15 ms·

When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I want

When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted. Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks. If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced. People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development. Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics? They were not. Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends. Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries. Yes. It's a problem.

31reasons 10y ago
Facebook is the only tech company I feel very reluctant to work for. It feels so dystopian.
- simplehuman 10y ago
  As opposed to Google that does the same? I am kinda surprised facebook has not given out free email ids yet.
  - no_wizard 10y ago
    they tried. It failed. http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-email-service http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Open your eyes, if you dare.
- astrange 10y ago
  The propaganda posters all over their walls are impressive. http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jpg http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jp... Since then they've added a few more which are basically "remember not to be racist".
ysavir 10y ago
Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had. The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.
- zardo 10y ago
  >If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    and how many people tell themselves they'd like to do something else (say, learn a language or instrument) as a form of ego-protection because it's "what sophisticated people do"? The underlying assumption that we should all want to learn Latin and to play the Cello seems to have been roundly invalidated, despite continuing to be played out in the public sphere.
    - always_good 10y ago
      Probably not very many people tell themselves that. Seems more like something cynical and judgmental people assume other people tell themselves. But I can tell you almost anything creative / productive / self-developmental feels more rewarding than the time I fritter away doing nothing on the internet, like idly scrolling Reddit. I'm not content that my default mode is to do things that never feel rewarding. So any minute I can reclaim for something more self-developmental, like a Duolingo Spanish exercise, makes my life a little better and satisfying in my own eyes.
      - beaconstudios 10y ago
        But _why_ do you want to learn Spanish? Is it because you are planning an extended stay in a Spanish-speaking country, or have Spanish-speaking friends, or is it because you have a romantic conception of multilingualism? My point was that people often seem to romanticise fairly arbitrary personal development goals as being a lofty intent, but when push comes to shove you'll find them in front of the TV or playing a game. What does that say about our internal reward system and the value of forcing yourself to do something that you tell yourself you'll enjoy over something you genuinely enjoy? The idea that entertainment is a "lower pursuit" and learning arbitrary skills is a "higher pursuit" smacks of social construction.
jacquesm 10y ago
Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment. There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn). The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University. Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    > There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD. I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior. But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD. While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.
ambulancechaser 10y ago
Is this a pessimistic view of Facebook or of people?
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  The answer is "yes". It's both. The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it. If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables. http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    The computers are programming the humans.
    - harveywi 10y ago
      Humans are using computers to program other humans. Used to be humans using TV to program other humans.
      - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
        Awww so optimistic. Haven't you seen that tshirt with the caveman nobley striding followed by the hunched computer programmer?
return0 10y ago
> It's a problem. You 're talking about people, right?
chapium 10y ago
In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding. I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?
- lovehashbrowns 10y ago
  Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.
lovehashbrowns 10y ago
Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.
- RileyKyeden 10y ago
  Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public. People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.
  - aisofteng 10y ago
    "Bioethics in Star Trek" is not a high bar.
    - ryanx435 10y ago
      look at you, judging other people for using science fiction as a vessel for discussing deeper philosophical topics.
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  Relevant early xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
kelvin0 10y ago
"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..." I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games. But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.
- politician 10y ago
  Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1]. It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber [2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio
- thedailymail 10y ago
  Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.
  - creaghpatr 10y ago
    Second this rec! I only play poker/blackjack at casinos but after reading Addiction by Design I'm almost scared of even trying a slot machine. The addiction extends to the casinos and politicians who become addicted to the profits generated by the addicts and it swallows the entire industry.
no_wizard 10y ago
I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse. In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once: https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-forms-of-entertainment-always-get-blamed-for-child-crime-79a61c4c4999#.cp43152cm https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-for... I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.
christoph 10y ago
Long time deleted FB account holder here. I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it. I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror. I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well. Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster. I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc. I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.
- spitfire 10y ago
  Got a link to the munger speech?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Not OP, but: Recently, this: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisdom/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisd... (posted to HN) There's a very long (~250 pages) collection of wisdom here: http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Charlie-Munger-1994-2011.pdf http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Cha... I've run across a shorter (~15 - 45 pages or so) compilation or speech a ways back, but it's not turning up. He covers a certain set of ground fairly frequently though.
wslh 10y ago
On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use. I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.
bisby 10y ago
> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends. This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!" It's clickbait that appeals to pride.
aswanson 10y ago
Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up. Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.
- lovehashbrowns 10y ago
  Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets. Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
  - aswanson 10y ago
    I have indeed trafficked in overreaction and arrogance masquerading as intellectualism in my days. Probably will again. Such is life.
  - dTal 10y ago
    The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant. The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi. None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".
nicolashahn 10y ago
I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game. For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed. Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value. Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration. Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there. tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
- mcone 10y ago
  > tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary. But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
  - nicolashahn 10y ago
    True, but I didn't because the OP didn't either. It is a problem that hasn't been solved yet, and for me, so far it's been an worthy compromise. I avoid putting anything truly personal on my Facebook - it doesn't have my home address, I turn location settings off, I never send sensitive information over Facebook messenger, etc. I try to minimize what they have, and I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.
fullshark 10y ago
The problem is not technology, but people. They are not as interested in these high minded pursuits as everyone imagined.
nostrademons 10y ago
I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus": http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky.... His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc. And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today. People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- terminado 10y ago
  It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today. Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of) Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then. Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about. There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions. You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago. Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0] [0] https://www.xkcd.com/386 https://www.xkcd.com/386
grahamburger 10y ago
> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics? I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago. Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Yup. Right now I could be working on a useful and interesting side project. Instead I'm rolling through HN comments. Dang social media.
krushing 10y ago
The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life. The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing. Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against. I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion. If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pharrington 10y ago
I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person." I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum. Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.
- laynnn 10y ago
  +1 for the Hegel memes On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.
aphextron 10y ago
I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.
dsacco 10y ago
It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value? Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off. Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.
eevilspock 10y ago
As another top level comment notes, Adlous Huxley nailed it 85 years ago.
0x445442 10y ago
Brilliant take.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path. See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.
unclebucknasty 10y ago
Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.
aisofteng 10y ago
The problem lies not in the product but its customers. This is what people are like, on average.
sneak 10y ago
Maybe all it really did is show us that >90% of people in society are not and never will be intellectually curious.
bubblethink 10y ago
>... then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. Upvoted.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BoringAsian 10y ago
that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.
agumonkey 10y ago
Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right. I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned. It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target. I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before. ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.
ryanx435 10y ago
> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics? > They were not. I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such. my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool [1] http://www.hellochinese.cc/ http://www.hellochinese.cc/

31reasons 10y ago

Facebook is the only tech company I feel very reluctant to work for. It feels so dystopian.

simplehuman 10y ago
As opposed to Google that does the same? I am kinda surprised facebook has not given out free email ids yet.
- no_wizard 10y ago
  they tried. It failed. http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-email-service http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...
dredmorbius 10y ago
Open your eyes, if you dare.
astrange 10y ago
The propaganda posters all over their walls are impressive. http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jpg http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jp... Since then they've added a few more which are basically "remember not to be racist".

ysavir 10y ago

Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had. The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.

zardo 10y ago
>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  and how many people tell themselves they'd like to do something else (say, learn a language or instrument) as a form of ego-protection because it's "what sophisticated people do"? The underlying assumption that we should all want to learn Latin and to play the Cello seems to have been roundly invalidated, despite continuing to be played out in the public sphere.
  - always_good 10y ago
    Probably not very many people tell themselves that. Seems more like something cynical and judgmental people assume other people tell themselves. But I can tell you almost anything creative / productive / self-developmental feels more rewarding than the time I fritter away doing nothing on the internet, like idly scrolling Reddit. I'm not content that my default mode is to do things that never feel rewarding. So any minute I can reclaim for something more self-developmental, like a Duolingo Spanish exercise, makes my life a little better and satisfying in my own eyes.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      But _why_ do you want to learn Spanish? Is it because you are planning an extended stay in a Spanish-speaking country, or have Spanish-speaking friends, or is it because you have a romantic conception of multilingualism? My point was that people often seem to romanticise fairly arbitrary personal development goals as being a lofty intent, but when push comes to shove you'll find them in front of the TV or playing a game. What does that say about our internal reward system and the value of forcing yourself to do something that you tell yourself you'll enjoy over something you genuinely enjoy? The idea that entertainment is a "lower pursuit" and learning arbitrary skills is a "higher pursuit" smacks of social construction.

jacquesm 10y ago

Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment. There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn). The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University. Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  > There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD. I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior. But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD. While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.

ambulancechaser 10y ago

Is this a pessimistic view of Facebook or of people?

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
The answer is "yes". It's both. The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it. If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables. http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  The computers are programming the humans.
  - harveywi 10y ago
    Humans are using computers to program other humans. Used to be humans using TV to program other humans.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
      Awww so optimistic. Haven't you seen that tshirt with the caveman nobley striding followed by the hunched computer programmer?

return0 10y ago

> It's a problem. You 're talking about people, right?

chapium 10y ago

In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding. I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?

lovehashbrowns 10y ago
Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.

lovehashbrowns 10y ago

Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.

RileyKyeden 10y ago
Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public. People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.
- aisofteng 10y ago
  "Bioethics in Star Trek" is not a high bar.
  - ryanx435 10y ago
    look at you, judging other people for using science fiction as a vessel for discussing deeper philosophical topics.
TorKlingberg 10y ago
Relevant early xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/

kelvin0 10y ago

"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..." I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games. But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.

politician 10y ago
Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1]. It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber [2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio
thedailymail 10y ago
Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.
- creaghpatr 10y ago
  Second this rec! I only play poker/blackjack at casinos but after reading Addiction by Design I'm almost scared of even trying a slot machine. The addiction extends to the casinos and politicians who become addicted to the profits generated by the addicts and it swallows the entire industry.

no_wizard 10y ago

I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse. In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once: https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-forms-of-entertainment-always-get-blamed-for-child-crime-79a61c4c4999#.cp43152cm https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-for... I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.

christoph 10y ago

Long time deleted FB account holder here. I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it. I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror. I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well. Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster. I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc. I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.

spitfire 10y ago
Got a link to the munger speech?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Not OP, but: Recently, this: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisdom/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisd... (posted to HN) There's a very long (~250 pages) collection of wisdom here: http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Charlie-Munger-1994-2011.pdf http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Cha... I've run across a shorter (~15 - 45 pages or so) compilation or speech a ways back, but it's not turning up. He covers a certain set of ground fairly frequently though.

wslh 10y ago

On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use. I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.

bisby 10y ago

> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends. This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!" It's clickbait that appeals to pride.

aswanson 10y ago

Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up. Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.

lovehashbrowns 10y ago
Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets. Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
- aswanson 10y ago
  I have indeed trafficked in overreaction and arrogance masquerading as intellectualism in my days. Probably will again. Such is life.
- dTal 10y ago
  The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant. The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi. None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".

nicolashahn 10y ago

I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game. For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed. Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value. Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration. Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there. tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

mcone 10y ago
> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary. But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
- nicolashahn 10y ago
  True, but I didn't because the OP didn't either. It is a problem that hasn't been solved yet, and for me, so far it's been an worthy compromise. I avoid putting anything truly personal on my Facebook - it doesn't have my home address, I turn location settings off, I never send sensitive information over Facebook messenger, etc. I try to minimize what they have, and I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.

fullshark 10y ago

The problem is not technology, but people. They are not as interested in these high minded pursuits as everyone imagined.

nostrademons 10y ago

I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus": http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky.... His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc. And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today. People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
terminado 10y ago
It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today. Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of) Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then. Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about. There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions. You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago. Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0] [0] https://www.xkcd.com/386 https://www.xkcd.com/386

grahamburger 10y ago

> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics? I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago. Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
Yup. Right now I could be working on a useful and interesting side project. Instead I'm rolling through HN comments. Dang social media.

krushing 10y ago

The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life. The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing. Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against. I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion. If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pharrington 10y ago

I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person." I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum. Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.

laynnn 10y ago
+1 for the Hegel memes On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.

aphextron 10y ago

I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.

dsacco 10y ago

It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value? Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off. Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.

eevilspock 10y ago

As another top level comment notes, Adlous Huxley nailed it 85 years ago.

0x445442 10y ago

Brilliant take.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path. See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

unclebucknasty 10y ago

Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.

aisofteng 10y ago

The problem lies not in the product but its customers. This is what people are like, on average.

sneak 10y ago

Maybe all it really did is show us that >90% of people in society are not and never will be intellectually curious.

bubblethink 10y ago

>... then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. Upvoted.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BoringAsian 10y ago

that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.

agumonkey 10y ago

Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right. I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned. It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target. I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before. ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.

ryanx435 10y ago

> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics? > They were not. I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such. my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool [1] http://www.hellochinese.cc/ http://www.hellochinese.cc/