14 ms·

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system

Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system." I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

kibwen 6y ago
Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  To quote @mumblemumble: """ There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure. I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly. """ I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    >I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum. They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...
    - lovecg 6y ago
      Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as anything else on the Internet.
      - kibwen 6y ago
        There are options in your HN profile to help with this. "Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.
    - raunakdag 6y ago
      I agree - I feel like one really important misconception to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social media". From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and iMessage. In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone can find a community and make friends on Discord, but it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because it's a communication based platform
- devlopr 6y ago
  There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      Yes, but the increased availability of such things around the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.
      - scook 6y ago
        Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when information becomes available to a broad swath of the population immediately after it comes into existence? For instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy dissemination of dis- and misinformation.
    - scndalousarbite 6y ago
      Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.
      - Nasrudith 6y ago
        I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese "social media" including forums and image boards are biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared to US ones often involving owner presence even if just dangling a toy and talking to the cat. Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they demonstrate that the source of social problems may be found in the mirror collectively and not in new technology.
- Hendrikto 6y ago
  I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some upsides: Studies have shown that disclosing information about oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0]. Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing information easily with a large audience, which activates reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media because it makes them feel good, which is probably the reason for their explosive growth over the last decades. Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does this provide you with information, it might also motivate you to contact those people again, which will then reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that having an active social circle is predictive of lower stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health [1]. Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media platforms. Reported benefits include greater social connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated with their condition; and potentially even improve their situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each other to seek professional help. [2] Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this, is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a matter of minutes, and communication is not limited geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people usually communicate through sign language or written text. Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low, written text is the most accessible way to communicate with others. For them, social media offers an accessible and efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-determination [3]. Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness, and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative consquences is positive or not. [0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038–43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109. [1]: Suwen Lin et al. “Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness”. In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June 2019), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. [2]: J. A. Naslund et al. “The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media”. In Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp. 113–122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067. [3]: Christine Forsberg. “The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the Netherlands, and Croatia”. MA thesis. July 2020. url: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367 http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367. Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  One upside for me is that I only like interacting with people about my interests, not about personal stuff. I don’t want to hear or talk about weather/kids/sports. Social media allows me to discuss woodworking with someone in Galway instead of whatever little common ground I can find with my next door neighbor.
titzer 6y ago
> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too. Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me. Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is. Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)
op03 6y ago
This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and downside would be produced by the system they created. The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides. Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  There's a reason these people will come out and say they don't let their kids use the apps they work on...
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That luddite standard of "expected to know all upsides and downsides of something novel" bugs the royal crap out of me. It not only demands omniscience but implicitly assumes perfection of the status quo by not holding it to the same standards. To call forums for speech reckless is a very novel standard that back in the 90s and 00s would get you mocked as sounding like a third world dictator.
antihero 6y ago
I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.
- dav43 6y ago
  I must concur. There is a reason taking drugs has been around for 1000's of years - within reason.
  - enkid 6y ago
    Lots of things have been around for 1000's of years. Rape, murder, clothes, but that doesn't mean they are a good thing.
    - LocalH 6y ago
      Being around for thousands of years has zero bearing on whether something is good or bad. It can speak to relative safety. In all the thousands of years, there has yet to be a single death that can be attributed directly to cannabis (and I don't count "marijuana-related visits" to hospitals where regardless of which ailment a person has, if they test positive for cannabis it becomes a "marijuana-related visit", nor do I count deaths where a person just happened to have smoked beforehand).
      - enkid 6y ago
        Good point!
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack
  - hhh 6y ago
    Absolutely, cannabis is leaps and bounds worse than crack.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too. apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to children) imo.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  On the other hand, 'Social media damages teenagers mental health' sounds a lot like puritan arguments against rock music, weed, and video games from decades past. All of those things had legit studies done on them that showed harm, too. Honestly I think the kids are gonna be alright.
  - johnfn 6y ago
    Well, sometimes they get things right, like (only stretching slightly) alcohol, which is not great in excess. You have to consider these things individually rather than trying to draw generalizations like "all puritan backlash is wrong."
    - grahamburger 6y ago
      My argument isn't really "they said these things were bad and they're not," it's more like "these things are actually kinda bad in some circumstances, but mostly we all turned out ok anyway, and things wouldn't really be much different or better if rock music were more heavily regulated when we were kids."
      - johnfn 6y ago
        Really? How is rock music bad in some circumstances? I think I just got hung up on a technicality in your argument.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    These days I think the Puritans were right about some of that stuff. Weed is pretty addicting. It's nowhere near as bad for you as it's been made out to be, but it's still bad for you. Music is the worst in my opinion. Most of the most popular music is full of terrible lyrics which only promote bad things and rarely ever promote good things. Constant misogyny, hypersexuality, etc. A large part of pop music is selling "sexy" older boy bands to preteen girls (which is super creepy). And kids are addicted to this stuff like crazy. I've seen 8 year old kids throw tantrums because someone told them they can't listen to this garbage pop music while doing homework. It's not good for small kids to be exposed to sexuality the way pop music does it. And that's super obvious. If thinking that makes me a Puritan, then so be it.
oblio 6y ago
There is a difference. Planes and schools are by design positive things. Social media by design is at best neutral. Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat. Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we regulate casinos to hell and back.
everdrive 6y ago
>"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.
claudiawerner 6y ago
Your analysis of schools doesn't seem so far-off for me, and it's not unreasonable to say that not every aspect of social life should be measured by a calculus of upsides to badsides. The utilitarian 'weighing' mode of thinking is not appropriate for every situation, and I think you (inadvertently) made a good case for why, at least with schools. The fact that schools also educate can be worked into an analysis even of the 'bad sides' as not contingent, but a part of the same system that creates the 'bad sides'. The very fact that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for instance - and that's not because people in the past have done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the question, just as there are good and bad methods in science or philosophy.

kibwen 6y ago

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

nyanpasu64 6y ago
To quote @mumblemumble: """ There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure. I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly. """ I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum. They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...
  - lovecg 6y ago
    Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as anything else on the Internet.
    - kibwen 6y ago
      There are options in your HN profile to help with this. "Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.
  - raunakdag 6y ago
    I agree - I feel like one really important misconception to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social media". From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and iMessage. In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone can find a community and make friends on Discord, but it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because it's a communication based platform
devlopr 6y ago
There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    Yes, but the increased availability of such things around the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.
    - scook 6y ago
      Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when information becomes available to a broad swath of the population immediately after it comes into existence? For instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy dissemination of dis- and misinformation.
  - scndalousarbite 6y ago
    Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese "social media" including forums and image boards are biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared to US ones often involving owner presence even if just dangling a toy and talking to the cat. Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they demonstrate that the source of social problems may be found in the mirror collectively and not in new technology.
Hendrikto 6y ago
I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some upsides: Studies have shown that disclosing information about oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0]. Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing information easily with a large audience, which activates reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media because it makes them feel good, which is probably the reason for their explosive growth over the last decades. Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does this provide you with information, it might also motivate you to contact those people again, which will then reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that having an active social circle is predictive of lower stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health [1]. Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media platforms. Reported benefits include greater social connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated with their condition; and potentially even improve their situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each other to seek professional help. [2] Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this, is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a matter of minutes, and communication is not limited geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people usually communicate through sign language or written text. Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low, written text is the most accessible way to communicate with others. For them, social media offers an accessible and efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-determination [3]. Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness, and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative consquences is positive or not. [0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038–43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109. [1]: Suwen Lin et al. “Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness”. In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June 2019), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. [2]: J. A. Naslund et al. “The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media”. In Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp. 113–122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067. [3]: Christine Forsberg. “The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the Netherlands, and Croatia”. MA thesis. July 2020. url: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367 http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367. Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.
spoonjim 6y ago
One upside for me is that I only like interacting with people about my interests, not about personal stuff. I don’t want to hear or talk about weather/kids/sports. Social media allows me to discuss woodworking with someone in Galway instead of whatever little common ground I can find with my next door neighbor.

titzer 6y ago

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too. Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me. Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is. Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)

op03 6y ago

This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and downside would be produced by the system they created. The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides. Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.

deeeeplearning 6y ago
There's a reason these people will come out and say they don't let their kids use the apps they work on...
Nasrudith 6y ago
That luddite standard of "expected to know all upsides and downsides of something novel" bugs the royal crap out of me. It not only demands omniscience but implicitly assumes perfection of the status quo by not holding it to the same standards. To call forums for speech reckless is a very novel standard that back in the 90s and 00s would get you mocked as sounding like a third world dictator.

antihero 6y ago

I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.

dav43 6y ago
I must concur. There is a reason taking drugs has been around for 1000's of years - within reason.
- enkid 6y ago
  Lots of things have been around for 1000's of years. Rape, murder, clothes, but that doesn't mean they are a good thing.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    Being around for thousands of years has zero bearing on whether something is good or bad. It can speak to relative safety. In all the thousands of years, there has yet to be a single death that can be attributed directly to cannabis (and I don't count "marijuana-related visits" to hospitals where regardless of which ailment a person has, if they test positive for cannabis it becomes a "marijuana-related visit", nor do I count deaths where a person just happened to have smoked beforehand).
    - enkid 6y ago
      Good point!
mhh__ 6y ago
Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack
- hhh 6y ago
  Absolutely, cannabis is leaps and bounds worse than crack.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too. apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to children) imo.

grahamburger 6y ago
On the other hand, 'Social media damages teenagers mental health' sounds a lot like puritan arguments against rock music, weed, and video games from decades past. All of those things had legit studies done on them that showed harm, too. Honestly I think the kids are gonna be alright.
- johnfn 6y ago
  Well, sometimes they get things right, like (only stretching slightly) alcohol, which is not great in excess. You have to consider these things individually rather than trying to draw generalizations like "all puritan backlash is wrong."
  - grahamburger 6y ago
    My argument isn't really "they said these things were bad and they're not," it's more like "these things are actually kinda bad in some circumstances, but mostly we all turned out ok anyway, and things wouldn't really be much different or better if rock music were more heavily regulated when we were kids."
    - johnfn 6y ago
      Really? How is rock music bad in some circumstances? I think I just got hung up on a technicality in your argument.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  These days I think the Puritans were right about some of that stuff. Weed is pretty addicting. It's nowhere near as bad for you as it's been made out to be, but it's still bad for you. Music is the worst in my opinion. Most of the most popular music is full of terrible lyrics which only promote bad things and rarely ever promote good things. Constant misogyny, hypersexuality, etc. A large part of pop music is selling "sexy" older boy bands to preteen girls (which is super creepy). And kids are addicted to this stuff like crazy. I've seen 8 year old kids throw tantrums because someone told them they can't listen to this garbage pop music while doing homework. It's not good for small kids to be exposed to sexuality the way pop music does it. And that's super obvious. If thinking that makes me a Puritan, then so be it.

oblio 6y ago

There is a difference. Planes and schools are by design positive things. Social media by design is at best neutral. Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat. Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we regulate casinos to hell and back.

everdrive 6y ago

>"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.

claudiawerner 6y ago

Your analysis of schools doesn't seem so far-off for me, and it's not unreasonable to say that not every aspect of social life should be measured by a calculus of upsides to badsides. The utilitarian 'weighing' mode of thinking is not appropriate for every situation, and I think you (inadvertently) made a good case for why, at least with schools. The fact that schools also educate can be worked into an analysis even of the 'bad sides' as not contingent, but a part of the same system that creates the 'bad sides'. The very fact that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for instance - and that's not because people in the past have done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the question, just as there are good and bad methods in science or philosophy.