I think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town square , why is everything we do in the town square used against us , town squares were fine less than two decades ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
Except you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol
Zealous parents are using this as an opportunity to take phones, computers and means of digital communication away. Hell, by law, you can't even use Discord without verifying your age lol
Imagine if they banned video games and texting 20 years ago because parents were convinced their kids were addicted to Halo and T9Word. They could always roll hoops in the street and send letters to each other with a little planning, too.
Which just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media.
Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.
Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.
I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.
And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
obviously the scientific method is perfect , but i think i remember reading that the majority of studies are non reproducible, so things clearly arent perfect in practice. if one truly believes in the fallibility of humans, they also believe in the fallibility of the applying the scientific method - how could the output of of a fallible process ever be non fallible? confounding variables, hidden variables, incomplete sample spaces, etc ... these cannot ever be accounted for with certainty , thus i trust the scientific method as much as any human lol
Doing a PhD, I got to see a tension first hand that clarifies the reproducibility question: most of the papers I read were visibly garbage, but reading papers was a necessary step in achieving tasks. Every student at some point tries to achieve their concrete tasks without sifting through the dung heap to see how other people lied about their approach to the tasks, and it doesn't work- the garbage is a necessary ingredient and or enough authors are truthful.
The best media representation I've seen of this process is the youtube channel Explosions&Fire, which attempts to replicate entertaining-looking chemistry papers. He's often mad at the authors of the papers he's using in any given episode, but following their breadcrumbs is still effective enough (compared to I guess mixing acids and stuff based on vibes?) that he keeps at it.
If they are not reproducible, then they are not valid studies and not using the scientific method which requires reproducibility. So yes, the scientific method is indeed perfect. lol
re adults it does fall to individual responsibility , re kids we can partially blame parents for not taking care of their kids properly , overall the enemy of our attention has quadrillions of dollars which is fairly difficult to fight against
people who actually have a life generally don't spend time hanging around internet forums so it's important to consider that a disconnection from reality is involved in places like these , thru my eyes you have restated the idea of low trust vs high trust societies without building on top of the idea , which isnt downvote worthy but isnt upvote worthy either
I didn't expect up votes. I also wasn't about to write a treatise. And saying "low trust vs high trust societies" wouldn't be meaningful, nor would it actually be accurate. The issue here isn't trust - it's humility, integrity, conscientiousness, etc. Trust often comes along with such traits, but it's not the core issue.
Don’t know if it is the same for everyone. But when I experienced psychosis I definitely thought I was on a “higher plane” of thinking than others. That didn’t help me get a single idea through and of course it was all BS. So no, it definitely is not a desirable state of mind.
i don't wish to debate the accuracy of your experience , however i will challenge it a bit - perhaps all psychotics believe they are on a higher plane of thinking , this does not imply that all those on a higher plane of thinking are psychotics
Don’t know about the parent, but in my experience it was sort of an “extreme introspection”, any thought you have is immediately scrutinized “why did I think about this, is this the right thing to say in this context, what are the implications”. Then of course the thought about thought is also introspected, leading into a spiral of thought that occasionally gets “popped” as a stack. The memory works in a very weird manner where you almost immediately forget a lot of context and then get reminded of it in one go when you “pop” a level.
It is quite hard to imagine, I think, and even myself I can only explain the idea of it but not how it actually felt.
I wouldn’t say this was anything spiritual, rather than the thinking stopped working as a stream of thought but more like a graph traversal.
i think you meant this to be some sort of gotcha , seems your statement aligns with my personal view that literally nobody has any clue what's really going on behind the scenes , so there very well could be a flying spaghetti monster pulling the strings for all we know
when vampires are knocking at everyones front door , a sizeable proportion of the populace will be vampirized , such that any barricades to your domicile will be inevitably breached
one of asimov's finest , a metaphor that continues to find relevance in my day to day existence - that the conclusions we so readily come to are assumptions made in the absence of the awareness of something more
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