> "The studies show that Meta has obtained extensive evidence, from many different kinds of research, that its products facilitate and enable vast direct harms to young people (e.g., cyberbullying, unwanted sexual contact) and that its products are likely harming users’ mental health, particularly for adolescent girls, particularly via harmful social comparisons, promotion of eating disorders, body-image problems, and increased depression."
I have a previous Master’s degree from art and I am after working years in tech doing a second degree in CS. Neither degree I need in my current job.
Personally I think what you gain from education comes from three things:
i. How much you apply yourself, how much are you willing to self-study, do research, your own projects, ask question.
ii. The structured pathway an educational institution gives you to learn certain skills and gain knowledge. In self-learning the problem comes knowing what to learn and in what order so that you can advance to a more advanced level.
iii. People you meet. Not just networking, but the fact that if you hang out with very clever people all day long, some of that prob sticks to you as well.
Even my art degree was extremely useful, although it provided absolutely no path to employment. I don’t know what the future brings, but I have absolutely loved my current degree so far, although it admittedly very hard at times.
From wikipedia: ” An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time.”
As with covid, individual actions are not enough to stop the spread of the epidemic. You need vaccinations, health education, public policy etc. not just individual actions, so ”go dancing” and ”talk to people” doesn’t quite cut it.
Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…
I cannot either, but I think we need to start looking at technology from a point of view of public health. Some sort of sociology/medical studies on the effects of computing on human body/mind and society.
> Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…
It doesn't seem that strange that a website with a few thousand geeks isn't able to solve a global phenomenon by commenting on an article.
HN is a place for discussion. It seems unreasonable to expect world changing outcomes.
I suspect the "think global, act local"-motto applies here. You can certainly make a local impact by "going dancing".
You missed my point. You cannot find a solution to a problem if you don’t first correctly analyse the problem. My criticism lies in the fact that most answers (not all however) analye the problem from an individualistic point of view, not from the systemic, ignoring the technological aspect. Which is a bit ironic one must say.
Laws and regulations are also ”advanced behaviour modification”. That is how they work. Tobacco is clear example of this, almost everybody used to smoke back in the 90’s and 00’s (including me) whereas after years of laws regulatios, taxation, public education, and providing healthcare for addiction, we are at the point where smokin makes you a loser rather than some cool Marlboro dude/dudette. There is very little society can do for grandparents addicted to fb, but we can prevent the same happening to the future elderly.
Limiting at which age you can use the product is just one part of the puzzle. You could also hit a big tax on ad revenue gained via social media to veer people off from ruining their brains. There is a host of others tools as well and I think we will see them implemented more and more. The tech billionaires fight back and rather fund a fascist dictator to power than lose a single cent, but there you go. But I think the Musk’s and the like have constantly stepped over boundaries to the extent that the tide has changed.
Yep, this is definitely written by an LLM. I doubt any model is capable of reasoning this bad.
> “harmful compared to what?”
The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.
But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
You do realise many of us read ”on the internet” (or preferably study literature, history, art and the language) of places we visit? These two in no way cancel each other out.
I have been on a work trips to places I really did not quite know the culture, history, or the language of, nor did I care enough to learn about them. These trips are always boring, even without the work stuff. Mass-turism is similar and most beautiful artistic achievements are just tedious extension of yet more of Disneyland forever.
I spoke a bit of Japanese when I travelled to Tokyo over 10 years ago, before the current tourist boom. I had known the history and culture for years from reading about it and studying martial arts since I was a child. I was an art student when I went to Rome, Firenze, Venice, Napoli. I could read a comic book in French when I first went to Paris, knowing of course the art historical perspective to it, but wanted to understand the culture, the feel, match it with my reading of the history.
So there’s travel and there’s travel. You can travel to your own back garden and find immense treasures, after a bit or research. Or you can go to other side of the planet and find nothing at all.
Nothing about my post said nor implied the two things were at odds or that there aren't people that do both. In fact, based on everything you are saying, I can't really find anything to disagree with at all.
> So there’s travel and there’s travel.
Indeed. If travel = tourism, then I agree most travel (as tourism) is superficial gives mostly trivial knowledge about a culture. If travel is "living / working abroad" or "an exchange", than, obviously it is not so trivial. And indeed, even a week as a tourist can be rich if you've read deeply on some specific aspect of the country, and that is the focus of your tourism.
I would still guess that over 90% of travel (at least among younger generations) is just shallow tourism, and people most vocal about the benefits of travel are generally just tourists pretending their shallow tourism is something more. This is the sentiment I think animates this kind of blog post / article.
EDIT: And also there is nothing wrong with liking fundamentally superficial and/or simple things. I enjoy trashy fast food and SPAM from time to time despite also happily spending many days and hours carefully preparing gourmet meals. But I don't ever pretend that enjoying SPAM is some elevated fine taste. Those who enjoy shallow tourism just have an annoying tendency to try to pretend that their "travel" somehow makes them better and/or sophisticated in some way, but, it simply does not, in the vast majority of cases.
I never been to Las Vegas, but social media makes me feel like entering a casino in John O’Briens Leaving Las Vegas (the book, not the film). Despite of all the glitz and glamour, just a desolate desert for those who have lost all the hope… And the way all these applications make you hooked works exactly like the coin machines in a Casino. Jean Pormanove was just a one poor soul, there’s literally thousands of them, somebody (or themselves) live-streaming the destruction of their bodies and soul. This is suppose to be fun?
I left long time ago. I kicked many things back then and are a lot happier now. I hope the culture is changing and SoMe ban for kids (I believe Australia is only the beginning) will cause a shift in global culture and in future IG, TikTok and rest of them are seen in similar light to tobacco today.
Yep, I have heard social media etc compared to one armed bandits. Not far off. The trouble like gambling is that I'm not interested in the game unless I win.
However, I don't consider Australia's social media ban a good thing as it is government trying to gatekeep the internet.
> I don’t want to believe this is true, because I want to believe culture is an infinite game, and inexhaustible. And surely the number of linear combinations—of distinct ideas humans can have, and works of art we can make—is so high as to be inexhaustible. But each new remixing brings less information than the last.
Were this to be true, surely the usable ideas for art would have been exhausted by the ancient Greek already? There is only so many poses in which you can distort the human body and retell the greek myths and as it happens, quite a while the European artists believed this to he true.
This is why using mathematical logic to describe cultural phenomenons is not necessarily the best approach to understand art. Parthenon statues, Nibelungen or Warhol’s Death and Disaster -series are essentially meaningless without the meaning and value we give them. And this changes when times chamge, new political ideas permiate the world, new technologies change our understanding of time and space. In science you cannot just come up with a new dimension just like that. In art, you kinda can, if you can get enough people dream about it collectively. This is something the great artist of periods have been directors of.
In a sense in our millenia the technology has taken the position art had in the 19th and 20th Century. We dream not through theatre, literature, music, visual arts and cinema, but via new digital technologies that are promising to change the world to a more satisfactory one - newest of course being the AI, whatever one means by that. Startup CEO’s give pitches that are almostly exactly like artist statements of the 80’s and 90’s. Many hackers here make much more interesting projects far superior to the old shit you see in Venice or in the other five zillion biennale’s of contemporary art.
Personally I find transhumanism to be an old hat at this point, but the new dimension to this chaotic space-time-continuum of art seems to me come from some new modality between art and technology, or technology as art. Images generated by AI are rather boring and AI is only one avenue of this. Perhaps future art historians will look at coding itself from the advent of computing to our era as an artistic practice. I think they should.
https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a80c0928...
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