the unwitting willing.
I called my Aunts and Uncles for New Year's Day, and they all brought up politics within ten minute conversations. It's not that media is forming their opinions. It's framing the topics of their thoughts and conversations. Conveniently, all these topics such as national/state policy and compliance, crime statistics and trends can only be fed by more media consumption. I worry about the permanence of the effects from these behavioral patterns. ADHD is a real medical condition, but there is also something else at play. It feels like we haven't developed the vocabulary to talk about these issues properly. I would love to tell people (like my Aunts and Uncles) something to the effect of "you seem a little X". Where X means your perspective is clouded by excessive media consumption.
One form this takes is that people with some regularity claim that 'all this advertising doesn't work on them' while having an iPhone, ridiculously over-priced in ear headphones, designer clothes with large logos on them and shoes with very visible branding.
Advertising works, on everybody. The only way to get to a level playing field is to filter it out of your life as much as possible. The only thing I haven't found a solution for is billboards and radios and TVs playing in places that I have no control over.
For most of the last decade I've worn sneakers shoes with no visible branding unless you're very close or can look at the sole, even though they're by major shoe companies everyone knows. My current daily walking around shoes have a logo but it's smaller than my pinkie fingernail and I have to squint to notice it. You don't have to be a billboard if you don't want to, and you can still enjoy the comfort of good design/manufacture at very reasonable cost.
And a large fraction of fashion items are made out of advertising; that is, the value proposition of displaying a branded item comes from the web of associations generated and maintained amongst your social group by the fashion brand's advertising efforts, which will in turn be associated with you by exhibiting the item.
This means that it is actually possible to not be affected by advertising and still use fashion items, on the theory that everyone else is affected by advertising and the effect you want is to leverage that effect.
I'm sure the most fashionable people are aware of this since they need to parse the fine distinctions of brand associations to maximize their desired effects. Ironically I think they may be the least affected by the advertising even while becoming the strongest real world advocates.
Your can make your brand associations more meaningful though. I've started to embrace hyper-local street fashion. Wearing tshirts from local businesses in my area that I enjoy (bars/cafes/local brewery merchandise).
>The only thing I haven't found a solution for is billboards and radios and TVs playing in places that I have no control over.
This might sound silly, but I deliberately train my eyes to avoid looking at advertisements on posters whenever I take public transit (not completely successful, but it does reduce exposure).
For radio advertisements, that's what the 'over-priced in ear headphones' are for (admittedly a luxury and not a necessity as I could achieve the same effect with earplugs or cheap, noise-isolating earphones, but I enjoy the high-quality music).
TVs are the most difficult because they easily catch attention due to the moving picture. I also try to avoid looking at them like billboards when I go to the gym (plenty of TVs) and turn off the display whenever using the treadmill, but it's a conscious decision I make before walking in.
Also, for what it's worth, I don't think the value of iPhones are overstated by advertising. I purchased my first one after reading a book by an academic about the lack of privacy in technology. It was a suitable option for a phone that's relatively private while working with relatively easy setup (versus most Linux phones). So, iPhone usage may reduce the effectiveness of targeted ads by collecting less data to use for advertisers.
Is there a way to _prove_ one is less influenced by advertising? I have an Iphone but several models old, and most of my clothes are Amazon Basics/brands with no logo.
So yea, I echo the claim. But I’m probably wrong. Where’s my blindspot? Is there a way to test how affected I am by ads?
A good benchmark would be your tendency to make purchases based on emotions, and also your tendency to make impulse purchases.
I volunteered in several marketing positions for educational non-profit organizations and university clubs, and read books about marketing and advertising to try to improve at my job.
A great deal of advertising tactics rely on emotional appeal first (e.g. identifying a human need or fear–like the want to belong, the want to find a good romantic relationship, the want to save time or money, the want to look smart–then selling a product or service as a solution. Another common tactic is to reduce friction to make a purchase, to make impulse purchasing easier (e.g. one-click purchases, very visible purchase buttons). A third is to use other high-pressure or manipulative tactics (e.g. a countdown timer to get a discount, or offering free gifts or books to make a purchase).
You're likely to reduce the effectiveness of these advertising tactics on you by being aware of them (though there's a high chance they still have an effect). Besides knowledge from reading about advertising, good habits to reduce ad effectiveness include: delaying purchases, especially large ones, by writing them on a list and seeing if you still want them after a month; avoiding regular, small purchases of ~$20 because they add up; and holding yourself to a personal budget, where impulse spending comes at the cost of other life goals (e.g. setting up an emergency fund, saving to afford a vacation with a loved one, or pursuing educational training).
Succesfuly quitting smoking cigarettes two years ago gave me some additional insight into what "addiction" meant for me, what my relationship with cigarettes/nicotine was like for me. Which led to me for the first time fully recognizing my social media use as addictive, not just as a metaphor.
The entire way the old media reports on the new media is unironical scaremongering about how the internet is hacking the fear response of your amygdala. They should instead be positive and publish articles like "Here are 10 youtube channels that go into more depth that the master program of any university".
Sure. And then, at the end of every youtube video a whole slew of totally unrelated trashy videos that are perfectly produced to produce maximum engagement and eye candy will hijack your attention and steal another 3 hours before you even notice that they're gone because of the in-your-face nature of the recommendations.
Wouldn't it be great if all youtube did was just store and replay videos? But it doesn't, it's an engagement and advertising dollars slot machine.
If you use the toggle next to the closed caption to turn off autoplay, instead of playing another video the player will show thumbnails for other videos after the current one finishes. These filters prevent those suggestions from showing up, and you just get a black rectangle when the video is finished.
Could you point me in the direction of a single YouTube channel that goes into more depth than a Masters program?
Other than occasional captured lectures, everything 'educational' on YouTube seems to me to be optimising for that TED-style sense of wonder / happy familiarisation with the content, which is poorly associated with learning outcomes.
It's difficult to find material that's a series, rigorously demonstrated and advanced at the same time (there's lots excellent material that ticks either one or the other of those boxes). Here are some examples I subscribe to that come close:
Covers Quantum Field Theory and General relativity in as approachable a manner as I imagine is possible while still going deep into detail: https://www.youtube.com/c/viascience/videos
You may tell me I'm cheating by posting videos that are obviously not "native" to YouTube, but YouTube was the way I found them, how I watch them, and how I share them with other people.
OK, so YouTube-native videos are hard mode. Try https://youtu.be/WHASYE2e5Xo I suppose? I like it. It has life lessons I'd argue are at least as valuable as the videos you're thinking about.
Kling is building an operating system and a web browser, and frequently relases videos about the work. Most go through development of a single feature. The videos are unedited to show all of the development steps: design, implementation and debugging. A Masters program usually has more theory and larger scope, but this is more hands-on and in-depth.
But the internet is hacking your amygdala, and has been for years. Most of the information and stimulus you come across on the internet is designed to manipulate you, deceive you and control you in some way, and it works. This has real ramifications at scale, as the spread of disinformation and violence enabled by social media has shown us.
This isn't unironical scaremongering, it's a real thing and it is newsworthy. "Here are 10 youtube channels that go into more depth that the master program of any university" is exactly the kind of clickbait garbage people wish the media would do less of.
Also, the "old media" no longer really exists, it lost its identity and was assimilated long ago. Every media outlet that exists is deeply invested in the web, everyone is "new media" now.
Why would old media publish articles that people don't want to read? No one would read "here are 10 youtube channels that are more in depth than a master program". They would go out of business in a quarter. It's not like old media doesn't publish a variety of content and then evaluate which gets the most views already. They know we don't want to sit through fifty hours of academic lectures instead of reality tv.
I also think it's funny to describe "old media reporting on new media as scaremongering" when scaremongering in the form of conspiracy theory and false expertise in new media (social media) is arguably its greatest flaw. What facebook et al have empowered in terms of fear and control is truly breathtaking. I don't think the insulated tech community of hacker news can truly appreciate how many people in the West have been led to fully distrust science and academia. How many reject medical science and climate science. How many have been manipulated into thinking collapse and violence are imminent and have engineered their entire lives around that belief, from moving to far away rural areas and stockpiling weapons and supplies. The breadth of the scaremongering and thoughtcontrol that social media enables is unparalleled in our history.
One of our political parties has found out that by pressing the 'anti-government' button and piling on a bunch of conspiracy theories they can mobilize scarily large sections of society for protests, which invariably turn violent because there is a radical element at play.
A Pokemon GO - like game but developed by a subversive power to destabilize society further and further, inch by inch, slowly until the strength withers from within.
Yep but with real life implications such as social credits and in game credits to influence behavior.
For example we have people who forgo actual social interaction and instead favor synthetic relationships and achievements.
Potentially you could maid millions happy by giving them a synthetic world and IRL they live off some form of UBI but because the made up world is most of their existence they don’t mind nor care about their IRL standard of living going down, etc.
There is a popular meme that shows the landscape of a colonized Mars, and the skyline is filled with McDonald’s and Chevron billboards. I think about that a lot.
This for me is key, these sorts of problems cannot just be solved on an individual level. They are systemic.
"Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”."
Except I have no choice but to walk through an area which might be polluted. I do have a choice to not read news sites for four hours a day.
The article fails to define both the problem and the solution.
How exactly this “attention theft” causes significant negative societary consequences is defined extremely vaguely, and almost exclusively through personal anecdotes.
The offered solutions, forcing employers to respect working hours and forcing social media companies to change their business models, are borderline non-sequiturs to the article’s thesis.
There is a comment about this possibly being a new “moral panic”, which the author dismisses out of hand. Yet in the same article, he implies his son dropped out of school at 15 because of WhatsApp.
"Choice" really needs to be well-defined here. We know you can influence people to change their behavior because we invented the term "attention hacking". Sheer willpower will not overcome this on anything but an individual level. And just like obesity has other dependents like the cost of food, there is also cost/disincentives to "disconnecting". Social interaction is almost exclusively happening online now, especially during a pandemic. There is a very limited set of circumstances in which individual action will not have other severe consequences to your life - so while it might work for you, there's no way it'll work for everyone. Systemic issues require systemic solutions.
The article describes a far broader group of culprits than just social media. However, the author only calls for forcing social media companies to change their business models and not, say, news sites that publish articles trigger-happy about declaring crises and emergencies.
I'd say "choice" in the conventional sense - the exercise of voluntary control over one's body. If sheer willpower can overcome this on an individual level then it can overcome it on a societal level, society being nothing more than a collection of individuals.
It seems as though you're suggesting that we use authority to "solve" these "systemic" issues - which really are just individual issues for a subset of the population. This suggests that you are comfortable deciding what's good for others. How would you respond to obese or social-media-obsessed people who are content with their lives and not interested in your "solutions"?
You're acting like corporations aren't enacting control over large populations right now either.
Everything the market does as a byproduct of maximizing profits is fine, but all other intervention with provably better mental and physical health outcomes is authoritarian. Did I get that right?
First we have to all agree on what this means, which I'm quite sure is impossible. Everything the free market does is voluntary by definition. Every "intervention" is by definition not. That is exactly the basis for my opposition to authoritarian paternalism.
Also I disagree that corporations are "enacting control" - they are merely exerting influence. There is a world of difference.
> Everything the free market does is voluntary by definition. Every "intervention" is by definition not.
In some ideal world, where both parties of an exchange hold equal bargaining power, the "free" market might be "voluntary".
This is certainly not the current state of affairs, though. Being able to "choose" between a crappy option and a horrible option is anything but voluntary: "you can choose to work for me for little to no money... or you can choose to starve to death. it's your 'free' choice."
The very premise of what would make a free market efficient in the real world simply doesn't exist, but we keep trying to convince ourselves that it does because we don't know or aren't used to anything different.
Being able to choose between horrible options is exactly the definition of freedom. Believe it or not many people would choose free destitution over pampered slavery. It is exactly the ability to make this choice, at the most extreme level, that should be respected. To take an maximal example: you should be able to sell your kidneys to fuel your heroin habit, for no other reason than because no one can claim more ownership over them than you.
To protect people, against their will, from the consequences of their own misfortune or inadequacy is fundamentally paternalistic. The goal isn't efficiency, but the primacy of agency and consent.
If the two horrible options were free from context, sure. But that's hardly (if ever) the case. It is very convenient to start from a place where A has power over B, then say "B is free to choose whatever crappy options A offers, because... freedom".
Surely by it. I would struggle to find a precedent where children are considered equal to adults, and not subject to their authority. In fact my whole point is we shouldn't treat adults the same way we do children.
Why is it authoritarian and condescending for a government to provide service and address societal problems, but no less authoritarian or condescending for a government to be in the business of protecting the rights that any self-respecting freeholder should be ready and willing to do so?
Because that self same freeholder should be ready and willing to negotiate with others to provide whatever goods and services he needs. He shouldn't need a third party to intervene on his behalf, and, knowing that depriving anyone of freedom deprives him as well, should be loathe to apply force to compel the other free party he is negotiating with to meet his terms.
Sounds like then the truly moral position would be to cut out the government entirely. If the freeholder is ready to take on the grave responsibility of ensuring every single interaction, both large and small, are secure, then they should also be responsible for guaranteeing their own rights from all threats large and small, and not abdicate that in favor of a shadowy government.
This presupposed the "voluntary" part of capitalism, which I find objectionable, but I didn't want to go on a tangent for too long.
FWIW, I wouldn't want to prescribe a particular habit of eating healthy or not binging media, but I also don't consider the current status quo neutral. It is true that it is simply a product of profit incentives, but that doesn't mean the outcomes are good, desirable or natural.
My point is that "good, desirable or natural" are not real. They are not concrete things that we can derive from observations about the world. They are akin to religions beliefs. Reasonable people can hold opposing views, and there is no oracle to divine the one truth. Given this situation, the only reasonable way forward seems to be tolerance of the full diversity of belief, and refrain from imposing one's own beliefs onto others.
This is why I wanted to avoid this discussion. Because philosophically, I really don't disagree with this statement, but the discussion has pivoted past the important part, where we talk about whether total economic freedom is itself ideology (or "an imposition of belief"). It doesn't exist in a vaccum. It is a way to maximize one particular aspect of freedom, but at the expense of other aspects. You will always have to make this trade off somewhere, paradox of tolerance and all, and I don't think this is the one we should make.
I'm curious how you would categorize total economic freedom in any sense an "imposition of belief". It is simply absence of any imposition into the economic realm. What other aspects are being sacrificed in order to maximise this aspect? I'm not sure the paradox of tolerance is a statement of fact.
But that economic system is built on barely 2 century old philosophy you take for granted. It is not "human nature". If you could argue for any political system to be "human nature" it would be feudalism or anarchism-without-adjectives.
What is being sacrificed? Equal starting conditions to start with. Wealth in capitalism tends to concentrate. Social mobility exists, but it is severely limited. Exploitation through holding capital is mandatory. I'm feeling this right now, I am in the top 25% income bracket overall and much better if accounting for age, yet I will never be able to do such trivial things regular workers could do just a few decades ago such as build a house, thanks to the freedom afforded to the absolute top end to turn housing into a speculative commodity. If I lived in the US, a considerably "freer" society than mine, my entire wealth would be consumed by healthcare, a result of the freedom of hospitals and insurers to charge arbitrarily high fees for maximum extraction.
I'm not arguing that it's "human nature". I'm arguing there's no such thing. I'm arguing that we are fundamentally decision-making agents.
> Equal starting conditions to start with
Equal conditions are not a prerequisite for liberty. They are in fact impossible to define and impossible to impose. You can be destitute and free, and you can be pampered and enslaved. The Darwinian nature of a free economic system isn't imposed, it's an emergent property of any system where scarce resources are competed for by living beings. As in any Darwinian system, the optimal behavior for the successful is to maximally exploit their success, to pull-up the ladder, so to speak.
Everything else you've said just betrays your religion: "Workers should be able to build houses". "Healthcare should be regulated so people can afford it". I don't think it's unreasonable to disagree here. In my religion, I'd prefer to die in agony rather than pry greedily into the pocket of an unwilling stranger. Why is your religion better than mine?
Which other freedoms are you referring to? How would they be reduced by total economic freedom? I don't see how economic freedom would lead directly to violence.
I agree that the maintenance of the common physical environment we live in should be regulated, but that's not what we're talking about here is it? We're talking about regulating interaction between people, which is inherently paternalistic.
- We already regulate interaction between people (e.g. you can't throw a rock at someone when you disagree with them). Even if it's paternalistic, surely you're not proposing we should do away with those regulations.
- The internet is a common shared environment, so its maintenance should be regulated like other environments to manage externalities.
These points seem consistent with your philosophy and also permit regulation of social media companies.
If it wasn't clear, I'm suggesting regulating nonviolent interaction is paternalistic, as is weaseling around it by expanding the definition of violence.
I agree we shouldn't let people physically destroy internet infrastructure. I don't think this is controversial. I don't think we should regulate how people peacefully interact.
Why is "violence" your boundary? Most people agree that lots of things can be "bad" besides violence. There's a pretty broad consensus on that. You're going to need some pretty strong arguments to justify legalizing theft and fraud.
I'm not trying to justify legalizing theft and fraud - these are most generally justified by property rights, which are somewhat tangential here. Neither of them set a precedent for the government intervening in honest interactions between people. Lots of things are widely considered "bad", that doesn't mean it wouldn't be tyrannical to make them illegal.
You didn't answer. Why do you draw the line there? What's so special about violence that it deserves special attention from the state, while other bad things don't? I see you've also added property rights now, which are a totally separate category from violence. Why these things in particular?
We’re talking about the concept of total economic freedom in general, which would inevitably lead to negative externalities of any kind, including to the physical environment, not merely interactions between people.
I'm not strictly in favour of total economic freedom and wasn't the one to bring it up. Namely I am in favour of regulating the physical commons - rights of way, air, water, etc. that we all must physically interact with. I'm against the paternalistic regulation of how free people should peacefully interact with each other, with the view to steer outcomes to some random idea of good.
What ensures the parties involved are free? Many of these issues being discussed deal with consequences experienced by one party that were never disclosed by the other. Information asymmetry makes such contracts un-free and thus the legal framework should permit nullification and redress.
To bring it back to the article at hand, did social media and other tech companies disclose the negative effects of the use of their products in their EULA?
The prohibition by the government of the use of physical force requisite to deprive people of their freedom.
If a distributor of an addiction-forming substance engenders an addiction in customers, is that not utilizing physical force to deprive them of their freedom? Especially if the addictive properties were not disclosed ahead of time.
It certainly does justify it. And literally everything else. It's an argument against laws of any kind. After all, "good, desirable or natural" are not real. We have no framework to rank desirability of outcome, according to you. The only reasonable way forward is tolerance of the full diversity of belief, right? Including the belief that murder is okay.
Well, if one person doesn't want to be murdered and another wants to murder someone, and these people are equal, then we have a conflict. We should tolerate the full diversity of belief, but we should not tolerate infringement on anyone's liberty.
How are those two examples even remotely comparable?
Uninstall social media from your phone, delete your social media accounts, put your phone in a box when you get home, etc, etc, etc.
These “problems” are trivially easy for an individual to solve. They are so easy to solve that I disagree with the basic premise that we even have a problem.
I think we could rewrite this article from the perspective of any generation. Just replace the phone with whatever hysteria was happening in that era. Music, video games, comics, or whatever.
The author of this article seems to just throw her hands up without having tried even a single thing.
“No, I cannot manage my own behavior. It is society that must change!”
Well, in same vein, you can tell addict to 'just drop that needle', yet few do. Or cigarettes. Addictive behavior is, well, addictive, and few in population have the mental will to shed it off themselves once they get hooked.
Tobacco clearly kills you (and people around), ruins you and make you stink like pile of old crap. We still allow it, but regulate it heavily since bad effects are out there, everywhere. TBH I don't mind some regulation on too-powerful social media, they've enjoyed their free pass for way too long and so far they definitely didn't make the world a better place, in contrary.
HN and many tech-minded forums struggle the most with arguments that require empathy. For people who probably don’t consider themselves religious, their outlook is extremely Puritanical.
“I see you explaining why x is difficult for most people, but I don’t struggle with it so the difficulty is invalid.”
Do you have any links to share that would corroborate your suggestion that social media is as addictive or hard to quit as heroin or tobacco? That’s quite a statement.
I find these two examples particularly interesting because the regulations have done absolutely nothing. Heroin has never been more popular or more regulated. Tobacco is lightly regulated and the declines in usage are almost completely attributed to campaigns against smoking, not the regulations themselves.
I'd start by questioning why you think addicts should discontinue their habits? Why do you think you know what's good for someone more than they do? If an addict says "I like my addiction, thank you very much", what gives you the right to intervene?
the societal cost is why intervention is justified. you know, the basis of all laws? we don't live in an anarchy. unless you live completely sustainably with no dependence or impact on others' resources, society has a right to intervene.
Correct. It is baked into their business model, to monetize your attention. And they have gotten very good at it. A "race to the bottom of the brain stem" as Tristan Harris likes to put it[0] is the correct way to look at it, AFAICT.
To me, it's also a problem of "Moloch does it". Scott Alexander describes it well and gives a handful of great examples in Part I of his Meditations on Moloch.[1]
Of all the examples, reddit is the scariest to me. People think it's a bunch of nerds talking about geeky topics (or whatever) but as soon as a subreddit has a sizable user base it will be targeted by PR firms posing as normal users. More political subs are likely subject to propaganda ops bu8t Im not even going there.
Some things on the frontpage are clear advertisments, there has been evidence of shilling about certain topics by using post templates etc etc. but still somehow the impression persists that some dude from Idaho just posted his awesome BBQ recipe and the perfectly framed and well-lit tech equipment in the background is just coincidence.
In my eyes, the worst is probably Facebook or Instagram or TikTok (none of which I use) but yes, I also understand the Reddit example as well (which I do use). And yes, even without speaking to the larger politicized subs like T_D, I do completely agree. Quite scary.
And it scares me 'PR firms' exist and are named as such because the term 'propaganda' started to take on a negative connotation. Kinda like how Google became Alphabet, or Facebook became Meta. Advertising, marketing, public relations, propaganda, manipulation.... where does the distinction lie?
Do you care to give a couple cases/examples on the Reddit front? Like proven scandals where people or groups have conspired to deceive? You mention a dude from Idaho, but I'm not in-the-loop enough to get the reference.
The only way that you can solve it is on an individual level unless you are in a position of power. You have far less agency over the systemic issues than you have over your individual choices.
I just don't agree really. That analogy is pretty absurd.
It is hugely powerful to not get caught up in all this nonsense at the individual level.
I know so much more than what I knew in early January 2021 because I spend my time reading books, doing tutorials or taking MOOCS instead of wasting my time watching TikTok. I literally don't even know what the user interface to TikTok looks like and never will.
If anything the exact problem is people are giving up agency at the individual level. As if there is absolutely no choice other than to be helplessly addicted to your phone. That implies then that it is not your fault that you check your phone or txt while driving.
It's both. Yes it is good that you spent early 2021 not mindlessly scrolling TikTok, and yes it is true that as individuals we do have some agency in the matter.
But, it is also true that in this 'attention economy' the large companies are hiring psychologists to try to break your agency, to try to take it away from you. And they are doing a pretty damn good job, and aren't going to stop any time soon. "Stolen" in the title of the OP is not really an exaggeration.
>It is hugely powerful to not get caught up in all this nonsense at the individual level.
I mostly agree with this, but in the same token think we should be aware of "this nonsense".
>As if there is absolutely no choice other than to be helplessly addicted to your phone.
Don't think anyone is saying that. Think what we are saying is more along the lines of something like 'the problem is systemic, essentially baked into the business model of advertising/marketing, and it should be addressed'
> “Stolen" in the title of the OP is not really an exaggeration.
Theft can happen only when it’s involuntary.
> the problem is systemic, essentially baked into the business model of advertising/marketing, and it should be addressed
That’s not the root cause. It is just a choke point for blame.
The root cause is the choice people make, which we’ve established exists. If people want help, there are plenty of mitigations for social media, like alternative front ends.
I suppose I am arguing that it is involuntary. Social media addiction is a real thing. "Stolen attention" seems to fit here. But I guess the line does get blurry. When a true heroin addict shoots up, is that completely voluntary or completely involuntary? Probably neither.
>The root cause is the choice people make, which we’ve established exists. If people want help, there are plenty of mitigations for social media, like alternative front ends.
So the root cause is not that these companies are being manipulative for financial gain, the cause is that users aren't choosing alternative front ends to social media (or some other mitigations). Hmm... Not sure I agree.
Yes, it is true users have some sort of agency or choice in the matter, but that doesn't mean these large companies aren't still doing the sneaky things that we know they are. Even you including the word "mitigation" in your response speaks to the fact that the problem is deeper than the users choice. Mitigation is secondary.
Also, I think this is a great discussion that is well worth having. The 'root cause' of all of this... (I tend to think it's just greed.)
> When a true heroin addict shoots up, is that completely voluntary or completely involuntary? Probably neither.
The heroin addict doesn't get to blame someone else for their choices; it's a bit like jumping from a building - it's not voluntary to be falling (i.e. being subject to gravity). You had a choice to not jump from the building.
The mitigation is to turn the parachute on your back on, so _continuing_ to be falling is voluntary.
So, in the moment, it may not be voluntary - but in the long term, it certainly is. And the _responsibility_, that most certainly lies with the user in this case.
> but that doesn't mean these large companies aren't still doing the sneaky things that we know they are
It's not like they're hiding anything from the user so it's not sneaky at all. The effects of social media are pretty public on the Internet.
And what are they doing, exactly? Responding to HTTP requests over the network and serving content as the user requests them via algorithms.
Not much different than any other addictive thing in life. Sure, you can try to compare the addictiveness, but it's still just a spectrum.
> It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable
And yet we have worn masks for months at least. If the price of a free internet is the equivalent of wearing a gasmask then I would rather do that, at least until we we have the equivalent of the nano-robot immunesystem from the Diamond Age.
If we let the government make the rules here we will lose the last place where we can play freely, and will almost certainly not solve the problem we wanted to be solved.
Regardless if the solution is government intervention, it seems rather funny to say the modern internet is a place that all entrants can play freely. It’s changed quite a bit since when The Diamond Age was first written.
We can play freely, invent new solutions and approaches without having the government test their safety, without having to get special approval by anybody.
I am aware of the bias of large companies that stops certain people from building, which is why I wrote play.
The antitrust left says large companies prevent people from building freely, but doesn’t the free speech right also claim that large companies are preventing from playing- or rather, speaking- freely?
Seems like different activities are falling under corporate purview.
The problem isn't as much that social media is addictive. The issue is that people aren't happy with their other options of what to do. If you have a draining job and don't have energy to put into a hobby, or you don't have lots of friends to hang out with, you're much more likely to waste time on something addictive.
The default human condition is to be slightly bored much of the day. This is true now, this was true in hunter-gatherer societies.
These kind of traps are addictive to even otherwise happy and well-connected people; there are basically no subcultures on earth that has produced individuals who voluntarily abstain from social media (only cultures where such technology is banned entirely, like the Amish).
It's not about abstaining completely. There's nothing wrong spending some time catching up with what your friends are doing using social media. It's when you spend more time than you'd like to that it becomes a problem.
I find your two concepts of boredom incredibly different one from the other.
When you have dopamine tablets as low hanging fruit you use them as much as you can so to keep your mind busy, in a simple society you don’t have those tablets all around 24/7.
People are praying on our boredom in our contemporary society, it wasn’t like that in the past.
Plus, I don’t think the default to be being slightly bored but being slightly mentally inactive, boredom is a modern concept of our very complex modernity.
I'm never bored when I'm outside and moving and with people, I could spend my whole life this way and get inside just to rest and I'm pretty sure I'd be perfectly fine, I think its so much different to be "bored" in real life than it is to be bored locked to cyberspace and screens. Maybe there's a distinction to be made between boredom and alienation? Because These are two very different things to me. I'm not so sure about your hunter-gatherer societies take really. Man has not been alienated forever, or is by default, or is condemned to being, this just isnt true. A lot of this stuff are modernity issues and modernity could very well have developed differently, even though technology would keep on its course just as it has always done.
Politics itself if implemented well, uncorrupted, could very much take care of it. The problem to me is political institutions and other human institutions became too weak and lost to capitalism so now that money has the final say in everything we became paralyzed because we can't imagine things being an inch different, which to me just doesn't make sense.
I mean why the f*ck would unhealthy stuff be impossible to control? Why can't food be healthier? Tech be healthier? Work be healthier? Why can't ignorance be fought and won? There are fallacies buried deep in the arguments people use defending that this specific configuration of stuff we have now is inevitable. All I know is History is deffo not done yet, things do change, one way or another, sooner or later.
In a way, social media is the new tabloid mixed with popularity contests and politics. Very easy to consume, mostly bullshit, mostly doomscrolling eventually, mostly divisive and tribal in the cult-like movements.
It is somewhat scary when people believe the "movements" on social media, they are mostly being engineered. People's first reactions and bad takes are what you find mostly on social media, those are usually worked out in normal reality.
There is some good to social media, for hobbies and information, but it is submerged under the astroturfed and cult/popularity/tabloid madness.
An individual's reality is whatever their brain decides to make of it in the moment. Whatever it is matters not, they're now living it, and only they can change it.
Fighting this "metaverse" from down here is pointless. Showing people close to you how to recognise the manipulation and teaching them how to harden themselves against it is far more effective and worthwhile, I believe.
In this, similar to (other) things recognized as addictions.
Eg (just first thing I found googling for this commonly heard theory/model):
> A strong belief exists among addiction treatment specialists that the primary reason addicts remain addicted is less about pleasure-seeking and more about their need to escape and dissociate from the pain of his or her (often trauma-based) emotional isolation.
> if you have a draining job and don't have energy
Never in modern times have we worked less. It is not that much the 7 or 8 hours of not-quite-daily work which make us tired, it is that on top of it come the 2 or 3 hours of not-really-interesting-but-designed-for-addiction serials watching, the 1 hour of news article browsing, the 2 hours of reading and sometimes writing hundreds of comments about what makes us rage on whichever form of forum or social media or newspaper comment section, the 1 hour on social media of keeping-connected-with-family-and-friends you wouldn't have cared about before, the 1 hour of wanking off to the hundreds of thousands of hours of free porn available in 1 click while you would never have bought a porn magazine before, the 1 hour of browsing online shops for stuff you don't really need of for which you could just have bought the first item at your supermarket without spending hours of research to get the very best one or to save 10 cents.
For most people, at least half of this time spent connected to Internet would have been free 15-20 years go. Free to cook, free to rest, free to read, free to get bored, free to do something a bit more productive or interesting than indulging into one's vices or immediately yet falsely rewarding consumption, which is what the new Internet-backed face of consumerist capitalism excels at providing.
A lot of Internet leisure now occupies many hours a day, and gets placed at the same level as work and duties, instead of being considered as one way of occupying one's free time, so now the free time seems to be only starting after all this leisure consumption has be done, thus it appears extremely reduced.
I have a ton of time and energy, and I'm still hooked. I implemented a bunch of countermeasures, but I'm still not in control. I don't think that the lack of alternatives is entirely to blame.
My attention has collapsed in recent times, but it's not because of mobiles. It's because I have three young kids. You literally have to keep your eye on them at all times so you stop them killing themselves.
Also, going from 8 hrs of sleep a night + 1 hr of intensive sport a day to 4-5 hrs of sleep a night and 1 hr of sport a year is an absolute mind killer.
When I was younger I could never imagine going into management, as I'm "not a multitasker". Turns out all I needed to do was to never focus on anything for more than 1 minute..
I would say that your attention has improved rather than collapsed, it is now again focused on the real world around you instead of on a virtual window into a world that isn't really there.
I'm talking about during work. I work from home and the covid restrictions here (NL) mean that I've had the kids at home an average of two days a week. I also have a high pressure + important job (the NL COVID apps the last 6-7 months one of the key technical people driving the EU-DCC and other vaccination credentials).
I've had to stop coding because of it; finally admitted defeat (I love coding) and have essentially 10x'd my effectiveness. So there's that.
Before COVID my screen time with the kids was when sitting waiting for them to go to sleep, or feeding during the night (or staying up with them).
For me it was exact same. Even when kids were safe, they wanted my attention approximately every 10 minutes. That destroyed my attention span quite seriously.
It got back after a while and effort, but social media were not to blame.
This 100x! I am in the same boat, ours are 4 and 2. I recently installed rings and a super sturdy pull up bar next to the kids room and hope to do some basic calisthenics there with the kids before putting them to bed. Wish me luck. So far they really like it and I get at least a mini-workout out of it. Nothing like an hour at a real gym, but better than nothing.
Yes, that hits the system. I was more or less back to normal then got a second round :( But this time recovery was swift, no more than a week or two, the only thing remaining is the cough.
> 1 hr of intensive sport a day to 1 hr of sport a year
did you make this tradeoff by choice( vs religious reasons ect) . I've never been that active but you sound like someone who enjoyed sports and being active.
As a parent with a 3 and 4 year old who was only a functional adult if I worked out intensely at least 4 days per week, and now is struggling desperately to get that back, its not by choice. Children are just really demanding. I think a big part of the problem is that humans were not meant to raise children in isolated family units. You were meant to have a small village where they could go bother different adults and older children and learn from everyone to find a little niche for them, and everyone just kind of kept an eye on the kids so that the parents could do normal survival things like cook, work, and make.
They used to die in accidents a lot more then now. They used to be independent significantly sooner too. Like, 5 years olds herding gooses next to river with no adult independent.
COVID. I've also been working 80hr weeks for nearly two years now; first building the NL Contact Tracing (GAEN) app and then building the EU and NL vaccination credential systems. Both of which I'm proud of - our work saved lives - and it's worth having a couple of hectic years.
Honestly it wouldn't have been much different if I had been on a normal project; with the COVID measures the kids were at home (so no day sport) and by the time they're asleep the gym is closed. We moved during COVID - I even built my house gym - but it's covered in boxes which we've not had time to sort out (and they're from my wife's crap, so I can't touch them).
My wife owns a group of pharmacies and has been as busy as I have been - they've been running on emergency mode for almost two years, same thing as in most of the medical industry.
Fuck man, me too. I've heard that this is just a phase that passes, but some days I think that I'm never going to be able to go back to being able to focus for 12+ hours a day.
One thing I believe to be true: If you have a device near you, there is no amount of habit or self control you can enact to change the habits of using that device. The same with the type of device. If a device has internet capabilities, no amount of self control or habit forming will make you only use the reading app on that device. You will always lose the habit at some point.
A requirement for changing habits is changing the physical world. Picking a device with no internet browsing capabilities, like an e-reader or a physical book. Or going for a walk where you physically don't have your phone. Even putting a phone in the next room isn't enough, you have to be somewhere where you physically can't access the phone.
Humans are not capable of fixing attention habits in which the physical world is set up to make it feasible to lose your attention.
> A requirement for changing habits is changing the physical world.
James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits [0][1], explaining that to break a bad habit, you must invert the first law of good habits ("Make it Obvious") so that the bad habit is "invisible". To do this, as you say, you must change your environment: "Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment."
Ad blockers and other such tools are just as essential for ADHD users as ramps are for wheelchair users. Their continued existence and unhindered operation should be legally protected.
Google's plans to take away this last line of defence are absolutely disastrous, especially for people who lack the knowledge or means to implement and maintain workarounds.
It is physically impossible on a biochemical or neurological level for us ADHD invalids to ignore whatever it is that triggers us. Removing these potential triggers as much as possible is therefore essential to prevent/reduce disorder-specific self-harmful behaviour, and to get anything done on today's internet.
Ads are only a part of it. Most news sites push ideological views as the core content. Most social media push memes and consumerism and conspiracies as the core content. Ad blockers do nothing for the deeper rot in the system
Consider what this does to opinion and independent thinking.
Most attention grabbing platforms are designed to use a variety of reward mechanisns to reinforce the politics of the platform.
Some easily botted platforms (like reddit) will constantly bombard people with anti-civilizational content promoting "anti-work" or very toxic identity politics that further isolates the users, and, in turn, strengthens their addiction to reddit because they will have no friends or family.
I wonder if the platforms are complicit in this or if they are passively incompetent and this terribleness is just being exacerbated by foreign adversaries trying to poison western dialogues and minds.
Absolutely agree. I see anecdotal evidence of this everywhere. Its most noticicble with people who spend a lot of time "online" browsing placing like twitter, reddit, and tiktok (or even older folks who watch too much "mainstream" cable tv news). They tend to hold derivative and thoughtless "stock" worldviews that are clearly directly borrowed from the feed they subscribe to and not a result of deciding for themselves how they think things based on their lived experiences or research. This is as much a "liberal" problem (e.g. Capitalism is bad) as it is a "conservative" one (e.g. Universal healthcare is communism).
A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.
We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.
The anti-work content on reddit should be analyzed by the feds a bit. It is promoting illegal sabotage of workplaces much of the time.
It is also very similar to an organic movement from China that got banned and censored just before it suddenly became a top three thread on reddit every day for all of this year.
I suspect movements and divisions that are studied and analyzed in (adversarial nation) are then exported, translated, and weaponized by their information warriors.
What I have noticed about anti-work is that the insane opinions are amplified and encouraged. They promote and advocate for digital sabotage of your own work places.
This all has numerous effects down stream that would slightly benefit an adversary.
Have you considered that there are just a lot of people whose work lives are so horrible (because they don't have cushy tech jobs for example) that they might completely and utterly despise the work-worshipping society we live in? Many Americans, let alone people in poorer places, are forced to work like dogs, often under inhumane conditions, for compensation that barely earns them a dignified standard of living. It's a far simpler explanation than believing there must be some coordinated effort to topple America via propaganda on a little subreddit. Sometimes the lack of empathy shown by commenters on hackernews with the living conditions of their fellow humans is really jarring to me.
The sentiment exists in every society because society and civilization is always hierarchical.
That is the root of a simple division that a coordinated state actor will exacerbate, amplify, meme-ify, and repeatedly upvote with bot armies.
Taking as fact that social media platforms program the brain of their users via dopamine rushes obtained through the upvotes, likes, and user engagement. Thus and therefore we can conclude that this is the easiest attack vector in the history of state versus state psychological warfare.
Adversaries use benign divisions as a tool to cause discord. This has always been the case, but social media is a tool that has been weaponized to tremendous effect and now you can see it being leveraged as a weapon by simply opening Reddit and seeing what divisive was botted to the top.
Maybe you refuse to believe this is happening and you assume this is all a paranoid fiction. That is fine. How then do you explain the legions of PHDs and psych researchers and language experts working at Chinese and Russian information warrior farms and leveraging machine learning empowered bot identity generators? Do you just assume Russia and China are pissing money away?
>This is as much a "liberal" problem (e.g. Capitalism is bad) as it is a "conservative" one (e.g. Universal healthcare is communism).
Bingo.
>A particularly striking example for me recently was when I happened to compare the content on my TikTok feed to the content on my 60 year old parents. There were completely different sets of propaganda being peddled to both of us that were essentially incompatible with each other.
This is kinda scary and makes me glad I've never had a TikTok account. Also kinda makes me think that you and your parents shouldn't have one either. But hey, "to each their phone"...
>We are all drowning in so much propaganda on these platforms its almost impossible to separate fact from fiction or to find a perspective that has the proper level of nuance. Its no wonder everyone is so divided.
Isn't that the way ""they"" want it though? Divide and conquer? So busy fighting each other that we can't see the real enemy? Or is that just some crazy shit I picked up somewhere?
Of the platforms you listed, I only have a Reddit account. And I don't consider it to be "the same" as a TikTok account, but I think I understand what you mean.
Yes, I understand that everyone is grabbing for my attention, it's just that some companies do let the users have a little bit more autonomy or agency. Eg; sure, Twitter can be a cesspool, but AFAIK they don't have 'streaks' where you get a dopamine hit for signing on every day or messaging with your friends every day. (That's an example of a thing I'm pretty sure exists on either TikTok or SnapChat. Like I said, I'm not a user of those platforms.)
Further, I would add, it seems pretty scarey that many of the platform leaderships trend toward thinking toxicity in the leftwing direction is somehow not bad or censorable due to some absurd logical fallacy of victimhood hierarchies and such that allow leftist groups to claim their toxicity isnt toxic because they are "victims".
Anyone who doesn't just have a kneejerk reaction based on the name realizes antiwork is actually more against the exploitation of workers and/or the planet than against work. Calling it "anti-civilizational" demonstrates that you either have no understanding of it, or worse that you're trying to discredit the movement through intentional lies and manipulation.
As for the possibility that the movement is being bolstered by some foreign nation for nefarious purposes, maybe. I have only checked it semi-regularly in the first half of 2021 and it wasn't that popular then, whereas I often see it on the frontpage nowadays. However, even if that was the case, it doesn't mean that the sentiments at the heart of it aren't genuine. Rebellion against capitalism's unsustainability has been a long time coming.
I think it's more about existential crisis than electronics. People don't have focus because they don't have focus in their life. They drift along the trend and only have occasional focus when it is forced upon them (e.g. deadline tomorrow morning). They don't really need focus, IMHO, because most of the things they work on don't require that. Social media and other things just feed them the phantasy that they are "focused" and "have something meaningful to do". I kinda agree a previous commenter that there will always be entertainment (and those entertainment are trained to grab your attention) around and removing some from us won't fix.
I also found that lack of energy plays a role. Whenever dealing with a difficult topic (e.g. studying something difficult), my energy level drops fast and in maybe 20-30 minutes it's totally gone and I cannot force my eye balls to fall on the reading material any more.
As mentioned in another comment, I believe I also fell victim of "juggling", whenever I'm learning online (i.e. without a book), I tend to multitask if the material is not very challenging (i.e. does not need focus). That brings me the conclusion that modern web learning platforms such as edX and modern course designers tend to simplify/gamify the material by cutting the material into very small chunks (most of the videos are sub-5 minutes). I would like to fall back to the traditional learning experience in which we read physical books, working on real electronic components and have to make appointments to ask questions (or grind in library for hours, even days for one single issue).
This is a major reason why I am bearish about online learning. I do love the accessibility of MOOCs, but I have to watch the videos multiple times to deeply understand the concepts, and I have to print out the assignments in order to really play with the ideas and solve them in a way that makes me grow. I prefer whenever possible to buy books. I'm not a bibliophile; I just do MUCH better when the target of my attention can't throw alerts at me or show me ads.
I know someone who claims to be a visual learner because he prefers video tutorials. But I say to him: no, I like pictures too, but what I can’t stand about videos is the person talking. I want to be able to scan things at my own (varying) pace, my mind wanders when listening to a single voice talk about something. I struggled with university lectures because of this. But I’ve learnt a lot from podcasts and have been an avid listener since ~2005 but only for ones where it’s a conversation between at least 2 people. I’ve tried and failed audiobooks due to it just being a single narration.
I often wonder what the world would be like if the Buddhist sciences of the mind (e.g. mindfulness) were taught at all levels of society, as a priority, and TFA mentions it near the end, to say it's not enough:
> Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.
I'd argue the 'attention stealing' -- the 'itching powder', as the article called it -- is all in your head. It does exist, concretely, of course, in the form of social media, video games, etc. but their power over you -- the itchiness -- is something I find is seen for what it is through mindfulness. If we teach people proper control over their own minds, we put the power in their hands to evaluate new technologies and services mindfully.
I would sooner fight for teaching proper mental hygiene to people than trying to regulate every possible idea under the sun (as it suggests at the end). You DO own your own mind, as TFA says at the very end -- so take control of it!
I've done a bunch of Buddhist trainings, 10-day retreats and such and, for me at least, the saying "no plan survives contact with the enemy" seems to apply. I've yet to be able to carry what I've learned forward into a modern lifestyle. I'm able to keep some amount of discipline for around 2ish weeks following my period of isolation from the world, but I eventually find screen time and work pressures overwhelming my ability to resist. I get the feeling that meditation is an artisanal solution to an industrial problem. And teaching people to survive in a dysfunctional society rather than addressing that dysfunction directly isn't the right way to deal with it.
10 minutes of meditation, consistently & properly performed once or twice a day over time does a lot more good than any temporary boost like a retreat. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Venerable Henepola Gunaratana says:
> When you first start meditation, once a day is enough. If you feel like meditating more, that's fine, but don't overdo it. There's a burn-out phenomenon we often see in new meditators. They dive right into the practice fifteen hours a day for a couple of weeks, and then the real world catches up with them. They decide that this meditation business just takes too much time. Too many sacrifices are required. They haven't got time for all of this. Don't fall into that trap. Don't burn yourself out the first week. Make haste slowly. Make your effort consistent and steady. Give yourself time to incorporate the meditation practice into your life, and let your practice grow gradually and gently.
The way 'mindfulness' is taught and the business of retreats and training gets in the way of the real work, which takes place every day and in normal life, a little at a time. It doesn't need to be complicated.
I'm sure every blue collar worker and mother of two has the time and temperament to sign up to the Bene Gesserit school
It's amazing how far the ideology of the unfettered market economy has seeped into our lives to the point that the idea that we should retrain the entire human species to fend off media manipulation seems somehow more practical than simply putting an end to the unethical business practices of an industry.
Imagine if a local company was pouring waste into the river and someone argued the solution was to offer anti-poison resilience training rather than stopping the problem at the source.
'Bene Gesserit school'? How hyperbolic. I am talking like 10-15 minutes of meditation a day. I used to do it in the break room for 10-15 minutes twice a day while working at Walmart or elsewhere. It is no issue at all. I'm not sure what you have in mind that would be more complicated than that!
> retrain the entire human species to fend off media manipulation
Mindfulness assisting in opening one's eyes to media manipulation is just one of the benefits, not the only one. There are many benefits to teaching it to all.
One way that would really help achieve better mental hygiene for the masses would be if we had some sort of sensors that could detect when a person’s attention is being diverted away from the task at hand, and remind them to refocus. A person could then see a sort of screen time type summary of how long they are being productive and when they are wasting time on mindless garbage. Perhaps even employers could provide bonuses to those workers who maintain the highest productivity times, which over time would encourage people to improve their mindfulness in day to day life.
I wouldn't mind knowing more. Do you have any links to research or work in progress in this area?
The Buddha had a lot of great ideas, but it was over 2000 years ago. If, perhaps, we can teach mindfulness in a way that is more consistent and available to all (like a focus-detection feature in devices), I would definitely support it if it results in the same changes in the brain. Since changes induced by meditation (both acute and long-term) are detectable with brain scans, this seems like something easy to test and compare with traditional mindfulness teachings and practices.
> One way that would really help achieve better mental hygiene for the masses would be if we had some sort of sensors that could detect when a person’s attention is being diverted away from the task at hand, and remind them to refocus.
I suspect that no, constant nagging wouldn't improve “mental hygiene”, in any useful definition of that term.
I also suspect it wouldn’t improve productivity, only stress.
I’d recommend anyone try going a week with zero phone apps or TV. You will be surprised not only by how strong the habits are, but also by how strong they are in others. Its puts a depressing focus on how much time people around you spend mindlessly scrolling on their phones while you hang out.
I have an ex who was so hooked on instagram that she would even pull it up to browse during red lights driving. We can’t handle downtime anymore without our phones.
I have experienced it and it's truly crazy. However, it's hard to decouple the addictive parts from the useful parts. I use my phone as a book, calculator and map, among others.
Doomscrolling caused by "engagement" metrics. When engagement is all that matters, the most engagement comes when people are divisive, mad/angry or even pushed to extremes. That tabloid-esque reactionary content does engage people, but not in a good way. Information of all types give a dopamine hit though and it is sometimes hard to pull away.
When you feel yourself getting bothered, angry and you have to prove someone wrong on the internet, step away. Or if you are wasting too much time on it. You are taking valuable time from your own projects and quality of life.
People can have different opinions and that is ok, your ideas and opinions are what make you, see that as your unique tool to success. On top of that many "organic opinions" are actually astroturfing and PR designed to promote or get you to "engage".
>When you feel yourself getting bothered, angry and you have to prove someone wrong on the internet, step away. Or if you are wasting too much time on it. You are taking valuable time from your own projects and quality of life.
Everyone, please do this. Time is basically the only resource you can't get more of.
I had a dream last night that expressed my recent concern that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are Pied Pipers leading our kids into virtual worlds where Meta controls everything including allowable expression and thought, where even certain concepts are banned with no allowable word for them [1]. My concern is that kids are getting VR headsets and going to a place where there is no parental control because adults don't understand VR or how to join their kids there. In my dream, and unseen voice is telling a young brother and sister how to secretly steal money from their grandparents and send it to them.
> kids are getting VR headsets and going to a place where there is no parental control because adults don't understand VR or how to join their kids there
Sounds like early social media. Hanging out without parents was the crucial feature.
I’m 34 now and having parents on social media still feels like an odd concept
I had to ask myself why VR was different and it's because there's no screen that a parent can monitor. Once a child puts the glasses on, who knows where they go are where they are? I think parents will demand a screencast feature built in so they can at least watch what their kids are doing.
> … It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly…
Oh. Have I missed “the flow”.
I have been trying to get back into the mode from a while, with lot of self doubt in mind, “ you are just lazy”, “you are too distracted by Twitter “, “were you like this all along”..
It hit me hard when I realised that.. it’s been a decade and I still not able to achieve this.
I'm glad that the article specified that individual effort is important. Too often, people act as if a collective solution is exclusive of the ability to improve your personal situation in the meanwhile (this accounts for probably 95% of usage of the term "victim-blaming" that I see online, including on HN)
But I'm also a strong believer that raw willpower is a poor substitute for a supportive environment. I've had great results the last 15 years from identifying rough edges in my computing workflows and sanding them off with scripts and OS tweaks. Between the rise of the Internet attention ecosystem and my own higher bar for focus as I get older, more and more of this iteration loop has been consumed by optimizations to improve focus and prevent distraction. "Automating willpower" like this has borne some pretty fantastic results when it comes to my ability to focus and thus both my productivity and mental health.
Sadly, most people don't use a proper general-purpose OS like a Linux distro[1], and are locked out of the ability to change much of their environment. Mobile devices remain a stubborn challenge: While I'm considering getting back into rooting my devices after a decade, this is a pretty poor substitute for a proper OS, so I'm also trying to build habits that shift usage from my phone to my laptop.
In the event that you haven't tried scripting up guardrails against attention hazards (or are still using an OS that prohibits you from using your computer fully), I strongly recommend taking a serious look at this approach.
[1] I'm explicitly excluding Windows due to my familiarity with the severe limitations it puts on the user, all smartphone OSes are the most egregious offenders, and my familiarity with OS X is lower but I gather that it falls between Windows and a Linux distro in terms of how much it babies/limits the user.
Good stuff, really. I like the analogy between sugar, fat, salt and information, though infotainment may be a better term for the stuff we are addicted to.
Yes, just as some cultures have very specific meanings for concepts (like the famous German compound words, or the variety of words the native Inuit language uses to describe types and formations of snow), we should probably develop more specific words than just the generic all-encompassing “information” or “data”.
Infotainment is a good one, but we will need many more!
Yes, this. Humans as a race have evolved to be able to short-cut our own motivational and behavioural control systems. Or more precisely, for one group to manipulate anothers' motivators to serve the interests of the manipulator rather than the party served by those factors.
Wants are a means to an end. They are not the end itself. That is, wants are evolutionarily-derived (or sometimes culturally-instilled) drives or motivators which should result in improved fitness.
Think of these in terms of emotional drives, tastes and our responses to them, favouring aesthetics (symmetry, balance, smoothness, etc.) Those evolved in an environment which was itself not counterevolving to feed those drives faster than they could emerge.
That's not to say that there isn't co-evolution occurring: fruits, say, evolve to be sweet to attract animals which will eat it and spread seeds. But *there is no "fruit sector" specifically engineering high-sugar fruits with a response cycle of days or weeks or months. Even human breeders typically take years or decades, and natural selection generally takes much longer.
Motivators evolved to find things in the environment which improved overall fitness.
"Give them what they want" is engineering rapidly to appeal to psychological behaviours in ways that exploit them specifically to the interests of the engineer. (Or more likely: the investors / shareholders / VC behind them.)
If you're gaming the want itself directly, you lose the argument that what you're providing is at the choice of the target, because you've coopted that choice to your own interests.
Very insightful response. Taking your fruit analogy further - some fruit evolved to be poisonous to mammals because birds spread their seeds further.
Also liked the manipulation point you made. It’s why you have things from the 20th century like soda companies and McDonalds and all the other organizations just “giving people what they want”.
Now in the 21st century we have Facebook, Instagram and the like similarly low-level poisoning people.
The marketing excuse has long bothered me, though it took me years to put my finger on just what the issue was. The Mastodon thread linked above is where I first articulated it.
I'm aware of some similar work and concepts (especially "paradox of choice" research), but nothing as yet that lands close to what I've come up with. I've got a few feelers out for any possible earlier work.
If there is an extant similar concept, I'd love to hear of it.
(If anyone comes across this later, email me, HN username at protonmail.)
This is why I think we should ban ads on the internet. Ads are inextricably tied to the abuse of our attention; they turn attention into money.
Ads shift the incentive away from providing value, replacing it with an incentive to consume our time. I think all currently ad-driven platforms would be less harmful with a donation or subscription model.
Not to say such a ban is the perfect solution, but I think it is 75% there.
I've avoided smartphone ownership successfully since the beginning, as I feared my own addictive tendencies would have me paying attention to it instead of the world.
Even without a smartphone, however... there are things that I got sucked into while being a system administrator with far too much time to surf. It's now apparent to me that I need to schedule time for myself with no computer in the same room.
> wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.
I don't think this is the most accurate analogy.
The most attention draining parts of the web/internet are some kind of social platform. I needn't list them, you know what they are... they are not analogous to air. Perhaps they seem that way when you've fully integrated them into your life, but they are not.
Keep your phone, your laptop, and keep the tools you need to create and work. But whatsface and spacechat are not part of that toolkit, those types of platforms are psychological crack cocaine.
Taking a full break from all tech can be good, but when you return to it, make sure you delete those accounts or uninstall those apps. Don't worry about friends, the ones that count will be happy to communicate with you through less toxic channels - the rest aren't really your friends anyway.
Social media --- those site which we don't need to name because we all know what they are --- surround us socially. I don't use the F, or the T, or the IG, or the YT, or the TT. But I sure as heck live in the world they create. In most of the West they've permeate politics and culture. It's often difficult to engage with businesses, or governments, or your own job, without having a presence on these systems. And in parts of the world they've played a major role in insurrection, revolution, and genocide. Sometimes celebrated for that role, increasingly looked on with a sense that something's gone horrifically wrong.
So no, disconnecting personally is not the solution.
I think you're correct to point out they indirectly affect us all through their impact on society as a whole.
However what I meant (but failed to say explicitly), is that it is unlike breathing air (which is impossible to avoid), because partaking in these platforms personally is still optional for most people in the world - Maybe it's different in the US but you certainly don't need any of it for your job or government purposes in the UK and I expect most of the EU, and of course none of the east.
In the case of breathing (or not) air, wearing a particulate mask or VoC respirator is an option. It's expensive and marks one in public, of course.
In the case of social media, the exposure equivalent is the fact that much other normal intercourse --- social conversation, behaviours in public (as detailed in detail in TFA), and references in media, news or journalism (to the extent these still exist), in the form of trackers which appear on the present Internet, offline tracking through purchase and surveillance mechanisms which also feed into the attention-diversion, manipulation, and advertising machine, etc., etc.
And again, I assure you, for an increasing number of organisations, businesses, and institutions, the unspoken assumption is that social media use is normalised --- for communications, advertising, often for commerce, and again, with website trackers and data feeds through offline interactions.
It is weird to me that someone can watch their kid (I know that this is a godparent) go down this path and not intervene. If the cause of dropping out really was distraction, it is sad that the parent didn't take the device from the child. The kid's parents paid for this conduit monthly.
I had that discussion this week end. I wonder if it will be any different from our Game boys? Or is the problem that smaller children get their hands on them?
I think there are two main factors that are different (not necessarily in order):
* companies can much more easily weaponize their services and tailor them to get individuals addicted, than individual video games ever could. And the feedback loop happens much faster.
* it was easier to moderate video games, because they had a single purpose: entertainment. since you can be in a device for any number of reasons: gaming, studying, catching up, reading,... and _everyone_ is on their devices _all the time_ (both kids and parents), it's much harder to establish good boundaries.
I grew up in the 90s. At least in my part of the US, Gameboys were pretty damn rare; I only knew a couple people who had them, and they didn't play them often, in part because AA batteries were rare and precious commodities for children.
Ye probably. I looked into what Nintendo does nowadays and luckely they seem to have not ditched their anachronistic cartridge design, even though there seem to be internet stores built in into "New 3DS". I guess they are opt in.
I want a digest system for notifications on my phone.
This used to be common for mailing lists and web forums with email notification systems. I could get an email daily or weekly with the replies to my posts and subscriptions instead of real-time. The temptation to poll manually was reduced because I knew I'd be notified eventually.
I want to be able to tell my phone to do the same with its notifications, preferably with fine-grained control. For messaging apps, it would be extra nice if the sender could mark a suggested priority so I could let certain people I trust not to abuse the privilege interrupt me when they think it's urgent enough.
iOS 15 added something like what you are describing called Scheduled Summary. Notifications are snoozed and delivered at set times throughout the day (twice per day is the default). I believe there is also an API for developers of messaging apps to allow notification privilege escalation.
I had to read the whole thing to make sure I didn't miss anything.
You don't need to read this article, it's adding nothing new to the conversation except for a whole bunch of "i'm so smart, use my wisdom" type stories dotted neatly around the "i don't like that i'm getting old" lamentation going on.
> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky
Who gives us a toss what some scientists say? What does the friggen data say?
Is this really what passes for higher tier journalism these days? Pathetic
I would appreciate it if everyone commenting here would disclose any affiliations with companies whose business models depend on maintaining the environment described in the article. Thanks.
Return yourself to the 1990s: Keep your mobile phone plugged in at all times when at home. Make it like a home phone line - turn on phone / texting notifs and disable all else. If you want to / need to check it, force yourself to walk to it to see that text or look something up. Print out things you need (like recipes, etc). Similarly, dock your laptop, and keep it docked when at home.
Not 100% possible, but it is a way to try and reduce the temptation to always check.
I've been doing 100% full stack while bootstrapping my current project for the past year and a half. So basically doing absolutely everything alone.
It's really exhausting and progress is extremely slow. It's not a matter of skill or knowledge as I've been doing design, front end, and general programming for 20 years. At first I thought it was because I was on my own, so the workload was tripled, but then realized a major factor is really the cognitive cost of having it all in my mind. The db, the platform, the backend logic, the API, the frontend code, the design, the UX, etc.
Now I try to not work on the whole thing at once. I focus on the backend for a couple of days, then on the front end for a couple of days, etc. This works, but there are many times where something doesn't work as expected and I need to switch between multiple projects (front, API, some other service, etc) during the same hour.
I really don't have a solution to this problem, but I wanted to share my experience. Hopefully someone who has been doing this juggling has some wisdom to share.
Hire a contractor or junior dev. Even if they aren't good at what they do, the very act of waking up in the morning to have a check-in and answer questions will motivate you.
Most solo devs/founders don't do this because they feel that an employee will only slow them down and degrade the quality of the product. However, this isn't true. You will wake up more motivated every day, learn about communicating needs, and you will often receive very important feedback (like when a feature makes no sense).
If you can't afford to pay a junior dev (even off-shore), you should assess your business strategy because this means you are likely to be financially precarious or dangerously risky
This is very familiar to me, I've been trying to use some strategies to limit cognitive load to mixed success.
The most effective thing has just been taking better notes. If i know i take good notes, and i write something down and know i will go back and read it, my brain knows it's "allowed" to forget about it, and that greatly lessons the load. Sounds obvious and simple but sometimes it's not obvious that spending time to write down a mix of both really basic and really complicated stuff can make it so much easier to get stuff done.
This is the key for me, but I've never heard anyone else talk about it. It feels like I need to get it out of my brain and somewhere else or my brain's 'ram' is full. I'm not sure if its mental of there is some physiological phenomenon going on there, but it really works for me.
Documentation would be a part of it but not really what im talking about. First step would be learning to recognize the thoughts that keep buzzing around in your head, like if are frequently noticing that you keep thinking "I gotta do X, which requires me to do Y, and this is how i should do Y but im not sure about Z and whether or not i do Z or Y first so now im thinking about how i should do Z".
Then those things need to get offloaded to some kind of note system. Just a text file can work, or a doc, or a paper notebook... It's good to write down the things you need to do, but also anything important about how you wanted to do them, or any inter-depencies you might forget about if you "offload" them now. Any thoughts you are 100% confident you can regenerate trivially dont get written down.
Once you have them stored, you need to mentally recognize that you no longer need to think about those things. It's kind of vague but thats the best i got. Then all the space it was taking up is free, and you're free to focus in on something more specific.
I've gone through a similar process. For me what you described of splitting it into the tangible parts helped a lot - I'd spend a week just working on the back-end and then a week on the front-end and vice-versa. Was hard to context switch between the two (especially as my back-end is usually python and front-end is usually a flavor of JS).
I spend a lot of time designing the thing I am trying to build to be spread-out vs built-on-top. This way, I have a big list of fun and interesting problems to solve, after which comes the gluing them back together for the prestige.
In reality, it never quite works out that way - but I still maintain it is a good way to start. Like many have said, it is essential to identify the path by which you multiply engineering as demanded by the needs of the thing you are building.
Many projects can keep that factor to 1, but it has to be about the love of doing it, not the outcome. The minute the outcome is more important, hire, scale and delegate!
Why would you try to "keep it all in your mind?"
Document. Wiki. Code comments. Good commit messages. Etc.
Use a task/issue tracker. Whether that is a text file, Trello, or whatever. Track progress.
> What I meant is that when working on certain features you will need to understand it all to implement it.
That's more or less true regardless if you're soloing a project or on a team. Depending on the design. It's true, you do sometimes, for a period of time, have to keep several things in your head at the same time, but how the code base, class, function, or whatever, is structured, can increase or lessen this cognitive load. There's many ways to skin this cat. Generally you shouldn't have to keep more in your head than the current module. It's all about encapsulation. Do you need to understand just the interface, or the implementation as well? That's your choice, as far as how you design your codebase, since you're a solo dev.
"There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works." (Simone Weil, Waiting for God)
I feel my attention at work has gotten worse, the ability to focus has decreased. Sure, part of it is caused by my phone (gotta keep the music/background noise going oh and might as well glance at reddit) but ALOT of it is being a senior engineer.
It is my place to be asked questions throughout the day and I'd rather be asked questions than not. It takes me out of the zone and Sometimes it feels as though my mind is juggling 3+ tasks at once because of the questions I've been asked. I've learned through interaction with reality that some programmers need a bit more guidance when it comes to tasks, some will dig down the correct paths, some will dig down the incorrect paths, and some will just stop and wait for help (which is ok). I feel that at times I've done a poor job of guiding some people.
There have been days where I might actually start work on my individual tasks 5-6 hours into the day and staying late after everyone leaves is key to getting back in the zone and solving a problem.
The internet has given us opportunities to connect with one another like never before. Yet, most sites we use today have barely tapped that potential. We believe in the power of well-designed tools to improve people's lives and bring about positive social change. They are characterized by five main aspects:
Time:
Instead of priding ourselves on how much time people spend in our apps, we want people to get in, get out, and get results.
Utility:
Help people get things done in the real world, rather than building an online persona.
Notifications:
Let people control which updates they receive about things happening in their life, instead of getting them addicted to notifications like a slot machine.
Organic:
In every context, pre-compute useful information and present it to the user, enabling them to do more in less steps.
Business Model:
Make money by helping people accomplish useful things as a group, not just by selling advertising.
I suffer from severe ADHD, and the only thing that has helped me is a better understanding of my personal dopamine production. I follow a TikToker who talks about his ADHD in terms of "follow the dopamine." It reminds me of the montessori programs, where you let the brain decide what it wants to do.
Allowing my brain to follow the dopamine - essentially auto rotate when attention goes off the rails - has finally helped me to implement some of the other ADHD tricks. All that to say, I think dopamine plays a significant role in attention and wish this article explored that a little. Social media is a dopamine spike. I think it's why we swipe, we're in a Skinner Box of sorts. Swipe. Reward. Swipe. Reward...
A few years ago Matthew Crawford wrote a fantastic book about this, "Head The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction". I recommend it every chance I get. The part that changed how I feel about these things for ever was about how the slot machine companies have been rigorously testing how to make them maximally addictive to the point that it's now normal for players in casinos to piss themselves and just keep playing.
Psychologically addictive substances are real, and they can be digital, and they can wreck our lives just as well as psychologically addictive drugs.
I already claimed my attention back. I did this by removing stupid media companies from my life. I did this by learning about "The Propaganda Multiplier". The Guardian is part of "The Propaganda Multiplier". The Guardian is a media company controlled by cut-throat oligarchs. It does not have independent journalists who investigate corrupt politicians deeply. It only has sellouts promoting corporate interests while keeping predators in power.
I feel like the biggest evidence for the "moral panic" side of the debate is that the article never actually gets around to making the argument that attention spans were longer in the past. "We can see the effects all around us. A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds." - how can we evaluate this without knowing how long they focused 25 or 50 years ago?
> “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.”
This sounds very similar to multi-threaded programming :-)
One of my antidotes to this: I perform large-scale musical works! The Bach St. Matthew Passion takes around three hours. Messiah is nearly that long. The flow state from performing or rehearsing these works is really quite wonderful.
Reading (books, not short articles) a lot also helps, I believe.
I find it ironic that the right sidebar of the guardian site has a "Most Viewed" list of articles constantly calling my attention away from the main article. As I scroll down, the list of "Most Viewed" articles follow...
I’m curious to know what percent of people read this article in one go, without checking social media or other interruptions. (I tried to do so but small children make uninterrupted work even harder…)
It's become more clear to me that pushing content based on past content consumption promotes harmful effects to both individuals and to society.
The data collection needed to provide such feedback is inherently prone to privacy violations and exposes safety risks (see what China is doing to monitor social media activity.) Secondly, these feedback algorithms can pull people into echo chambers of disinformation and amplify all sorts of negative feelings and behavior.
Not sure throwing more technology and regulation at the problem is a solution. In the end it will probably require a social shift; a realization that "social media" makes us less social at a deep level while providing the illusion of being social. Paying attention to the person in front of you used to be considered polite. Now it's considered old-fashioned?
I built a news app (The Factual) that sends only 1 notification per day for a morning briefing. And the newsfeed is consolidated by topic so that you can easily finish browsing what's newsworthy. The app has a small subscription and zero ads so we don't care how long you view or what you click on. I don't know if we'll succeed but trying to solve this problem.
I believe that once we reach a post-scarcity phase of civilization, the attention of other human beings will be the last, zero-sum scarce resource. And the competition over it will be no less intense and brutal than historical conflicts over the basics of life.
> I believe that once we reach a post-scarcity phase of civilization
That may never happen.
> the attention of other human beings will be the last, zero-sum scarce resource
It doesn't have to wait for it to be last for that battle to get underway.
> And the competition over it will be no less intense and brutal than historical conflicts over the basics of life
Depending on where you live, you may already be there. It's the downside of the future not being equally distributed, you also get the downsides of that future early.
We were promised a future of replicators and starships where the zero-sum scarce resource of fame was given to explorers like Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
We were given a present of increasing inequality and supply chain shortages where internet thought leaders fight it out for likes, subscribes, and RT’s.
Now that is interesting... at what point would follower bots be as good as the real thing? Dogs are pretty good at paying attention to humans in a way most of us like after all, and a household robot can lead to a similar bonding experience. I wonder what the minimum is...
I agree with them.
It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mistake is thinking that the ability to concentrate on something non-entertaining is the baseline. One reason so many people think they have ADHD is because they make that mistake.
We had the same anxieties about radio and TV. Those anxieties were right and wrong. Technologies do change how people behave but it's always the same story. There will be entertainment freely available and you'll have to choose to concentrate on things that aren't entertaining that you consider worthwhile.