I know we love evidence, and rightly so. But I do think there is space here for intuition. Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted? Is a sunset through a lens ever as satisfying or heart wrenching as a real one? I know for sure that I’m happier, my wife is happier, my two teen kids are happier when we’re in the real world more of the time.
> Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?
Is a life engaging with rich virtual worlds ever going to be good as a real one, spent in the company of bitter old farts who just want to complain about things?
> Is a sunset through a lens ever as satisfying or heart wrenching as a real one?
Is a beautiful artist driven sunset scene more satisfying than your cloudy real life nothing over a boring looking town?
It's all relative. There are definitely cases where a technological interaction is better than a natural one.
> spent in the company of bitter old farts who just want to complain about things?
I'm sorry but this entire thread is a collection of various complaints. In fact I would argue that HN is nothing but an endless feed of people complaining about things.
The point wasnt to complain about anyones life, it was to show how OP's idea of "real world is better than virtual one" might not be as ubiquitous as he believes. For some, virtual worlds might be better than real ones.
You could say something similar about the news. Complaint can be extremely useful, if someone hears it and finds a solution.
Of course complaint can also be a really dumb waste of time, or even harmful. But few things beat the utility of the right complaint to the right audience.
HN being an endless feed of people complaining about things is no more meaningful about the entirety of the digital world than a bunch of grumpy old complainers are of all humanity.
Most people here are talking about technology as mindless browsing on social media feeds designed to psychologically trap human brains. That's objectively worse compared to any real experience, largely due to the intentional cognitive trickery behind it.
The technology you seem to be talking about ("virtual worlds", "artist driven sunset") seem to obtainable only by top-tier gaming hardware & artful games that 99.9% people will never use (it actually doesn't even exist yet in the ideal form right now)
> Is a life engaging with rich virtual worlds ever going to be good
But that's not the question, at all. It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?
The question I was responding to was "Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?". And the answer is obviously yes, because some people are shit, and some virtual content is great.
> It's: how does it affect mental health? One way of looking at it is: are we so social we need contact with a physical human being for certain aspects of our well being?
No I don't think that's a good way to look at it. By that metric anything that is not socializing with other physical human beings is equally bad. Reading a book is bad. Eating is bad. Showering is bad. The way you've phrased this question, you've assumed that digital content is so pervasive that you don't get enough physically present socializing, which isn't necessarily true to evaluate the question "does it affect our mental health?". If we're open to extreme cases, everything affects mental health. The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.
> The question you really want to be asking is "does it materially affect most peoples' mental heath?". Personally, I think the answer is no not really. Obviously it becomes a vice for some.
The real question is how would you know if it did?
Addiction thinking sounds a lot like self reflection too: “I’m not addicted, I just like it very much. I can stop at any time I want, I just don’t want to”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone who likes something is addicted. It is just the means of finding that out is pretty tricky, especially for hyper-normal stimulus like processed food, porn, cocaine or some bits of the internet.
We can’t infer our ways out of self-deception, if we could it wouldn’t be self-deception.
Hence the requirement of proper objective tooling to measure such effects on (mental) health.
Always keep in mind the technology evolves faster than the human. This means we live in a completely different environment from our ancestors while our brains are largely the same as theirs. Maybe the contact we have already is too much.
There is space for intuition, but the argument the author makes is that intuition is making a mistake here (as it often does). Namely that we think increased phone use is correlated with (or even causal for) negative mental health, but the data does not support this yet. The author thinks we don't have the data to support or debunk this because of poor measurements, and I agree with this. Maybe better, more nuanced measurement will prove a link. But it probably won't be as simple as more phone time == more mental health problems.
My intuition is often wrong, but it is undoubtably useful for me as an individual. But the intuition of crowds is bad. It is no substitute for randomised controlled trials, mendelian randomisation, or even cohort and observational studies. For public health policy I prefer to use evidence over intuition.
The intuition is not 100% accurate but it points you in the right direction for further inquiry. So in this case, maybe it’s not that the amount of screen time in general is causing the mental health issues but it’s constantly being tethered to social media on the phone.
Lots of social media isn't necessarily bad either. HN, a carefully-curated Twitter feed, or the right subreddit or web forum can be wonderfully mind-expanding. Without regrets, I have spent many hours reading and discussing things in these digital spaces.
My intuition is that the connection between digital environment and mental health will prove similar to the connection between family environment or school environment and mental health: the quality of the environment is overwhelmingly what matters, not how much time is spent in different environments.
I agree with everything you said, but device use ≠ mindless clicking, at least not necessarily. I actually think this highlights one of the main problems with this issue, which is that devices may encourage certain usage patterns and behavior that are harmful, but they may also promote some usage patterns that are healthful. We could probably learn a lot by examining in more detail how people are using devices and how those usage patterns correlate to outcomes.
I just finished How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell, and this was one of the big take-aways I got from the book. She's not advocating total digital detox - she's actually fairly critical of the idea. Her argument that it isn't how much you use devices, it's simply how you use devices.
That said she also pushes back against the idea of using things like notifications and gamification to try and mold our behavior. I'm kind of inclined to agree; my instinct is to say that this is a spot where the ends don't justify the means; encouraging addictive behavior patterns is still encouraging addictive behavior patterns.
>encouraging addictive behavior patterns is still encouraging addictive behavior patterns.
The companies using them know, and that's the goal. It's all intentional, and many companies have had many meetings over many years about it. For lack of a better term, they simply aren't good people safe for polite society, and their mission in life is to reduce the quality of your life. This they call "engagement."
People buy houses with these techniques. They like it when your kids have to yell "Mom!" 10 times because you want to finish that one level. Their bonuses depend on it.
Just for the sake of argument, what would you think of using notifications and gamification to get people to, say, work their way through trigonometry problems or foreign-language practice?
I turned off all the notifications I had to practice language. They happened at whatever time they happen, which is always when I'm in the middle of something else. What I do instead is, I have a certain time of day that I do my intensive study, because that takes a chunk of concentration time and was never going to happen unless I actually made time for it. And I get through my flashcards in little spurts; I just do 5 or ten of the whenever I have to wait a minute on a recompile or integration tests or wait on the microwave oven or whatever.
A good, effective habit is one that is internalized like that. I really don't think you can effectively replace it with an external interruption.
I especially see gamification as problematic for learning things. It seems to me to be a 21st century version of teaching to the test. You end up learning what's easy to gamify instead of what you should be learning. If that's literally the only way you can motivate yourself, I suppose you've got to do what you've got to do. But, if you will take for the sake of argument that learning a language is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself, my experience with Duolingo is that I got really good at using the language to earn achievements on Duolingo. My real goal, though, is using the language to read books and have conversations. So I've had much better results with (non-gamified) language learning methods where the reward for my work is getting to do the thing I actually want to do: reading books and having conversations.
Good answers. Conceivably notifications could be useful for someone who's unwilling/unable to schedule intensive study time; but in that case, that raises the question of why they're studying something they're not motivated to study, or why they lack organizational/planning capability; but there might be common cases where the adults say "fuck it, I'm not going to try to solve those underlying problems, I just want to make them learn this stuff in the short term"; but one might rightly say, this is short-sighted child-rearing for short-sighted people, and keep it the hell away from me and my kids.
There might remain a question of whether it's better than what's currently being done by the short-sighted. But if more humane approaches stand a chance of winning out, then it might be best to not give any support to the competition, and even discourage others from doing so. That type of conclusion one should hesitate to draw, but it might be right.
As for gamification, perhaps if you could gamify "reading books and having conversations"—but as you say, by default what you'll get is just what's easy to gamify.
Even if it's not harmful, I have absolutely no need for points and achievement badges for reading books and having conversations. The whole point of those sorts of activities is that they're not games. They have their own, different value they provide to my life. When I want a game, I'll play a game.
Wow, this is such a wonderful distinction. I am sorry I do not have anything to add on to your point, but I hope to bring your conclusion up in future conversations.
I think if we want to go down the intuition route, we should compare people who don't have a partner/kids and the kind of relationship (good or bad). Are you alone and happier on the device or the real world? Do you hate your partner and are happier on the device or the real world? Stuff like that.
Devices can offer escapes and distractions from bad situations and that might actually help your mental health.
However, if real life is good, escaping isn't what you want to do and probably isn't going to help your mental health.
I see your point and largely agree, but I think comparing sunsets and having a laugh with friends to endless drudging of clicking is a bit of an unfair comparison, as its taking the best of one side and the worst of the other. Perhaps a fairer comparison would be endless clicking versus standing in an endless queue at the supermarket.
At least in my experiences, the highs in the "real world" are much higher, but the lows are much lower. That doesnt mean you don't have highs or lows digitally, but they're not as extreme. Both my happiest and most depressing memories are from the real world.
I live in the mountains and you're absolutely correct that the digital world doesn't compare to the real world in many cases.
That being said, I have disconnected from technology for up to a year at a time and overall it's not better. Technology introduces a lot of convenience and can reduce the time we spend on a lot of mundane chores, clearing up more time to spend in the real world ultimately. In the end it's all about balance.
I see your point and I agree that there is often room for intuition for most real-world problems, but I'm not sure that you have a valid argument there: not everyone clicking does them mindlessly, and some people see a beautiful world through pixels.
At the end of the day, I guess the two are not mutually exclusive in the current context.
> I know we love evidence, and rightly so. But I do think there is space here for intuition. Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?
This 100%.
Some things you just know are bad news. No one feels good after several hours of late night doom scrolling. You don't need mountains of research to understand that spending ours on your device instead of in the world is bad for your well being.
The assumption that digital = doom-scrolling is illuminating. What we call "intuition" is often just a blinkered, haphazardly assembled pile of our recent experiences. This is precisely why data is considered real evidence in science and intuition isn't.
Intuition is nice, but it can send you in the wrong path.
A typical case is what to do when it's cold. Most people prefer to close all the windows and turn on the heating to prevent getting cold and catching the flu or a common cold. (That is a very confusing name.) But we know they are caused by virus, so it's better to keep the windows as open as possible and use warm cloth. (Unless there is a blizzard outside.)
Intuition is prone to all sort of biases. It is a powerful tool, but a dangerous one. Tread carefully.
As time passes, I have less and less confidence in other's intuitions. Why should other people trust mine?
I do spend a great part of my time on "devices" yet I am happy, see a lot of people, and I don't let devices interrupt me when I'm with people most of the time. I usually do not wander mindlessly on the web. The connection between time spent on devices and mental health is far from obvious, there's a lot more to this.
> Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted?
Maybe not but is that really the alternative? If we're allowed to use intuition then my intuition is that people haven't replaced this wholesome cliche of friendship with mindless clicking; they have replaced mindless TV with mindless clicking.
Watching a sunset is a privilege. A kid in a dense urban setting isn’t going to see a sunset. A kid in a third world village wouldn’t think twice about it in between all their other worries. Technologies and screens democratize access to ideas and knowledge of what could be. There was a golden era when every businessman wasn’t trying to game this system and it was beautiful. We don’t live in that era so screens seem bad. But screens were life altering and eye opening to a middle class kid in India. Not everyone Can afford to camp or trek or take a break year and honestly I’ve met a metric ton of people who have done all of that and I don’t want to spend a minute of my life around them. I have a feeling your instinct might not be accurate here.
>Watching a sunset is a privilege. A kid in a dense urban setting isn’t going to see a sunset.
I've seen many sunsets that people like to call "the best" sunset (sunsets at sea on a boat, on mountaintops, in deserts) and some of my favorite sunsets I've seen have actually been in urban areas. The reflections of glass and the sharp angles of the buildings can combine in beautiful ways. Obviously there are popular things like "Manhattanhenge" but if you just walk around and look for a nice angle, you can find something special in many cities. The haze and rough angles of poorer, industrial areas can play with the setting sun in beautiful ways.
>Not everyone Can afford to camp or trek or take a break year
I've hosted travelers on Couchsurfing and many of my guests had an income, when they were working, of a few dollars per day. They'd budget a pittance for food and plan to couchsurf and hitchhike their way through Europe - and they seem to have a great time doing it. Now, sure, I was in the Netherlands, so not everyone could visit if poor (visa issues keep out many poor countries, but not all - Ukranine, Venezuela, etc can visit visa free.) Even if a visa or a plane ticket is beyond prohibitive, you can travel in your local region. If you're Russian you have access to all the CIS countries, if you're Chinese you have access to most of Asia. Visit those areas and you'll see people traveling en masse on tiny budgets. In Russia especially I've seen many people travel with only money for food - couchsurfing and hitchhiking to get around otherwise. Sure, there are people living hand to mouth and people with dependents that can't do this, but billions can.
One thing that’s not obvious to first world country folks is that family commitments is a fairly tight albatross around the neck of many people you suggest “just travel”. They can’t afford to take a holiday, probably because the wages are daily, or vacation policies are just stringent, or maybe simply any vacation has to be spent with family both voluntarily and involuntarily instead. I didn’t intend to personally say you need to check your privilege but I have no other way to put it: even your reply seems to be brimming with privilege. It’s not always liquid money, it’s the lack of burdens and commitments, it’s the assurance you have when you know you can go back home and get a job pronto. It’s the lack of bad decisions in a young age some self inflicted some imposed by society and family that closes in on your freedom significantly. These are things you wouldn’t consider if you didn’t experience yourself.
Hah, somehow this is the first time someone’s told me to check my privilege on the internet! Time to celebrate :)
...Except you seem to have completely ignored the actual words in my comment. I was explicitly not talking about my experience (as you’ve astutely deduced, I’m a privileged guy from a first world country.) I was talking about the direct words of countless people I’ve hosted through Couchsurfing, the majority (!) of which were from countries that my guests themselves would describe as third world and impoverished. I’m simply repeating the words spoken to me by many a traveler down to their last pennies: their almost religious creed, which they will repeat happily, that anyone can travel no matter how broke. Whenever I would ask if I could tell their story, they insisted I should, proud of it as a giant middle finger to the cynics of the world. So when you respond with “check your privilege”, you’re really telling an impoverished Ukrainian guy whose house was bombed to pieces to check his privilege - I'm simply the storyteller for him and his compatriots, because HN rarely intersects with their world.
I would implore you to talk to the same people you claim cannot exist - the millions of impoverished travelers of the world. I don’t think I do their stories justice. But the ridiculous claim that they cannot exist, that they must live their lives without so much as a sunset (!) as you said - that to me is disgusting and strips them from their agency as humans. But hey, take it up with them, I suppose. Feel free to pick up a hitchhiker and lecture him how he doesn’t and shouldn’t exist - but don’t forget to tell him to check his privilege before you let him out.
But I didn’t say that they are all as a group incapable of travel. Of course some of them are, some enlightened souls in the maddening rat race decide they’ll exit on their own terms and travel. But most can’t. Maybe they don’t have the will and are thus deserving of their fates, but going back to the original question that began this topic, the billions of folks who can’t travel (according to you because they are too weak to decide to) have the ability to get a better idea of what else is happening with screens so their lives can be slightly more tolerable.
>But I didn’t say that they are all as a group incapable of travel.
That's true, my bad.
That said: It's not just a few people that have exited the rat race. In many impoverished countries there is no rat race even available to join if one wanted. True youth unemployment is higher than the official numbers in pretty much every country on the planet, and even by those official numbers there are several large countries with the majority of the youth unemployed.
>the billions of folks who can’t travel (according to you because they are too weak to decide to)
I never said that. In fact, I respect people who would never want to travel regardless of the opportunity - it's an unusual preference to have. Amusingly enough I believe people like this are partially necessary to preserve the magic of travel; many of the most authentic characters I meet, rich or poor, are people who are 100% their village, they were born there and will die there. Those people are often the fabric of their local community.
Worth noting, I don't disagree with your initial assertion, which I'll summarize as "if your life sucks, a screen can be a good escape." What I disagreed with is that the urban poor can't watch sunsets, or that money is a prerequisite for travel.
Anyway, to articulate my point clearer, what I dislike is stripping agency from the poor. Yes, obviously, living in poverty is devastating to your health and happiness and stress and so many other things. But it doesn't mean you can't watch a sunset, or that it's impossible to travel. So, hey, if you can and you want to, stick out your thumb and see where it takes you.
Our of curiosity, why don't you want to spend time around people who have camped, trekked, or had time off? That seems like a large group of people to exclude from your social circle.
Just to clarify a bit I wouldn’t consider a break year by itself as a deal breaker, and I love to travel myself. I just have strong opinions on people who do it frequently (twice a year?), vocally, try hard to sound “hardcore” (camping and trekking) and make it part of their identity.
I didn’t start that way but just noticed patterns over a decade of meeting such folks. Some of the reasons include:
1. Many are often trying really hard to find meaning in travel, as if a forest or a mountain trek would suddenly change their outlook in life. Correlated, many of the most depressed folks and people who struggle to find their place in life I know almost all universally “like the outdoors” and would rate a trek in a beautiful path as their ideal past-time.
2. They look down at least subconsciously at the “urban” way of life as if they’ve somehow disconnected themselves from that hypocrisy. Like you realize you burned down a few trees personally (the equivalent) by flying to Hawaii right?
The general wisdom seems to be that travel will open your mind to new perspectives and tolerance but I’ve not experienced that personally. The folks who travel seem to do it mostly for pleasure, and rarely
Appear to have gained any real insight into any worldly process. In this connected age if you want to understand the ramifications of capital punishment in China you don’t need to travel there to know it. In fact you might get a more unbiased picture if you don’t.
An analogy here would be like learning science by making a vinegar volcano or that “heavy pendulum to the face” trick - in principle it’s science I guess? And everyone’s happy to do it, but the kids don’t learn much at all, and clearly given the scientific acumen of the American public which grew up with this stuff they haven’t learned much about what science even stands for. Probably the same with travel.
Well, I think the appeal of outdoors is certainly very broad.
In modern connected society, nature is a great refuge. I think you are conflating a few namely “time in nature”, people who enjoy solitude, and broadening horizons with travel to new places. IDK, I guess I feel, even in my tech and urban circle of friends, there is a great appreciation of nature and that it is pretty healthy. I’m sure some people patch up issues in their life with it. Most of the folks I know aren’t Doing the Instagram, travel, my life is awesome thing. They just go to nature for a nice scene, chill, peace and quiet, read some books, contemplate life. Do it with friends who enjoy it.
My take, I love getting deep into nature for solitude and quiet. It’s a forcing function to disconnect. The travel is just a means to new vistas, but we usually drive to places. The point isn’t really to broaden horizons so much as to see new places. I don’t really broadcast my lifestyle. I don’t promote it to others. I just do it. I also enjoy many things only urban and suburban life really offers (martial arts, etc). Anyway, you touch on some good points, but I also think the views are narrow and don’t capture the spirit of why many people are drawn to nature :)
Balance in most things tends to lead to a deeper and healthier relationship with those things (nature, travel, etc) over time.
From whatever you say I’m sure I’ll get along with you if I meet you in person, so there’s that! I think the most important thing I look for in a genuine person is the complete acknowledgment of all the hypocricies we put up in our lives. Travel etc is just an interesting lightning rod that concentrates such topics (other than dietary choices, but let’s not go there lol).
I do definitely judge quickly and summarily. But my thought process is I’m ready to change my opinion on anyone at a moments notice as I learn about them, and I don’t avoid people due to preconceived prejudices, so why not go wild with my judgement? It’s fun, it makes me look for underlying motives, and I’m happy to be wrong more often than not!
The moment I say this out loud, I typically don’t keep too many people around, for sure, but I’m not bothered by it that much. The ones that stick around are in the end much more fun for me to hang out with anyways.
How are you going to research your intuition? What if mine differs from yours? In the absence of arguments we give in to arguments of emotion, which your are in this post.
Absolutely drive your own life in accordance with your own intuition. Without accurate and compelling research it's all you have. If you're a scientist though, intuition is the starting point of new research.
Possibly more, I'd argue: that work of fiction may have a much more emotional arc than your own life.
Not everybody's direct immediate "real world" life is great, or has the ingredients available to be great "in person." This goes back as long as we've been telling stories.
> Is a life of mindless clicking ever going to be as good as a real one, spent in the company of real people who aren’t endlessly distracted
we also love rational argument, and this is an emotional appeal/argumentum ad populum/"appeal to taste" fallacy. Also, "mindless clicking" is disparaging, I wouldn't call what I'm literally doing right now "mindless clicking"
> Is a sunset through a lens ever as satisfying or heart wrenching as a real one?
Depends on the fidelity of the reproduction ;) I've certainly seen some quite impressive skyboxes in games. And somehow, people seem to survive without ever having seen a sunset over a body of water...
> I’m happier, my wife is happier, my two teen kids are happier
what's good for the goose is not always what's good for the gander
you also have to factor in how money can influence "science"
cigarette and oil companies paid off researchers for decades to drown out negative research results. Facebook and other major tech companies have literally trillions of dollars incentivizing them to try and discredit all these research results
That's our legal and court systems being influenced by junk science funded by shitty corporate actors.
Actual science is what they're trying to drown-out. And yes, big-money can influence academic review and publishing, and it's a real problem. (actually a HUGE problem). But that's not what you're describing. There are good scientists doing real and valid work in both establishing the cancer-tobacco link, and climate research with regard to carbon from fossil/petroleum fuel burning. That's not being drowned out in academia. It's being drowned out in the profit-driven political and newsmedia spheres.
This would make sense if there was some kind of causative link between the peak-ness of your experiences and your mental health, but I doubt that someone who only gets to see sunsets on their phone is doomed to worse mental health than someone who gets to see real ones.
>That the link between digital tech use and psychological distress is inconclusive would have come as a big surprise to me five years ago.
I think it's not so surprising since everybody "feels" this is true. Making people look where they can confirm their bias.
I'm not saying it's not a thing, but I think this is an issue with a lot of studies that look at something where people either do it and don't want to feel good or bad about it or have some beliefs about it being good or bad, e.g chocolate/wine/eggs are good/bad for you.
The thing that actually is surprising is how many researchers don't even mention why they've excluded the possibility of a reverse correlation in their studies.
I think you meant to write "reverse causation"? Correlation is by definition symmetric and directionless. If the researchers make no causation claims, they don't need to be concerned about the direction of causation.
I haven't followed the field, but it's hard for me to imagine published research in serious academic journals where causation claims are made without at least some discussion about the direction of causation and hidden confounders.
Negative correlation also known as anticorrelation does not mean there is a "direction". Simply, it is a scalar number and not a vector. Don't add to the confusion of terminology by using a colloquial definition of "direction" to mean it can be negative or positive. We could have defined correlation to be in [0,1] and your sense of direction would be very confusing.
Or the more you enjoy the idea of shooting people in the face, the more time you're likely to spend playing video games involving shooting people in the face?
Yep, things like that. I would at least appreciate adding a disclaimer, that this behaviour might be a symptom of some other issues for example at school.
It's the same thinking that links violent video games to violent behavior.
The causality fits very well into our world view. It also gives a very "simple fix". Limit video games, limit screen time, limit X.
When the real problem is significantly harder. Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.
If there's a real, reproducible, verifiable link, I'm all game for it, but when the problem is so wide spread and the answer is so simple, it really needs to be reproduced across multiple studies.
Because rarely is the problem + solution truly that simple.
> When the real problem is significantly harder. Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.
While I don't question that systemic racism is real, I don't quite see the link here. Isn't the kind of violence video games get blamed for more commonly committed by non-minority people who have mental health issues and/or were "social outcasts" rather than racially motivated? I mainly remember the topic as coming up in connection with school shootings and the likes, not potentially racial hate crimes.
100% agree on the looking for simple (and comfortable to admit!) fixes though. It is so much easier to say "we made a mistake letting kids play these games" than it is to face the truth that some people are either completely left behind by society or descend into incomprehensible madness for no comprehensible reason.
I believe what they mean is the majority of violent crimes committed by youth in the United States is committed by kids in historically redlined, segregated neighborhoods where the school system is non-existent, public services and infrastructure is falling apart if there at all, all the fathers have been arrested, the police and citizenry are openly antagonist to each other, so drug trade and criminal gangs are the best shot they have at participating in any kind of a community at all.
Solving that will go a lot further than worrying about the comparatively tiny number of suburban white kids shooting up their schools.
Note that "systemic racism" here doesn't need to mean any individual involved in this is still racist. It can just mean the lasting after-effects of institutional racism from decades ago that we never bothered trying to actively undo and just hoped everything would get better when we told the institutions they could no longer legally be racist.
Thanks, that makes sense — where I live most of the talk around video games was about school shootings, not "regular" violent crime among young people, that's why I was a bit confused.
> The causality fits very well into our world view. It also gives a very "simple fix".
> Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.
Some people use video games as bogeyman, some people use time spent online, and you just used racism. Could it be that you are from the US (alternatively: from the anglosphere) and i am not?
At this point i find it hilarious how US people point at every second problem and be like, "racism is behind this". I hope i'm not the only one who feels this is some kind of insane.
Systemic racism is the QAnon theory of the left. Every disparity between races has one simple explanation, racism, disregarding all other possible causes.
The data contradicts the narrative but data doesn’t matter as long as they believe it’s right.
It used to be there were laws enforcing racial segregation, that was systemic racism. Those laws are gone yet the effects still persist. But when there is discrimination now it is caused by individual actions, there is no system behind it anymore. So is that still systemic racism?
Furthermore, how do we know housing discrimination is caused by racism instead of class? If a landlord doesn't want to rent to black Americans he's racist. If he doesn't want to rent to white Americans he's not. But what if in both cases he's worried about not getting rent because of perceived class, is one racism and the other not?
literally got turned down to purchase property in a manufactured home park yesterday; because they have a "minimum credit score 670" rule for occupants. (My credit score is >750; but the unit was going to be occupied by my daughter who has some chronic health issues).
if that's not housing discrimination, I don't know what is.
See, this is exactly the fallacy I'm talking about. Black Americans are poorer on average so naturally it's because of systemic racism. It's the only explanation.
When we look at Nigerian Americans we see they earn more than whites and they are more educated than whites. We see the same with other ethnic minorities. If class was determined by the color of someone's skin this would be impossible. Clearly there are other factors at play.
Political discourse in the US would be a lot more healthy if the focus was on class instead of race.
One argument made in the episode was that since only white people could get mortgage loans the wealth generated from owning property, was exclusive to them. Which is more or less the wealth that defines the middle class today?
I'm not denying that what happened in the past still affects the present. My point is that labeling it as systemic racism today doesn't seem right. There are so many variables. And you bring up an interesting point. Black owned banks reject mortgages for blacks at higher rates than white owned banks.
IMHO this is the elephant in the room. The US is a bad place for poor people, and the black folks are overrepresented in the poorer social classes.
The social and economical system of the US is failing, and media and politicians are sprouting anti-racist slogans to distract attention away from their failings to improve the living conditions of the poor.
Its not racism, its poverty that is eating the country.
> Systemic racism is the QAnon theory of the left.
No, its not.
> Every disparity between races has one simple explanation, racism, disregarding all other possible causes.
No, “systemic racism” is not “all racial disparities are caused by racism”. It is “some racial disparities are caused by institutional features that may seem racially neutral on shallow analysis but which structurally disadvantage particular races”.
> The data contradicts the narrative
Well, it certainly contradicts your strawman narrative, but that has nothing to do with what systemic racism is about.
While it's always a good thought exercise to ask oneself "what else might (partially) produce this result", that does not mean one is equipped to answer it accurately.
Additionally, if your goal is to "expose" people instead of working with them to figure out what is happening, then all you will ever find are exposures. That doesn't mean that's all there is to find.
People who insist that disparities in people are caused by _isms are just delusional. If i had to guess, these people are insecure and want to do these "endangered minorities" a favor to feel better about themselves. But i don't really know for sure.
I say this is a emotionally driven pattern and nothing rational or fact-based. In my eyes, the "systemic _ism" is just a pretext, the kind of pretext people make up to conceptualize their feelings. And i think it needs to be exposed to prevent it from interfering with the constructive talk.
What caused me to be bugged by irjustin's post: They accurately point out how humans pick the easy answers even when they are wrong, and he continues to make the exact same mistake in their next line. Just, how? Is it easier pointing at others than to reflect upon yourself?
> When the real problem is significantly harder. Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.
This post is a perfect example of Poe's law. I genuinely can not tell if it's satire, it is so extreme.
I'm not trying to demean the post or poster, but I think this is a good microcosm of current Western society, especially the US. Taking this post on face value, I genuinely don't know how to respond this this. It triggers the same feeling I get when someone tells me Jewish people secretly control the world.
It really seems like these conspiracy minded beliefs are getting major uptake on both the left and right, and that strikes me as extremely dangerous. I wonder how this sort of thinking correlates with excess screen time? It does seem like these ideas largely spread online.
Probably. It's a tribute to how monumentally successful Big Agro convinced America that fat was bad over the past 80 years. We're only just now starting to come out of those dark ages and we still have a long way to go.
Towards the end of the 20th century, as the obesity epidemic was starting to become a real concern, the general layman's (and possibly medical?) understanding in Western countries was that to lose weight you should consume less dietary fats.
This lead to a lot of low-fat diets and products that advertised themselves as "99% fat free", "fat reduced" etc. - many of which contained extra sugar.
Of course, now we know this belief was not only wrong, but harmful. At the time, though it "felt" true.
I am almost certain this cultural phenomenon is what GP was referencing.
1. A person's mental health is likely to improve if they reduce their social media usage.
2. A person's mental health is likely to improve if they and all/most of their friends reduce their social media usage.
Intuitively, I can see why the first one might be false, even if the second one turns out to be true. So much of modern social life is deeply involved with social media, including a lot of the conversation at IRL social events. Unilaterally cutting yourself off from all that doesn't seem like an obvious boon to mental health.
This was my exact experience of the problem. I cut back dramatically on device usage and news, to the point where I suddenly felt very disoriented and disconnected socially. It was a big improvement in many ways, but that was a real problem and I'm still adjusting to find the right level.
I did Facebook Fridays for a while (before gradually losing interest in Facebook).
It was a helpful structure for me: as much Facebook as I wanted on Friday, none the rest of the week. (I use the Messenger app for FB messages so didn't put any limits there. There's even a separate Messenger website!)
I'd end up naturally spending only 20 minutes or so on Fridays; enough to check notifications and realize nothing really interesting or important was actually on there.
I found Facebook Fridays to be more sustainable than going totally cold turkey. Now I just go on Facebook every once in a while if I have a specific purpose.
Hmm, maybe I need to try Twitter Tuesdays or HN Thursdays...
This is one of the problems I have with Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism, those dopamine fasting articles that were circulating a couple of years ago and other similar movements to reduce time spent online or on a device - there's very little evidence to support them.
Reminds me of similar stories about video games in the 90 and 2000s.
It's pretty simple: walking outside in parks, where there are trees and green and fresh air, is good for everybody. Staying inside 4 walls is always unhealthy, sitting for too long, or not being exposed to enough sunlight.
But using a smartphone and social media is compatible with all those things.
The only things that bothers me in social media:
* Narcissistic tendencies
* Bullying and doxxing
* Political bubbles
* Abusive online advertising and influencing, and privacy problems caused by internet giants.
This reminds me of Monty Python: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
This study was conducted during the pandemic, when people with low smartphone screen times would experience even more social isolation than those who had high smartphone screen times.
Of course when every other avenue of socialization is limited, online access becomes better than nothing.
Clearly it matters what you are doing. I, fortunately, have amazingly healthy mental health but also spend a lot of time on devices for my job. What I do on the device is clearly different than a high schooler suffering from FOMO.
We use this insight with our children. E.g. it’s not “no devices” it’s “no consumption right now, you can only use your devices for creation/discovery, consumption time is limited to 1 hour at these times”.
Just to be contrarian (on HN, what a surprise!), social media and similar tech is deliberately designed to maximise the time the user spends on it engaging in sedentary activities.
>Imagine that everything known about the COVID-19 pandemic was based on people giving their best guesses about whether they have the virus, instead of highly reliable medical tests. Now imagine that people who actually have the virus are more likely to misdiagnose themselves. The consequences of relying on this unreliable measure would be far-reaching.
Why do we need to imagine something that actually takes place? Phase 3 trials of vaccines relied on self-reporting of symptoms by participants. E.g:
But it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a second order relationship. The article shows that time spent on mobile devices and mental health are not link as cause and effect, but it doesn’t disprove that they are not related.
Also, time spent may not be related so some types of mental health issues like depression, but we have many other mental health issues like anxiety, loneliness, etc.
The devices in our hand aren't inherently good or bad. There's plenty of good, and there's plenty of bad. The problem is knowing the difference in the context in which it's being used. And the incentives of companies developing these technologies aren't always aligned with a concept of good or bad (ie engagement).
> In an effort to protect young people from the harms of digital tech
Any skepticism of these experts is clearly rooted in hatred of children.
Less snarkily, I'd like to see more parenting credentials for those purporting to advise me on how to raise mine, as these Really Smart People don't seem to have society on an optimal course.
> Less snarkily, I'd like to see more parenting credentials for those purporting to advise me on how to raise mine, as these Really Smart People don't seem to have society on an optimal course.
Regardless of what one thinks of Brexit, I think Nigel Farage very accurately described technocratic class as people who've never had a "proper job". This could be expanded to "people with no real life experience".
Like the parent commenter, I'm increasingly skeptical of advice given by people who have more schooling than meaningful life experience -- especially when they lack experience in the exact area they're an "expert". I'll gladly take parenting advice from a plumber with four kids over that given by a childless Ivy Leaguer with a PhD, loft apartment, and a French bulldog.
You probably don't have ptsd, and if you do have ptsd that's been diagnosed by a trained professional then it's likely you already have an exposure plan.
Or put another way, you treat being "triggered" by being exposed to the triggering mechanism.
I don't want to defend social networks, myself have left them few years ago to find more happiness outside, after having found out that there was a reason I lost connection with some people from my past.
But i think we should also look at happiness of kids starting from their families, we live in a corporate era of bonus coming from mass layoff, speculation, crisis, crashes, instability, and so on, which i guess affect families and the happiness of the youngest of those families, i think maybe politicians should also stop blaming everyone else except them, especially those who have been sitting at congress for centuries
