10 ms·

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my a

by lsc 9y ago

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing else, it is a certain indicator that they are not living their best lives... but I have a hard time imagining a world where I could be jealous of someone like that. For that matter, most of the positive social media content I see is baby pictures. I'm one of those people who is glad other people have children; I admire parents, yes, but I certainly wouldn't want to be one myself. I suppose I just don't get it. Do other people carefully curate their social media lists so that they are only following the super-rich, super-successful and super-articulate? because my experience with social media is that I see people closer to 'average' when I log in to facebook, whereas in real life, I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes. [1]The silicon valley "Agile Articulators" toastmasters debate club - we meet at the Hacker Dojo in Santa Clara. https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Articulators-Toastmasters-Club https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Articulators-Toastmasters-Club

whatshisface 9y ago
If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them. Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!
- lsc 9y ago
  > If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them. Sometimes, yes, and that is the cause of some negative self-reflection on my part, but I think that there's another factor at work... I think that especially the "racist memes with spelling mistakes' crowd just values different things from what I value. For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute except to the extent that it intersects with income, (this attitude is creeping into HN, I think) and even then... you have to understand that unlike most of the people I work with now, I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart. >Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy) I've wondered what this would have been like. I mean, arrogance has always been with me; and I think I am a lot more aware of my own arrogance than other people are? But a big part of that is that for so many of my friends now, I am 'normal' or maybe even below average - just because they went to really exclusive schools then worked at prestigious places. They have a completely different view of what is normal. What if I always existed in a world where I wasn't "special"? I imagine I'd be a better person, socially. But maybe not? I dunno. >or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV! I... did move back to my hometown for a while. It was... not an experience I care to repeat.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    >I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart. That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way. To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.
    - lsc 9y ago
      >People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time Yes. This is something I do consciously... but also poorly. It would not surprise me at all if most people do something like that, consciously or not.
    - rorykoehler 9y ago
      >That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way. That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.
      - lsc 9y ago
        >That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool. I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.
        madaxe_again 9y ago
        Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US. I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work. The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.
- watwut 9y ago
  His issue was "racist meme with spelling mistake" which is not about them being poorer or less articulate. The part about them promoting racist memes is not just a function about being poor or less articulate or less educated. Only spelling mistake part has something to do with education. Plenty of rich educated people are racists. Turning it into him making them depressed (are they even depressed?) Is quite unfair and waaay to much benefit of doubt to them and waaay too little to him.. It is not his fault they believe in whatever that racist meme promoted.
aqsalose 9y ago
>I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes Maybe this is a relatively rare situation. I'd assume for most people, their FB life and "real" life social spheres coincide quite much. (And because I love speculating, maybe you are the odd one out in your FB circles, the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, not stuck in a life situation where "posting racist memes with spelling mistakes" is sensible use of their time.)
- lsc 9y ago
  >the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, That sentence makes me laugh, because when I grew up (and I'm not certain if this is "when" or "where," really.) that could only be said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
Not helpful, facilitating contempt for people is not the opposite of facilitating depression. It's even worse when it facilitates contempt for your peer group, e.g. dumb yuppie millennial shit prejudicing interactions with the neighbors, coworkers, people that have tech jobs and live near you etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lsc 9y ago
  You have a good point. Really, I spend a lot more of my "negative or critical self-reflection" time thinking about my own arrogance and contempt... At my debate club, I mentioned this part way through the argument, that I did find my own argument distressingly (and depressingly) arrogant and sad; It was pointed out that in debate club, it is traditional to not undermine your own argument.
weeksie 9y ago
This is pretty much my exact experience with social media. I grew up in a remote, working class area. Many of the people I grew up around are lower SES than I ended up being. Of course, I'm the lucky one that got out of that so my relative well being is pretty high. Who knows what it would be like if I grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major city. That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.
jraby3 9y ago
I'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life. I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy. In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I specifically cut out Reddit entirely. Subreddits quickly end up being insular groupthink echo chambers, thanks to the voting system and biased moderators. The noise:content ratio is simply skewed way towards pointless noise. It's not worth it.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.
    - str33t_punk 9y ago
      Until you realize ALL subreddits are almost entirely gamed by marketers. Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items? Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system
      - brucephillips 9y ago
        Do you have an example? I don't observe any bias in /r/vaporents, for instance.
gkya 9y ago
The usual fallacy of "I don't experience it, so how come others do?"
- spuz 9y ago
  That's not a fallacy, it's just a question.
  - gkya 9y ago
    That is a fallacy, whether worded as a rhetorical question or explicitly as "faulty generalisation" or "fallacy of defective induction". The fact is that the subjective observation is generalised without any buttressing evidence whatsoever. "That's not my experience, so that's doubtful."
    - zbentley 9y ago
      It absolutely is not a fallacy, nor is it an inherently rhetorical question. Inquiring as to whether others share your experience isn't illogical; it's the root of most human learning and understanding thus far, and I suspect it precedes most other methods of claim-buttressing. And, to be pedantic, the fallacies you mentioned are specifically in terms of drawing conclusions from that faulty logic; not asking questions. Also, faulty evidence for a claim is not the same as false evidence for a claim. If I have zero other information besides "other humans exist and act similar to me", and "that object is grey", I can infer that it is more likely than not that other humans see the object as grey. This is faulty in that it is subjective and not rigorous (I could be colorblind), but it is not inherently wrong or invalid reasoning. This is a common annoyance of mine when the terms "fallacy" or "faulty logic" are bandied about: the presence of insufficient logic is only problematic when an insufficiently-premised claim is evaluated against a more-sufficiently-premised claim without considering the differences in the quality of the evidence/premises.
      - gkya 9y ago
        I have interpreted the comment in question---which BTW I don't really recall ATM--as drawing conclusions, not as asking questions. That's why I thought is fallacious. I may well be mistaken in that, so sorry if that's the case.
jboynyc 9y ago
As others have pointed out in responding to you, you don't only have to be following the super-rich and super-successful for your feeds to project an image skewed toward their experiences. Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do. So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.
ck425 9y ago
Note that the article is on teens, an age group where as a general rule everyone is super hormonal and therefore emotionally changable and hyper aware of social status. You're trying to look at this through the eyes of an adult, presumably one with a reasonably good career judging by other comments you've made.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  I think this is likely the most powerful factor among the possible explanations given here, and I'm not sure why your comment did not provoke more discussion. Saying teens are "hyper-aware of social status" is not going far enough: the teenage years are a period of social awakening in which we reach new levels of understanding, empathy, and theory of mind. From a physical perspective a lot of teenage behaviour can be attributed to various brain structures developing at different rates (specifically, structures associated with emotions developing quicker than the structures associated with rational inhibitions). Mentally speaking, a lot of teenage development is about the brain growing and "recalibrating" to deal with the new sensations this growth brings. It is not a great leap from there to expect that social media, with their hyper-optimised feedback-loops, are capable of greatly disturbing this process.

by lsc 9y ago

whatshisface 9y ago

If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them. Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!

lsc 9y ago
> If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them. Sometimes, yes, and that is the cause of some negative self-reflection on my part, but I think that there's another factor at work... I think that especially the "racist memes with spelling mistakes' crowd just values different things from what I value. For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute except to the extent that it intersects with income, (this attitude is creeping into HN, I think) and even then... you have to understand that unlike most of the people I work with now, I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart. >Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy) I've wondered what this would have been like. I mean, arrogance has always been with me; and I think I am a lot more aware of my own arrogance than other people are? But a big part of that is that for so many of my friends now, I am 'normal' or maybe even below average - just because they went to really exclusive schools then worked at prestigious places. They have a completely different view of what is normal. What if I always existed in a world where I wasn't "special"? I imagine I'd be a better person, socially. But maybe not? I dunno. >or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV! I... did move back to my hometown for a while. It was... not an experience I care to repeat.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  >I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart. That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way. To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.
  - lsc 9y ago
    >People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time Yes. This is something I do consciously... but also poorly. It would not surprise me at all if most people do something like that, consciously or not.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    >That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way. That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.
    - lsc 9y ago
      >That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool. I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.
      - madaxe_again 9y ago
        Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US. I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work. The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.
watwut 9y ago
His issue was "racist meme with spelling mistake" which is not about them being poorer or less articulate. The part about them promoting racist memes is not just a function about being poor or less articulate or less educated. Only spelling mistake part has something to do with education. Plenty of rich educated people are racists. Turning it into him making them depressed (are they even depressed?) Is quite unfair and waaay to much benefit of doubt to them and waaay too little to him.. It is not his fault they believe in whatever that racist meme promoted.

aqsalose 9y ago

>I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes Maybe this is a relatively rare situation. I'd assume for most people, their FB life and "real" life social spheres coincide quite much. (And because I love speculating, maybe you are the odd one out in your FB circles, the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, not stuck in a life situation where "posting racist memes with spelling mistakes" is sensible use of their time.)

lsc 9y ago
>the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, That sentence makes me laugh, because when I grew up (and I'm not certain if this is "when" or "where," really.) that could only be said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xkcd-sucks 9y ago

Not helpful, facilitating contempt for people is not the opposite of facilitating depression. It's even worse when it facilitates contempt for your peer group, e.g. dumb yuppie millennial shit prejudicing interactions with the neighbors, coworkers, people that have tech jobs and live near you etc.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lsc 9y ago
You have a good point. Really, I spend a lot more of my "negative or critical self-reflection" time thinking about my own arrogance and contempt... At my debate club, I mentioned this part way through the argument, that I did find my own argument distressingly (and depressingly) arrogant and sad; It was pointed out that in debate club, it is traditional to not undermine your own argument.

weeksie 9y ago

This is pretty much my exact experience with social media. I grew up in a remote, working class area. Many of the people I grew up around are lower SES than I ended up being. Of course, I'm the lucky one that got out of that so my relative well being is pretty high. Who knows what it would be like if I grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major city. That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.

jraby3 9y ago

I'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life. I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy. In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I specifically cut out Reddit entirely. Subreddits quickly end up being insular groupthink echo chambers, thanks to the voting system and biased moderators. The noise:content ratio is simply skewed way towards pointless noise. It's not worth it.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  I've found that Reddit improves dramatically as you move away from the huge default subreddits and into smaller, more focused subs -- for hobbies you're involved in, for instance. For that sort of thing it's not half bad.
  - str33t_punk 9y ago
    Until you realize ALL subreddits are almost entirely gamed by marketers. Why do you think the reddit hive mind in small hobby subreddits conglomerates on a few devices / items? Reddit is literally the most shilled platform. Easy botting + the up vote down vote system
    - brucephillips 9y ago
      Do you have an example? I don't observe any bias in /r/vaporents, for instance.

gkya 9y ago

The usual fallacy of "I don't experience it, so how come others do?"

spuz 9y ago
That's not a fallacy, it's just a question.
- gkya 9y ago
  That is a fallacy, whether worded as a rhetorical question or explicitly as "faulty generalisation" or "fallacy of defective induction". The fact is that the subjective observation is generalised without any buttressing evidence whatsoever. "That's not my experience, so that's doubtful."
  - zbentley 9y ago
    It absolutely is not a fallacy, nor is it an inherently rhetorical question. Inquiring as to whether others share your experience isn't illogical; it's the root of most human learning and understanding thus far, and I suspect it precedes most other methods of claim-buttressing. And, to be pedantic, the fallacies you mentioned are specifically in terms of drawing conclusions from that faulty logic; not asking questions. Also, faulty evidence for a claim is not the same as false evidence for a claim. If I have zero other information besides "other humans exist and act similar to me", and "that object is grey", I can infer that it is more likely than not that other humans see the object as grey. This is faulty in that it is subjective and not rigorous (I could be colorblind), but it is not inherently wrong or invalid reasoning. This is a common annoyance of mine when the terms "fallacy" or "faulty logic" are bandied about: the presence of insufficient logic is only problematic when an insufficiently-premised claim is evaluated against a more-sufficiently-premised claim without considering the differences in the quality of the evidence/premises.
    - gkya 9y ago
      I have interpreted the comment in question---which BTW I don't really recall ATM--as drawing conclusions, not as asking questions. That's why I thought is fallacious. I may well be mistaken in that, so sorry if that's the case.

jboynyc 9y ago

As others have pointed out in responding to you, you don't only have to be following the super-rich and super-successful for your feeds to project an image skewed toward their experiences. Thanks to the heavy-tailed distribution of most aspirational resources (whether that is followers/friends, likes/retweets or various offline resources), we encounter a "generalized friendship paradox" (see https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a10 among others) where on average our friends in our social networks score more highly on a variety of attributes than we do. So it's enough for us to follow a few individuals on the long tail of a distribution for the paradox to apply that, even though most of our friends might not be particularly impressive individuals when compared to ourselves, on average our friends are much more popular, successful and beautiful than we are. Thanks to the structure of our networks (and online networks might have greater skew than offline networks), socially-induced anxiety can come about quite quickly. Not a lot of curation is needed.

ck425 9y ago

Note that the article is on teens, an age group where as a general rule everyone is super hormonal and therefore emotionally changable and hyper aware of social status. You're trying to look at this through the eyes of an adult, presumably one with a reasonably good career judging by other comments you've made.

vanderZwan 9y ago
I think this is likely the most powerful factor among the possible explanations given here, and I'm not sure why your comment did not provoke more discussion. Saying teens are "hyper-aware of social status" is not going far enough: the teenage years are a period of social awakening in which we reach new levels of understanding, empathy, and theory of mind. From a physical perspective a lot of teenage behaviour can be attributed to various brain structures developing at different rates (specifically, structures associated with emotions developing quicker than the structures associated with rational inhibitions). Mentally speaking, a lot of teenage development is about the brain growing and "recalibrating" to deal with the new sensations this growth brings. It is not a great leap from there to expect that social media, with their hyper-optimised feedback-loops, are capable of greatly disturbing this process.