20 ms·

How to get 7th graders to smoke

205 points by HR01 2y ago

andy99 2y ago
I remember hearing rumors that tobacco companies funded anti-smoking campaigns because they realized it just made smoking look that much cooler. It's certainly easy to imagine a dual purpose ad that will appear positive and affirming to adults but super lame to kids and make them want to do the opposite.
- piker 2y ago
  I believe big tobacco was required to fund those as part of a mass tort settlement.
- bagels 2y ago
  This is the source of those ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  As parodied by South Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqglh7WoBz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqglh7WoBz0
- FMecha 2y ago
  Given that this was required by the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement as pointed out, is it safe to say that the U.S. federal government accidentally mandated tobacco companies to make a brand-new form of youth smoking dogwhistle?
nobleach 2y ago
Show them a Quentin Tarantino film? ...or any film for that matter where the main characters seem so "cool, unfazed and untouchable". To a young (mostly male) mind, that's the ultimate goal; to be in charge. For most beginning smokers, it's not about the inhalation of tobacco, but the subversive "screw the rules, those don't apply to me" façade. This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media. Make the stupid guy in the movie the one that's dumb enough to smoke. Make everyone laugh at him every time he tries to look cool.
- matthewaveryusa 2y ago
  Exactly, these are the kinds of ads we need: https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smoking-campaign-uses-oral-sex-imagery https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smo...
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    I was thinking more like this https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its-gay-to-smoke-1819594854 https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its... But that one is not bad either :)
    - npteljes 2y ago
      Got a good laugh out of me, thanks for sharing!
- mrob 2y ago
  This has been tried before. In Waterworld, the bad guys are literally called the "Smokers" and smoking is a big part of their culture. It's so over the top it seems more like a parody of anti-smoking campaigns. I doubt it ever convinced anybody not to smoke, and I think any similar attempt is doomed to fail in the same way. Kids are good at detecting when you're trying to manipulate them, and it doesn't matter if you have good intentions.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Most adults claim that they're not influenced by advertising, yet studies show they are. I'm quite confident the same effect would be found in teens.
    - throwaway22032 2y ago
      Negative advertising and positive advertising are quite different. I'm definitely affected by both, but generally if I feel I'm being nannied my instinct is to go the other way. People don't need to be "convinced" to do things that are good for them - if they're not doing it, they likely just have reasons that you don't understand.
makach 2y ago
Put them on fire?
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  Or run them over with a forklift!
  - cheschire 2y ago
    Staplerfahrer Klaus as an anti-smoking mascot. Never would've had that thought before today. Thanks for that.
    - ooterness 2y ago
      For those unaware, Staplerfahrer Klaus is a gory, dark-comedy PSA about the hazards of forklifts in warehouses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck Most training modules are dry and clinical. This one is the opposite. Many people are killed, dismembered, and otherwise mutilated. I think the combination of good comedy and vividly illustrated consequences makes Klaus far more effective and memorable than the average corporate training module that OP is discussing.
sandworm101 2y ago
Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Vapers spend a lot less. As a pack-a-day smoker I was spending $7-10 a day on cigarettes. Before I quit altogether, I was spending $20-30 a month on nicotine salts, $20 a month on cartridges, and $100 once a year or two for mods and batteries. Since I was working from home I was vaping constantly, so I didn’t reduce nicotine consumption despite the cost reduction. I could buy a brand new mod every month and it’d still be cheaper. I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.
  - hipadev23 2y ago
    So nicotine salts are synthetic right? Is there a reason people consume them via oral pouches, does a pill simply not work? Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)
    - throwup238 2y ago
      Yes they’re synthetic. Pills take much longer than pouches since they have to go through the digestive system, whereas pouches steadily release nicotine that is absorbed quickly by the gums. Method of consumption is definitely important. I couldn’t fully switch to vapes until I found one that had the same “throat feel” as my American Spirits. Not just the type of nicotine (salts) but the exact brand of vaporizer and coil style. Just like people prefer the taste and ritual of coffee to caffeine pills.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation. This is hard to see if you only consider well-meaning attempts to change people, which you might not consider manipulation because that word has a negative connotation.
- jawns 2y ago
  And yet ... look at how much manipulation happens at the political level. I find myself constantly wondering how people can be so gullible as to buy the drivel they're being fed.
  - Clent 2y ago
    This is a different form a manipulation. No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy. The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Absolutely this. You cannot get a person to change an opinion, a belief, a tendency, by tackling it head on. It’s almost like we have an autonomous immune response to information which challenges our preconceptions or preferences. I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit. Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong. Contrary creatures, we.
nerdjon 2y ago
I firmly believe that the problem in the US regarding how we handle drugs in the US is that it is so focused on Shame. Same with how we do sex ed and many other things. We shame it so much, that when you have questions or you start thinking about it, you don't have people who you can go to and ask questions without judgement or being preached at. And then of course once you do try something, it is criminalized so you can't go talk to someone to get help without being worried about going to Jail (depending on where you are). It also doesn't help that so many of these systems love to talk about how Pot is just as bad as every other drug, which of course it isn't. I feel like we need more of a focus on compassion instead of just beating us over the head with "Drugs are Bad mkay" so of course we are going to rebel against adults telling us this. Especially when we know we can't have alcohol but they can, so are they telling the truth about drugs? Same with Smoking. The message gets mixed up when we are being told all these things that we shouldn't do but adults are able to do some of them.
- ganzuul 2y ago
  Shaming must be one of our worst generational traumas. I don't think millennials like me can stop it, but Gen Z already has a slim chance of doing it.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Most interesting part is how we view changing ourselves VS others so critically different. We know how hard it is to change ourselves, yet view others as fuzzy and that it's easy, just enact a few advertisements and a program or two, done. But at the same time, it's basically impossible to know what will work until it hits the field. Better to just throw a bunch of stuff and then adjust according to the results.
patwolf 2y ago
This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the "don't do drugs" speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he'd pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore. "This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode." It's a wonder that didn't work.
- User23 2y ago
  It was nice of them to teach kids how to identify real marijuana.
- 13of40 2y ago
  I never attended a DARE class, but in the early 90s the t-shirts were everywhere so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically".
  - marcodiego 2y ago
    In Brazil, in the 90's there was a campaign called "Drogas nem morto" (drugs not even dead). I heard about a guy who used a t-shirt of the campaign to sell drugs.
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    DARE to resist drugs. I don't do dares. (joke)
  - Izkata 2y ago
    > so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically". Drugs Are Really Enjoyable/Excellent
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    Still have one, vintage '91 to '93 or so. I wear it to Phish shows.
- 2y ago
t-3 2y ago
The reason "anti-drug training", "diversity training", etc., don't work is that lecturing is not conducive to learning for the vast majority of people. Most people need real life experience to internalize that people that seem very different superficially are just the same humans as they are, that addictive drugs can make you poor and sick and waste a lot of time, that getting a criminal record will fuck you over in every way possible, and so on. Peer pressure works - if all your friends think drugs are really stupid you probably won't ever try them, but you probably will if they all do them. Indoctrination in this fashion works well in isolation but tends to fall apart as people move socially and geographically.
h2odragon 2y ago
"Drugs are Bad" except all the ones we advertise on TV and might require school kids to take in order to attend school.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  The War on Drugs was used to target Nixon's perceived opponents: hippies and black people. Later, Reagan couldn't relate to poor or minorities, so he (and Nancy) doubled-down on "tough on crime" militarization and ineffective PSAs.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
You could always have a tobacco company sponsor a prime-time animated TV program intended for the whole family to watch before it was kids' bedtime. Where the main characters took regular breaks to smoke their Winstons, using those ancient Zippo lighters that basically rubbed two sticks together to light up. Fred & Barney never looked so relaxed and satisfied any other time.
flobosg 2y ago
Another example of interventions with reversed outcomes: “baby simulator” programs increase the rate of teen pregnancy – https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-pregnancy/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-p...
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  In high school, I had to "raise" a bag of flour for a week with a girl that I was dating as part of an assignment. One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc. It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.
  - 1992spacemovie 2y ago
    > One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc. Unfathomably based.
    - washadjeffmad 2y ago
      She and the other Catholic girls were raised to believe the only thing in the world worse than being an unwed mother was to be a pregnant teenager, so they grew up with some complicated fixations. By their logic, they needed to experts in all the ways to be safe to prevent it from happening, but pre-internet, their info was a little dodgy. One summer, they had a "No boys in the hot tub, at all" rule. It took some convincing to get them to explain why, but someone had heard that sperm. could swim. in water. ... And they'd just live in there, like goldfish? Did they need to be fed? Did they have maps? That one was probably the most precious. They never really questioned how the aggressive little Olympians might end up there in the first place, and these girls could all drive.
iamthepieman 2y ago
If you want someone to stop something you have to offer them a world of opportunities to replace it. Because you don't know exactly what will slot into that gap due to lifestyle, financial, personality and social factors. If you want someone to DO something you just need to show that it COULD fill a gap in some other part of their life. If it's addictive as well then they don't need to experiment for long before it's a solid part of their life. Getting someone to stop plays off loss aversion and sunk cost.
aeonik 2y ago
It's pretty funny in a sad way to me that this article talks about how little we know about human behavior and struggling to find answers about why the kids had a backfire effect. I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol. I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished. The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare. Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently. It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails. Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Indeed. People want "reproducible" campaigns, but that necessitates being entirely one-way. As soon as you start having a real connection with other humans it's non-reproducible.
- lrivers 2y ago
  One way to ruin kids desire to drink is to offer them tastes of what you’re drinking from a relatively young age. Whatcha drinking daddy? A beer! Want to try it? YUCK!!!! This removes the rebellion portion from drinking to a degree.
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    Unless they end up liking it, which I know some that applies to. Though, they did end up fine.
- csours 2y ago
  "I am not a fish" - Seth Godin As the author of the post says in a reply to a comment: > ' This is a common outcome for programs like this: "It doesn't work, but the adults like it!" '
quacked 2y ago
At the core of the problem is that social services that address the physical consequences of smoking (mostly medical professionals and financial counselors) are run by people who believe that everyone ought to be treated similarly and have similar opportunities, regardless of behavior. Smoking is considered "a problem" to society because intelligent, caring people that notice that smoking injuries and medical conditions cause sorrow, strife, and excess medical waste. They've run huge propaganda campaigns to get us to care about this problem: literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit." But the people who smoke usually don't care about the social sorrow & strife caused by smoking, and they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide hospitals or lung cancer screenings. They just smoke because they enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences. So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers. The answers that actually solve "the problem"--ban cigarette sales outright, imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers--are unthinkable to the meddlers, because they genuinely believe in their principles, especially "everyone in society should be taken care of by competent people". (For the record: I don't smoke, and I don't think anyone should smoke.)
- homefree 2y ago
  > “ So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers. Predictably, this doesn't work.” It actually did work incredibly well (at least in the US). Smoking went from something the majority of the American population did that was present in almost all private and public spaces to something only a small minority does in a small number of places. Whether or not you agree with the methods, I think it is necessary to recognize that the methods worked.
  - quacked 2y ago
    Yeah, that's true. I was thinking more about the "at risk" populations that are very resilient to smoking interventions, which are what the seventh-grade propaganda campaigns that I sat through and are talked about in the article are trying to capture and influence. There are still 20-30M adult smokers in the US, and cigarette sales are pretty stable. Smoking is still considered "a problem" by smoking interventionists, but they're not doing a great job at finally stamping it out, because they need harsher methods than learning campaigns and well-intentioned propaganda. Edit: I had removed "predictably, this doesn't work" from my original comment before you commented for the exact reason that you commented. To a degree, it does work, on people who typically follow rules, when it's combined with taxes and bans that make it a crime to smoke.
kazinator 2y ago
If you see footnote 1: "In a later paper where the researchers caught up with these same students again, the difference between the Social and Emotional programs had mysteriously disappeared." It almost seems as if the researchers triggered something resembling the Streisand effect. The Social and Emotional programs were obviously intended to discourage the kids from smoking, but participation in those programs was only serving to keep the kids' attention on smoking, and making some of them curious. The kids might also have gotten the message that trying smoking is okay, as long as it's not related to peer pressure or feelings, but one's inherent curiosity. Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure will not block smoking that is not caused by peer pressure.
- ordu 2y ago
  *> Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure... ... also could have a unintended effect. A kid could start to notice a peer pressure and get more clear idea how to follow trends or even predict them and to run ahead of them. Teenagers are really concerned about what their peers think about them. If you tell them all about peer pressure, they will listen attentively, and develop a strategy how to grow in the eyes of their peers. Very bright could get the idea that you can be the source of peer pressure. Lets start smoking and lets make all others to start smoking too. I would say, that if you talk with kids about smoking, some of kids get the idea that if they were seen smoking, then they will look more knowledgeable about smoking than you. Or maybe they will see rebellious and independent from boring adults. Especially rebellious if adults talk about dangers of smoking all the time. People's minds are difficult complex machines, they could react at your stimulus in unexpected ways, and the more ways you can predict the more mind-blowing unpredictable become.
poulpy123 2y ago
Requiem for a dream did more against drugs than any campaign
Workaccount2 2y ago
The fundamental problem is that drugs are fun and the bad effects are offset by years or even decades. Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  And they are usually addictive. Almost every person I know who smokes says they derive little pleasure they once did, but are addicted to nicotine and can’t stop. And as a non-smoker, it doesn’t look fun, but I trust it was at one point in their life - I guess.
  - devoutsalsa 2y ago
    Smoking Is Awesome, by Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell, touched on how smokers eventually need cigarettes just to feel normal. https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd
    - alt227 2y ago
      > touched on how smokers eventually need cigarettes just to feel normal. This is the same for every addictive substance, no?
      - asdfgrasdf123 2y ago
        I was amphetamine addict, I used daily for a year, very excessively in later stage. When I stopped I felt normal, it was not fun but I did not need amphetamine to get through the day. There is no physical urge to use more, you do it because you like it. It is very different with opiates I heard, but you said every. The word addiction pushed me towards drugs because I thought if I can stop any time it is not addiction and it is fine.
nkrisc 2y ago
> You know those signs on the highway that say things like, “Drive safely! Over 20 people have died on this highway so far this year!”? They maybe cause more people to crash and die. Ah yeah, those signs that completely remove the human tragedy of those who lost their lives driving. Instead you see something like "99 people died on this highway" and for a moment I can't always help but think, "so close to 100!" before remembering these are dead people, not just a number. What always reminds me to drive more carefully and not be so complacent is reading about some family has been torn apart by some little driving mistake that I could have easily made as well. It's tragic and depressing, but that's what reminds me to think about my own family when I'm driving. With regards to smoking, what convinced me to never take up smoking was seeing what 50 year old smokers looked like. Yikes. Should some lifelong smokers be fortunate enough to live to 80, taking a look at them will typically put to rest any remaining desire to smoke.
furyofantares 2y ago
Lots of great points, although a sexual harassment quiz for adults seems fairly different than a multiweek program for kids. And the article seems to argue that interventions are unlikely to change people while also accepting that the drug study did change the kids in the wrong way. To me that doesn't indicate that it's necessarily wrong to try to intervene with short-ish programs in schools, it indicates the content of those programs might be really bad. Maybe that program didn't actually harm kids, beyond wasting their time, and was a statistical outlier. I don't have much opinion that. But I can understand why interventions can backfire if they're inauthentic. When I figure out you've been lying to me, I want to throw everything you said out the window. If you also made me make some videotaped promise saying something YOU want me to believe then you can bet I'm gonna feel betrayed too.
hollywood_court 2y ago
I have a love/hate relationship with smoking. I quit smoking 5+ years ago when my child was born. But I always loved a smoke with a beer. But I also quit drinking. As a carpenter and electrician, I smoked many cigarettes during my career and they calmed me and allowed me to focus a bit better. However, I finally realized that few things say "hey look at me I'm am absolute idiot" quite like smoking. That's actually what I told myself over and over again to shame myself into quitting. I associated smoking with a few trashy individuals that I knew. I told myself that I didn't want to be like those people so I tricked my mind into quitting.
- parpfish 2y ago
  people start out wanting to smoke for whatever reason, but then the addiction kicks in and you just keep smoking even after that reason has passed. among adult smokers, i've always wondered what the breakdown was between people that actively like smoking and want it in their lives versus those that are ambivalent but quitting is too much of a hassle?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I'm a smoker and everyone I know who smokes hates it but it's just so fucking hard to quit. It takes active energy for months and months not to do it.
    - hollywood_court 2y ago
      I suggest using shame to leverage yourself into quitting. It's fallen out of favor in our society, but shame really should be a powerful motivator. I used it to quit smoking tobacco, quit drinking, and quit a 20+ habitual marijuana habit. I use shame to make myself do that extra bit of work in the evenings after my family has gone off to bed. Shame has plenty of good uses if leveraged properly.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        Currently hiding in my car smoking at work. I feel like a complete asshole.
Projectiboga 2y ago
I predate DARE. In 1980 we got a cool early 1970s film that was suprisingly neutral and only focused on Cannabis.
kmeisthax 2y ago
>What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes. It's easier than you think, but the techniques that actually work are all the ones in the no-no box that liberals like me know not to touch. Advertisers use them all the time: appeals to emotion, misleading and outright false comparisons, ridicule, etc. I cannot think of a single successful propaganda or advertising campaign that worked specifically because it embraced the whole "marketplace of ideas" debate club ideal. Speaking of "how to get 7th graders to smoke", anti-smoking and anti-vaping PSAs. They're so awful as advertising that they make smoking and vaping look good, because that is what advertising is designed to do. Make you feel good about the product being talked about. The few commercials that did actually get people to stop smoking back in the day were ones that were profoundly disturbing and had no positive emotional sentiment. Like the one where someone's smoking through a hole in their trachea. If you want to get people to stop smoking, you need to make it look as profoundly unsexy as possible, and that's something advertisers aren't great at doing. Likewise, for sexual harassment, you don't bombard people with incredibly obvious basic moral principles and legal minutiae. You make sexual harassers look like objects of ridicule. Cringe, as the kids say. My go-to example of how to do this would be Hbomberguy's early video essays[0], like the one where he systematically deconstructs all of Davis Aurini's toughboy affectations[1]. So let's break down the archetypal sex pest. They're not sexually harassing people because they need sex - in most countries you can just pay people for it now. Instead, they're doing it for the same reason my two male guinea pigs hump each other: to assert dominance. I want you to imagine the most domineering asshole you can think of, and then figure out what qualities will make them look pathetic rather than sexy. Again, if you want an example, perhaps check out this old video from The Onion about a sex pest dinosaur: https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-of-nature-s-first-sex-1819594790 https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-o... Forget the Social program, forget the Emotional program, I'm talking about the Make Smoking Cringe Again program. [0] No shade to his later work - it's also amazing, but in a different way. [1] People say he's still sipping that shot glass to this very day.
dctoedt 2y ago
In the first day or two of Navy nuclear power school in 1974, all of us junior officers in the new class (93 of us IIRC) were assembled in an auditorium for a don't-do-drugs lecture by a chief petty officer who was a "fleet sailor" — i.e., he'd been around the block a few times, so it was thought that young sailors would pay more attention to him — and had been assigned to get trained as the drug counselor. The speaker made one especially-memorable comment: "I'm told that shooting heroin feels like an all-over-body sexual climax. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds pretty neat." (The rest of the lecture was standard stuff about how doing drugs would get us de-nuked and basically end our careers.)
rdtsc 2y ago
> You can have a PhD and good intentions. You can have money and buy-in. You can do a bunch of reasonable things to prevent a problem that everyone agrees is bad. Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions... But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work? > Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk. That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.
chias 2y ago
"I understand these trainings exist solely for the purposes of ass-covering." This is not really true. They exist for shifting liability -- which is similar, but also quite different -- to where it needs to be. They exist so that you don't even have to listen to the "but that's just normal", "but we always do that", "i had no idea that wasn't allowed" excuses when a person gets in trouble. They exist because otherwise when someone does something that everybody including the perpetrator obviously knows was wrong, they can say "how was I supposed to know that was bad?" and suddenly you have to start arguing in a context where your opponent can "win" the argument by feigning being an idiot, which is a surefire way to have a shit day. Consider this: https://dynomight.net/teaching/ https://dynomight.net/teaching/
gumby 2y ago
I remember when the cigarette companies used to hire people to stand on street corners and just give them away (little three-cigarette packs) to encourage people to start or switch brands. Teenagers never have money so this was a great way to get them. I didn't smoke but I used to accept them and then give them to my smoker friends.
- swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
  You’re the one the programs warned us about, giving drugs away for free.
  - gumby 2y ago
    According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I am merely an provider and the liability rests with the employee who "posted" the cigarettes with me.
stackedinserter 2y ago
People subconsciously reject agendas that authorities (parents, school, government, corporations) push into their throats, what a surprising discovery.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
> We perceive ourselves in full 4000K HD with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound, but when we perceive each other, it’s like we’re watching a VHS tape that someone made by using a Motorola Razr phone c. 2007 to record the screen on the back of an airplane seat. Does anyone else feel the opposite? I can much more easily intuit how others feel and synthesize hypotheses on why they behaved the way they did than I can with myself. I have an infinite number of framings and reframings to choose from when it comes to my own behavior that it's difficult to objectively choose. I constantly ask myself how do I know that my own model isn't unconsciously avoiding negative feelings or conversely biased toward being too critical? So much so that I simply give up more than I like to admit.
- ksaun 2y ago
  Well, I have a similar difficulty in analyzing myself. So you are not alone. But I also struggle hypothesizing others' reasons for behavior. I can readily empathize with others, but often can't transfer from the emotional response to the underlying reasons/logic.
iamleppert 2y ago
I have a simple solution to end all world hunger, forever. Nuclear War.
ladzoppelin 2y ago
Like others have said its the lying and exaggeration on both sides that really made this a confusing topic to navigate. I wish there was a way to push a "wait until your brain is developed before anything" message without being pro drug or confusing.
nashashmi 2y ago
Here is what prevented me: My D.A.R.E. officer said to us (honestly?) when you take drugs you feel like you are on top of the world. You take it again and you again feel like you are on top of the world. This is called a high. And after that, you feel like just a little bit of trashy feeling from how you used to be. And so you take drugs again and again to keep the trashy feeling away and each time you feel trashier and trashier after the high is gone. Until people who have been drugs for so long have a difficult time ever becoming normal again. next what prevented me from doing this was that it is illegal. Plain and simple. I am not questioning the law. I am following it. Lastly, what prevents me is my community faith that has labeled it to be forbidden. OTOH, caffiene is also bad. My family told me so. And they drank it nevertheless. And I drank a few times, but very few. But I avoided it because children should not be drinking coffee/tea. Until college came. And then I had to. It was a hack. But I kept it disciplined. And then I got married to someone who always drank coffee. And now I am an addict. and my potassium is super high. And everything else in my body is in the gutters because of it. And I can't come off of it. It's a way to stave off depression. And stress. And anxiety. And keeps me in a positive state because I can drink and become a superworker and get all my work done, without addressing some of the more problematic stuff. All I have done is push the crash further down the timeline. Caffiene should be banned too. And probably ADHD drugs while we are at it.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  The vast majority of people don't have the same issues with caffeine as you do. Also, ADHD medication is regulated. It's an effective treatment for what can be a truly debilitating disorder affecting executive function, memory and emotional control. ADHD is not something that trying harder will fix.
porphyra 2y ago
I feel like humans, especially children, are in some respects similar to LLMs or current AI models. With an LLM, if you explicitly tell it not to do something, like keeping a secret hidden, it's notoriously eager to disobey the command and do just that. Similarly, if you tell generative AI like DALL-E to not include something, it will try super hard to include it nonetheless. It's as though once the concept is shown, they can't stop thinking about it. Maybe an "out of sight, out of mind" thing would do better than explicitly telling people not to do something?
dwhitney 2y ago
Contrarian view - the programs are working. Rates of smoking among teens over the past three decades: Ever used nicotine: 70.1% in 1991 to 17.8% in 2021; Occasional use of nicotine: 27.5% in 1991 to 3.8% in 2021; Frequent use of nicotine: 12.7% to 0.7%; Daily use of nicotine: 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021 https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking-study.php https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking... I suspect the same can be said for workplace sexual harassment and outlooks on diversity. I agree that the programs are dumb and the trainings are dumb, but they have an effect.
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
  This isn't contrarian, this is just correct and well understood. What's contrarian is the article suggesting that any attempts to change people's behavior, no matter how well intentioned thought-out, actually result in the opposite of the desired outcome.
  - syang737 2y ago
    While the statement "kids are smoking less cigarettes" is correct, not sure if that's proof that the programs are working. Naturally, teens are filling the void of cigarettes with vapes and e-cigs, seeing as 26% of high school students (https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/ https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/) have vaped. Whether the programs are working or not is more of a debate, but don't want this cherry picked stat to go untouched.
- defen 2y ago
  That's cigarette usage, not nicotine usage. Why would a teenager smoke when they can vape or use Zyns?
- foobarchu 2y ago
  I think that can be chalked up to other changes like the wild increases in cigarette prices, the near elimination of advertising, and cigarettes becoming culturally uncool (orthogonal to DAREs attempts). Your link shows that during the heyday of these campaigns usage rates were still rising. They didn't really drop until after the approach was dialed back, and they dropped most appreciably after DARE gave up on anti-drug messages entirely. The message of the article wasn't that you can't discourage drug use at all, it's that the means may be counterproductive. The means used in DARE were counterproductive.
pookha 2y ago
One of the main motivations that kept me from wanting to get involved with drugs was the T.V show COPS. As a young child I got to watch REALLY high people from the bottom rungs of society (all races and all creeds) get flashlight interrogated on T.V and or chased under mobile homes and crawl spaces by Belgian Malinois dogs out for blood. later in life if I got inebriated I'd think back to those faces on COPS and I'd start to feel shame and a return to sobriety. Being exposed to hard living (in the real world and not "scared straight" via prisoners) might have an effect that this author is breezing over.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  While COPS might have ancillary effects on some, it was largely voyeristic, triumphal poverty porn and propaganda used to justify the repression and brutalization of poor and minorities through selective Prohibition and over-prosecution.
TOGoS 2y ago
Only tangentially related to the main topic of the article, but the bit about the gym makes me want to say "that's an ADHD thing!". Which maybe the author already knows that. As if neurotypicals have an uncanny ability to simply skip over all the details of getting things done. Which explains both why they're able to get things done so quickly, and also why their constructions completely fall apart when you poke them with a stick. Or maybe getting stuck in the fractal of details is not specifically an ADHD thing, but the ADHD meme groups I'm in sure lead me to think it is. That said, I did manage to go to the gym regularly for a while. After a few times the routine of scoping out the equipment you want to use becomes habitual and the whole process becomes less overwhelming, though the do-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life requirement poses a challenge. For a few months, sure, but forever? I've got an infinite list of projects with infinite loose ends to attend to!
tech_ken 2y ago
It's definitely hard to change people, but I also think to some extent it's extremely easy if you know what you're doing and you're specific about the context. As the author notes: cults are really good at it. Another example is any entertainment performer, or even just a DJ: getting a crowd from one state ("cold") to another state ("hot") is well-understood game. On the other hand scientists seem to be very bad at it (if the last few decades of quantitative social science research are any indicator). My pet hypothesis is that this is because an experimental environment is actually a very bad way to reason about human behavior. When you're dealing with basic material phenomena (particles, energy, chemical reactions, even biological reactions to a certain extent) the behavior is 'isolatable'. It will happen in a predictable way under controlled conditions, and removing outside influences makes that behavior easier to observe. Human behavior is the exact opposite of 'isolatable' though: so much of what makes us act the way we do is the influence of outside factors. In a general sense I don't even think it really makes sense to imagine a 'single person' or 'isolated behavior', our mind exists in mutual definition with the social world around us. Indeed the successful examples I listed above are successful precisely because they take control of your environment: a secluded meditation area or a sweaty club are critical tools for changing the way someone is. As a result I think scientists often have a really skewed understanding of what motivates people, because anything they do in a controlled environment basically can never generalize by definition. Want to get kids to stop smoking? Don't treat the kids, treat the media environment they live in. But this isn't something that can be replicated in a generic/engineering/scientific manner; there's no magic recipe it's just common sense and coalition building (getting buy-in from the people who make media). But because these tools don't fit cleanly into an experimental framework they kind of get sidelined. Instead we get endless variations on nudge theory and little cognitive games to try and induce the behavior we want. Shockingly this fails time and time again. Preventing sexual harassment in the workplace simply cannot come from a PowerPoint deck or training, it will only follow from a massive overhaul in the cultural milleu. Look at any successful grassroots political movement: find people who are primed to receive your message; convince them to support you; use their support and evangelism to widen the circle to the next group of slightly less-primed people; repeat until massive; force structural/cultural change through a crush of bodies. Simple as. edit: hm okay I clicked one link in the OP and it seems this point is not very original https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-people https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-peo...
tracker1 2y ago
I think the absolute best anti-drug program is volunteering for homeless outreach programs. You'll see the level of f'd up that a lot of people will go to and through in order to get and keep taking drugs. It also helps to humanize drug victims and homelessness.
somethoughts 2y ago
In all seriousness (although half joking) - these days it seems perhaps the best way to get people not to do something is to make them think that some "Big" corporate monopoly - with an army of lobbyists - want to sucker them into buying their mass produced product for huge $$$ profits. The movie "Thank You for Smoking" has a great scene between Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Firearms lobbyist caricatures [1]. [1] Merchants Of Death Thank You For Smoking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20
currency 2y ago
>changing people is so surprisingly hard—no matter how much you focus on the person in front of you, you’ll never appreciate the million tiny influences that made them who they are and that keep them that way. If you really want to make someone different, you might have to change the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the things they learn in school, the friends they hang out with, the role models they look up to, etc. I'm a white guy who grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, so you can imagine what my implicit biases are like pretty reliably. What helps me get away from that is access to social media sites like X, reddit, and tumblr, where I follow people who are as different from me as possible. I have updated my influences. I listen. I pay attention to my internal dialogue and reactions and try to challenge myself. >and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult. Right. It's one thing to open myself to worlds I'm not aware of. It's something completely different to try to control what someone else experiences. Another way of saying that is—as an atheist, I don't find religions interesting or useful. But I know that I'll never be able to sell atheism to anyone if their religion is a deeply meaningful part of their worldview and identity. Any attempt to do so has to start by destroying that world and that identity, and that kind of violence is anathema to anyone with the smallest bit of empathy. We are made of our influences and this essay covers that well. It's a great essay that covers so much more than smoking (or drugs). Thanks for the link.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Damn, this is something Big Tobacco could use today in the global South where they still use cartoon packaging and school donations to increase tobacco use. https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children-tobacco-indonesia/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children... https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-fctc/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-...
ta_9390 2y ago
> A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed. I have always belived that the widespread of cheap psychological content aimed for average people is a mental-unhealthy plague and would only make them overconfident in judging their own and others mental health, this is why we see overuse of terms like bi-polar, trauma, narcissist etc.. in social media where teenagers are active.
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
[dead]

205 points by HR01 2y ago

I remember hearing rumors that tobacco companies funded anti-smoking campaigns because they realized it just made smoking look that much cooler. It's certainly easy to imagine a dual purpose ad that will appear positive and affirming to adults but super lame to kids and make them want to do the opposite.

piker 2y ago
I believe big tobacco was required to fund those as part of a mass tort settlement.
bagels 2y ago
This is the source of those ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...
arrowsmith 2y ago
As parodied by South Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqglh7WoBz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqglh7WoBz0
FMecha 2y ago
Given that this was required by the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement as pointed out, is it safe to say that the U.S. federal government accidentally mandated tobacco companies to make a brand-new form of youth smoking dogwhistle?

nobleach 2y ago

Show them a Quentin Tarantino film? ...or any film for that matter where the main characters seem so "cool, unfazed and untouchable". To a young (mostly male) mind, that's the ultimate goal; to be in charge. For most beginning smokers, it's not about the inhalation of tobacco, but the subversive "screw the rules, those don't apply to me" façade. This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media. Make the stupid guy in the movie the one that's dumb enough to smoke. Make everyone laugh at him every time he tries to look cool.

matthewaveryusa 2y ago
Exactly, these are the kinds of ads we need: https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smoking-campaign-uses-oral-sex-imagery https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smo...
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  I was thinking more like this https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its-gay-to-smoke-1819594854 https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its... But that one is not bad either :)
  - npteljes 2y ago
    Got a good laugh out of me, thanks for sharing!
mrob 2y ago
This has been tried before. In Waterworld, the bad guys are literally called the "Smokers" and smoking is a big part of their culture. It's so over the top it seems more like a parody of anti-smoking campaigns. I doubt it ever convinced anybody not to smoke, and I think any similar attempt is doomed to fail in the same way. Kids are good at detecting when you're trying to manipulate them, and it doesn't matter if you have good intentions.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Most adults claim that they're not influenced by advertising, yet studies show they are. I'm quite confident the same effect would be found in teens.
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    Negative advertising and positive advertising are quite different. I'm definitely affected by both, but generally if I feel I'm being nannied my instinct is to go the other way. People don't need to be "convinced" to do things that are good for them - if they're not doing it, they likely just have reasons that you don't understand.

makach 2y ago

Put them on fire?

Joker_vD 2y ago
Or run them over with a forklift!
- cheschire 2y ago
  Staplerfahrer Klaus as an anti-smoking mascot. Never would've had that thought before today. Thanks for that.
  - ooterness 2y ago
    For those unaware, Staplerfahrer Klaus is a gory, dark-comedy PSA about the hazards of forklifts in warehouses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck Most training modules are dry and clinical. This one is the opposite. Many people are killed, dismembered, and otherwise mutilated. I think the combination of good comedy and vividly illustrated consequences makes Klaus far more effective and memorable than the average corporate training module that OP is discussing.

sandworm101 2y ago

Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix. So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.

throwup238 2y ago
Vapers spend a lot less. As a pack-a-day smoker I was spending $7-10 a day on cigarettes. Before I quit altogether, I was spending $20-30 a month on nicotine salts, $20 a month on cartridges, and $100 once a year or two for mods and batteries. Since I was working from home I was vaping constantly, so I didn’t reduce nicotine consumption despite the cost reduction. I could buy a brand new mod every month and it’d still be cheaper. I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  So nicotine salts are synthetic right? Is there a reason people consume them via oral pouches, does a pill simply not work? Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Yes they’re synthetic. Pills take much longer than pouches since they have to go through the digestive system, whereas pouches steadily release nicotine that is absorbed quickly by the gums. Method of consumption is definitely important. I couldn’t fully switch to vapes until I found one that had the same “throat feel” as my American Spirits. Not just the type of nicotine (salts) but the exact brand of vaporizer and coil style. Just like people prefer the taste and ritual of coffee to caffeine pills.

amadeuspagel 2y ago

The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation. This is hard to see if you only consider well-meaning attempts to change people, which you might not consider manipulation because that word has a negative connotation.

jawns 2y ago
And yet ... look at how much manipulation happens at the political level. I find myself constantly wondering how people can be so gullible as to buy the drivel they're being fed.
- Clent 2y ago
  This is a different form a manipulation. No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy. The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's
madaxe_again 2y ago
Absolutely this. You cannot get a person to change an opinion, a belief, a tendency, by tackling it head on. It’s almost like we have an autonomous immune response to information which challenges our preconceptions or preferences. I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit. Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong. Contrary creatures, we.

nerdjon 2y ago

I firmly believe that the problem in the US regarding how we handle drugs in the US is that it is so focused on Shame. Same with how we do sex ed and many other things. We shame it so much, that when you have questions or you start thinking about it, you don't have people who you can go to and ask questions without judgement or being preached at. And then of course once you do try something, it is criminalized so you can't go talk to someone to get help without being worried about going to Jail (depending on where you are). It also doesn't help that so many of these systems love to talk about how Pot is just as bad as every other drug, which of course it isn't. I feel like we need more of a focus on compassion instead of just beating us over the head with "Drugs are Bad mkay" so of course we are going to rebel against adults telling us this. Especially when we know we can't have alcohol but they can, so are they telling the truth about drugs? Same with Smoking. The message gets mixed up when we are being told all these things that we shouldn't do but adults are able to do some of them.

ganzuul 2y ago
Shaming must be one of our worst generational traumas. I don't think millennials like me can stop it, but Gen Z already has a slim chance of doing it.

langsoul-com 2y ago

Most interesting part is how we view changing ourselves VS others so critically different. We know how hard it is to change ourselves, yet view others as fuzzy and that it's easy, just enact a few advertisements and a program or two, done. But at the same time, it's basically impossible to know what will work until it hits the field. Better to just throw a bunch of stuff and then adjust according to the results.

patwolf 2y ago

This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the "don't do drugs" speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he'd pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore. "This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode." It's a wonder that didn't work.

User23 2y ago
It was nice of them to teach kids how to identify real marijuana.
13of40 2y ago
I never attended a DARE class, but in the early 90s the t-shirts were everywhere so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically".
- marcodiego 2y ago
  In Brazil, in the 90's there was a campaign called "Drogas nem morto" (drugs not even dead). I heard about a guy who used a t-shirt of the campaign to sell drugs.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  DARE to resist drugs. I don't do dares. (joke)
- Izkata 2y ago
  > so my memory of it was people wearing the shirts "ironically". Drugs Are Really Enjoyable/Excellent
- buildsjets 2y ago
  Still have one, vintage '91 to '93 or so. I wear it to Phish shows.
2y ago

t-3 2y ago

The reason "anti-drug training", "diversity training", etc., don't work is that lecturing is not conducive to learning for the vast majority of people. Most people need real life experience to internalize that people that seem very different superficially are just the same humans as they are, that addictive drugs can make you poor and sick and waste a lot of time, that getting a criminal record will fuck you over in every way possible, and so on. Peer pressure works - if all your friends think drugs are really stupid you probably won't ever try them, but you probably will if they all do them. Indoctrination in this fashion works well in isolation but tends to fall apart as people move socially and geographically.

h2odragon 2y ago

"Drugs are Bad" except all the ones we advertise on TV and might require school kids to take in order to attend school.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
The War on Drugs was used to target Nixon's perceived opponents: hippies and black people. Later, Reagan couldn't relate to poor or minorities, so he (and Nancy) doubled-down on "tough on crime" militarization and ineffective PSAs.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

You could always have a tobacco company sponsor a prime-time animated TV program intended for the whole family to watch before it was kids' bedtime. Where the main characters took regular breaks to smoke their Winstons, using those ancient Zippo lighters that basically rubbed two sticks together to light up. Fred & Barney never looked so relaxed and satisfied any other time.

flobosg 2y ago

Another example of interventions with reversed outcomes: “baby simulator” programs increase the rate of teen pregnancy – https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-pregnancy/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-p...

washadjeffmad 2y ago
In high school, I had to "raise" a bag of flour for a week with a girl that I was dating as part of an assignment. One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc. It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago
  > One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc. Unfathomably based.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    She and the other Catholic girls were raised to believe the only thing in the world worse than being an unwed mother was to be a pregnant teenager, so they grew up with some complicated fixations. By their logic, they needed to experts in all the ways to be safe to prevent it from happening, but pre-internet, their info was a little dodgy. One summer, they had a "No boys in the hot tub, at all" rule. It took some convincing to get them to explain why, but someone had heard that sperm. could swim. in water. ... And they'd just live in there, like goldfish? Did they need to be fed? Did they have maps? That one was probably the most precious. They never really questioned how the aggressive little Olympians might end up there in the first place, and these girls could all drive.

iamthepieman 2y ago

If you want someone to stop something you have to offer them a world of opportunities to replace it. Because you don't know exactly what will slot into that gap due to lifestyle, financial, personality and social factors. If you want someone to DO something you just need to show that it COULD fill a gap in some other part of their life. If it's addictive as well then they don't need to experiment for long before it's a solid part of their life. Getting someone to stop plays off loss aversion and sunk cost.

aeonik 2y ago

It's pretty funny in a sad way to me that this article talks about how little we know about human behavior and struggling to find answers about why the kids had a backfire effect. I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol. I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished. The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare. Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently. It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails. Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.

pjc50 2y ago
Indeed. People want "reproducible" campaigns, but that necessitates being entirely one-way. As soon as you start having a real connection with other humans it's non-reproducible.
lrivers 2y ago
One way to ruin kids desire to drink is to offer them tastes of what you’re drinking from a relatively young age. Whatcha drinking daddy? A beer! Want to try it? YUCK!!!! This removes the rebellion portion from drinking to a degree.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  Unless they end up liking it, which I know some that applies to. Though, they did end up fine.
csours 2y ago
"I am not a fish" - Seth Godin As the author of the post says in a reply to a comment: > ' This is a common outcome for programs like this: "It doesn't work, but the adults like it!" '

quacked 2y ago

At the core of the problem is that social services that address the physical consequences of smoking (mostly medical professionals and financial counselors) are run by people who believe that everyone ought to be treated similarly and have similar opportunities, regardless of behavior. Smoking is considered "a problem" to society because intelligent, caring people that notice that smoking injuries and medical conditions cause sorrow, strife, and excess medical waste. They've run huge propaganda campaigns to get us to care about this problem: literally "other people are dying because of this habit so you need to hate this habit." But the people who smoke usually don't care about the social sorrow & strife caused by smoking, and they don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide hospitals or lung cancer screenings. They just smoke because they enjoy it and don't really anticipate or care about the consequences. So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers. The answers that actually solve "the problem"--ban cigarette sales outright, imprison or exile smokers, refuse medical treatment to smokers--are unthinkable to the meddlers, because they genuinely believe in their principles, especially "everyone in society should be taken care of by competent people". (For the record: I don't smoke, and I don't think anyone should smoke.)

homefree 2y ago
> “ So really, what's going on is that well-intentioned meddlers are trying to meddle in the lives of people who don't share the utopian, collaborative values of the meddlers. Predictably, this doesn't work.” It actually did work incredibly well (at least in the US). Smoking went from something the majority of the American population did that was present in almost all private and public spaces to something only a small minority does in a small number of places. Whether or not you agree with the methods, I think it is necessary to recognize that the methods worked.
- quacked 2y ago
  Yeah, that's true. I was thinking more about the "at risk" populations that are very resilient to smoking interventions, which are what the seventh-grade propaganda campaigns that I sat through and are talked about in the article are trying to capture and influence. There are still 20-30M adult smokers in the US, and cigarette sales are pretty stable. Smoking is still considered "a problem" by smoking interventionists, but they're not doing a great job at finally stamping it out, because they need harsher methods than learning campaigns and well-intentioned propaganda. Edit: I had removed "predictably, this doesn't work" from my original comment before you commented for the exact reason that you commented. To a degree, it does work, on people who typically follow rules, when it's combined with taxes and bans that make it a crime to smoke.

kazinator 2y ago

If you see footnote 1: "In a later paper where the researchers caught up with these same students again, the difference between the Social and Emotional programs had mysteriously disappeared." It almost seems as if the researchers triggered something resembling the Streisand effect. The Social and Emotional programs were obviously intended to discourage the kids from smoking, but participation in those programs was only serving to keep the kids' attention on smoking, and making some of them curious. The kids might also have gotten the message that trying smoking is okay, as long as it's not related to peer pressure or feelings, but one's inherent curiosity. Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure will not block smoking that is not caused by peer pressure.

ordu 2y ago
*> Programs designed to produce resilience against peer pressure... ... also could have a unintended effect. A kid could start to notice a peer pressure and get more clear idea how to follow trends or even predict them and to run ahead of them. Teenagers are really concerned about what their peers think about them. If you tell them all about peer pressure, they will listen attentively, and develop a strategy how to grow in the eyes of their peers. Very bright could get the idea that you can be the source of peer pressure. Lets start smoking and lets make all others to start smoking too. I would say, that if you talk with kids about smoking, some of kids get the idea that if they were seen smoking, then they will look more knowledgeable about smoking than you. Or maybe they will see rebellious and independent from boring adults. Especially rebellious if adults talk about dangers of smoking all the time. People's minds are difficult complex machines, they could react at your stimulus in unexpected ways, and the more ways you can predict the more mind-blowing unpredictable become.

poulpy123 2y ago

Requiem for a dream did more against drugs than any campaign

Workaccount2 2y ago

The fundamental problem is that drugs are fun and the bad effects are offset by years or even decades. Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.

kenjackson 2y ago
And they are usually addictive. Almost every person I know who smokes says they derive little pleasure they once did, but are addicted to nicotine and can’t stop. And as a non-smoker, it doesn’t look fun, but I trust it was at one point in their life - I guess.
- devoutsalsa 2y ago
  Smoking Is Awesome, by Kurzgesagt - In A Nutshell, touched on how smokers eventually need cigarettes just to feel normal. https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd
  - alt227 2y ago
    > touched on how smokers eventually need cigarettes just to feel normal. This is the same for every addictive substance, no?
    - asdfgrasdf123 2y ago
      I was amphetamine addict, I used daily for a year, very excessively in later stage. When I stopped I felt normal, it was not fun but I did not need amphetamine to get through the day. There is no physical urge to use more, you do it because you like it. It is very different with opiates I heard, but you said every. The word addiction pushed me towards drugs because I thought if I can stop any time it is not addiction and it is fine.

nkrisc 2y ago

> You know those signs on the highway that say things like, “Drive safely! Over 20 people have died on this highway so far this year!”? They maybe cause more people to crash and die. Ah yeah, those signs that completely remove the human tragedy of those who lost their lives driving. Instead you see something like "99 people died on this highway" and for a moment I can't always help but think, "so close to 100!" before remembering these are dead people, not just a number. What always reminds me to drive more carefully and not be so complacent is reading about some family has been torn apart by some little driving mistake that I could have easily made as well. It's tragic and depressing, but that's what reminds me to think about my own family when I'm driving. With regards to smoking, what convinced me to never take up smoking was seeing what 50 year old smokers looked like. Yikes. Should some lifelong smokers be fortunate enough to live to 80, taking a look at them will typically put to rest any remaining desire to smoke.

furyofantares 2y ago

Lots of great points, although a sexual harassment quiz for adults seems fairly different than a multiweek program for kids. And the article seems to argue that interventions are unlikely to change people while also accepting that the drug study did change the kids in the wrong way. To me that doesn't indicate that it's necessarily wrong to try to intervene with short-ish programs in schools, it indicates the content of those programs might be really bad. Maybe that program didn't actually harm kids, beyond wasting their time, and was a statistical outlier. I don't have much opinion that. But I can understand why interventions can backfire if they're inauthentic. When I figure out you've been lying to me, I want to throw everything you said out the window. If you also made me make some videotaped promise saying something YOU want me to believe then you can bet I'm gonna feel betrayed too.

hollywood_court 2y ago

I have a love/hate relationship with smoking. I quit smoking 5+ years ago when my child was born. But I always loved a smoke with a beer. But I also quit drinking. As a carpenter and electrician, I smoked many cigarettes during my career and they calmed me and allowed me to focus a bit better. However, I finally realized that few things say "hey look at me I'm am absolute idiot" quite like smoking. That's actually what I told myself over and over again to shame myself into quitting. I associated smoking with a few trashy individuals that I knew. I told myself that I didn't want to be like those people so I tricked my mind into quitting.

parpfish 2y ago
people start out wanting to smoke for whatever reason, but then the addiction kicks in and you just keep smoking even after that reason has passed. among adult smokers, i've always wondered what the breakdown was between people that actively like smoking and want it in their lives versus those that are ambivalent but quitting is too much of a hassle?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I'm a smoker and everyone I know who smokes hates it but it's just so fucking hard to quit. It takes active energy for months and months not to do it.
  - hollywood_court 2y ago
    I suggest using shame to leverage yourself into quitting. It's fallen out of favor in our society, but shame really should be a powerful motivator. I used it to quit smoking tobacco, quit drinking, and quit a 20+ habitual marijuana habit. I use shame to make myself do that extra bit of work in the evenings after my family has gone off to bed. Shame has plenty of good uses if leveraged properly.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Currently hiding in my car smoking at work. I feel like a complete asshole.

Projectiboga 2y ago

I predate DARE. In 1980 we got a cool early 1970s film that was suprisingly neutral and only focused on Cannabis.

kmeisthax 2y ago

>What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes. It's easier than you think, but the techniques that actually work are all the ones in the no-no box that liberals like me know not to touch. Advertisers use them all the time: appeals to emotion, misleading and outright false comparisons, ridicule, etc. I cannot think of a single successful propaganda or advertising campaign that worked specifically because it embraced the whole "marketplace of ideas" debate club ideal. Speaking of "how to get 7th graders to smoke", anti-smoking and anti-vaping PSAs. They're so awful as advertising that they make smoking and vaping look good, because that is what advertising is designed to do. Make you feel good about the product being talked about. The few commercials that did actually get people to stop smoking back in the day were ones that were profoundly disturbing and had no positive emotional sentiment. Like the one where someone's smoking through a hole in their trachea. If you want to get people to stop smoking, you need to make it look as profoundly unsexy as possible, and that's something advertisers aren't great at doing. Likewise, for sexual harassment, you don't bombard people with incredibly obvious basic moral principles and legal minutiae. You make sexual harassers look like objects of ridicule. Cringe, as the kids say. My go-to example of how to do this would be Hbomberguy's early video essays[0], like the one where he systematically deconstructs all of Davis Aurini's toughboy affectations[1]. So let's break down the archetypal sex pest. They're not sexually harassing people because they need sex - in most countries you can just pay people for it now. Instead, they're doing it for the same reason my two male guinea pigs hump each other: to assert dominance. I want you to imagine the most domineering asshole you can think of, and then figure out what qualities will make them look pathetic rather than sexy. Again, if you want an example, perhaps check out this old video from The Onion about a sex pest dinosaur: https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-of-nature-s-first-sex-1819594790 https://www.theonion.com/paleontologists-discover-skeleton-o... Forget the Social program, forget the Emotional program, I'm talking about the Make Smoking Cringe Again program. [0] No shade to his later work - it's also amazing, but in a different way. [1] People say he's still sipping that shot glass to this very day.

dctoedt 2y ago

In the first day or two of Navy nuclear power school in 1974, all of us junior officers in the new class (93 of us IIRC) were assembled in an auditorium for a don't-do-drugs lecture by a chief petty officer who was a "fleet sailor" — i.e., he'd been around the block a few times, so it was thought that young sailors would pay more attention to him — and had been assigned to get trained as the drug counselor. The speaker made one especially-memorable comment: "I'm told that shooting heroin feels like an all-over-body sexual climax. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds pretty neat." (The rest of the lecture was standard stuff about how doing drugs would get us de-nuked and basically end our careers.)

rdtsc 2y ago

> You can have a PhD and good intentions. You can have money and buy-in. You can do a bunch of reasonable things to prevent a problem that everyone agrees is bad. Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions... But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work? > Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk. That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.

chias 2y ago

"I understand these trainings exist solely for the purposes of ass-covering." This is not really true. They exist for shifting liability -- which is similar, but also quite different -- to where it needs to be. They exist so that you don't even have to listen to the "but that's just normal", "but we always do that", "i had no idea that wasn't allowed" excuses when a person gets in trouble. They exist because otherwise when someone does something that everybody including the perpetrator obviously knows was wrong, they can say "how was I supposed to know that was bad?" and suddenly you have to start arguing in a context where your opponent can "win" the argument by feigning being an idiot, which is a surefire way to have a shit day. Consider this: https://dynomight.net/teaching/ https://dynomight.net/teaching/

gumby 2y ago

I remember when the cigarette companies used to hire people to stand on street corners and just give them away (little three-cigarette packs) to encourage people to start or switch brands. Teenagers never have money so this was a great way to get them. I didn't smoke but I used to accept them and then give them to my smoker friends.

swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
You’re the one the programs warned us about, giving drugs away for free.
- gumby 2y ago
  According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I am merely an provider and the liability rests with the employee who "posted" the cigarettes with me.

stackedinserter 2y ago

People subconsciously reject agendas that authorities (parents, school, government, corporations) push into their throats, what a surprising discovery.

kelseyfrog 2y ago

> We perceive ourselves in full 4000K HD with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound, but when we perceive each other, it’s like we’re watching a VHS tape that someone made by using a Motorola Razr phone c. 2007 to record the screen on the back of an airplane seat. Does anyone else feel the opposite? I can much more easily intuit how others feel and synthesize hypotheses on why they behaved the way they did than I can with myself. I have an infinite number of framings and reframings to choose from when it comes to my own behavior that it's difficult to objectively choose. I constantly ask myself how do I know that my own model isn't unconsciously avoiding negative feelings or conversely biased toward being too critical? So much so that I simply give up more than I like to admit.

ksaun 2y ago
Well, I have a similar difficulty in analyzing myself. So you are not alone. But I also struggle hypothesizing others' reasons for behavior. I can readily empathize with others, but often can't transfer from the emotional response to the underlying reasons/logic.

iamleppert 2y ago

I have a simple solution to end all world hunger, forever. Nuclear War.

ladzoppelin 2y ago

Like others have said its the lying and exaggeration on both sides that really made this a confusing topic to navigate. I wish there was a way to push a "wait until your brain is developed before anything" message without being pro drug or confusing.

nashashmi 2y ago

Here is what prevented me: My D.A.R.E. officer said to us (honestly?) when you take drugs you feel like you are on top of the world. You take it again and you again feel like you are on top of the world. This is called a high. And after that, you feel like just a little bit of trashy feeling from how you used to be. And so you take drugs again and again to keep the trashy feeling away and each time you feel trashier and trashier after the high is gone. Until people who have been drugs for so long have a difficult time ever becoming normal again. next what prevented me from doing this was that it is illegal. Plain and simple. I am not questioning the law. I am following it. Lastly, what prevents me is my community faith that has labeled it to be forbidden. OTOH, caffiene is also bad. My family told me so. And they drank it nevertheless. And I drank a few times, but very few. But I avoided it because children should not be drinking coffee/tea. Until college came. And then I had to. It was a hack. But I kept it disciplined. And then I got married to someone who always drank coffee. And now I am an addict. and my potassium is super high. And everything else in my body is in the gutters because of it. And I can't come off of it. It's a way to stave off depression. And stress. And anxiety. And keeps me in a positive state because I can drink and become a superworker and get all my work done, without addressing some of the more problematic stuff. All I have done is push the crash further down the timeline. Caffiene should be banned too. And probably ADHD drugs while we are at it.

kayodelycaon 2y ago
The vast majority of people don't have the same issues with caffeine as you do. Also, ADHD medication is regulated. It's an effective treatment for what can be a truly debilitating disorder affecting executive function, memory and emotional control. ADHD is not something that trying harder will fix.

porphyra 2y ago

I feel like humans, especially children, are in some respects similar to LLMs or current AI models. With an LLM, if you explicitly tell it not to do something, like keeping a secret hidden, it's notoriously eager to disobey the command and do just that. Similarly, if you tell generative AI like DALL-E to not include something, it will try super hard to include it nonetheless. It's as though once the concept is shown, they can't stop thinking about it. Maybe an "out of sight, out of mind" thing would do better than explicitly telling people not to do something?

dwhitney 2y ago

Contrarian view - the programs are working. Rates of smoking among teens over the past three decades: Ever used nicotine: 70.1% in 1991 to 17.8% in 2021; Occasional use of nicotine: 27.5% in 1991 to 3.8% in 2021; Frequent use of nicotine: 12.7% to 0.7%; Daily use of nicotine: 9.8% in 1991 to 0.6% in 2021 https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking-study.php https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/teen-cigarette-smoking... I suspect the same can be said for workplace sexual harassment and outlooks on diversity. I agree that the programs are dumb and the trainings are dumb, but they have an effect.

knowaveragejoe 2y ago
This isn't contrarian, this is just correct and well understood. What's contrarian is the article suggesting that any attempts to change people's behavior, no matter how well intentioned thought-out, actually result in the opposite of the desired outcome.
- syang737 2y ago
  While the statement "kids are smoking less cigarettes" is correct, not sure if that's proof that the programs are working. Naturally, teens are filling the void of cigarettes with vapes and e-cigs, seeing as 26% of high school students (https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/ https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/vaping-statistics/) have vaped. Whether the programs are working or not is more of a debate, but don't want this cherry picked stat to go untouched.
defen 2y ago
That's cigarette usage, not nicotine usage. Why would a teenager smoke when they can vape or use Zyns?
foobarchu 2y ago
I think that can be chalked up to other changes like the wild increases in cigarette prices, the near elimination of advertising, and cigarettes becoming culturally uncool (orthogonal to DAREs attempts). Your link shows that during the heyday of these campaigns usage rates were still rising. They didn't really drop until after the approach was dialed back, and they dropped most appreciably after DARE gave up on anti-drug messages entirely. The message of the article wasn't that you can't discourage drug use at all, it's that the means may be counterproductive. The means used in DARE were counterproductive.

pookha 2y ago

One of the main motivations that kept me from wanting to get involved with drugs was the T.V show COPS. As a young child I got to watch REALLY high people from the bottom rungs of society (all races and all creeds) get flashlight interrogated on T.V and or chased under mobile homes and crawl spaces by Belgian Malinois dogs out for blood. later in life if I got inebriated I'd think back to those faces on COPS and I'd start to feel shame and a return to sobriety. Being exposed to hard living (in the real world and not "scared straight" via prisoners) might have an effect that this author is breezing over.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
While COPS might have ancillary effects on some, it was largely voyeristic, triumphal poverty porn and propaganda used to justify the repression and brutalization of poor and minorities through selective Prohibition and over-prosecution.

TOGoS 2y ago

Only tangentially related to the main topic of the article, but the bit about the gym makes me want to say "that's an ADHD thing!". Which maybe the author already knows that. As if neurotypicals have an uncanny ability to simply skip over all the details of getting things done. Which explains both why they're able to get things done so quickly, and also why their constructions completely fall apart when you poke them with a stick. Or maybe getting stuck in the fractal of details is not specifically an ADHD thing, but the ADHD meme groups I'm in sure lead me to think it is. That said, I did manage to go to the gym regularly for a while. After a few times the routine of scoping out the equipment you want to use becomes habitual and the whole process becomes less overwhelming, though the do-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life requirement poses a challenge. For a few months, sure, but forever? I've got an infinite list of projects with infinite loose ends to attend to!

tech_ken 2y ago

It's definitely hard to change people, but I also think to some extent it's extremely easy if you know what you're doing and you're specific about the context. As the author notes: cults are really good at it. Another example is any entertainment performer, or even just a DJ: getting a crowd from one state ("cold") to another state ("hot") is well-understood game. On the other hand scientists seem to be very bad at it (if the last few decades of quantitative social science research are any indicator). My pet hypothesis is that this is because an experimental environment is actually a very bad way to reason about human behavior. When you're dealing with basic material phenomena (particles, energy, chemical reactions, even biological reactions to a certain extent) the behavior is 'isolatable'. It will happen in a predictable way under controlled conditions, and removing outside influences makes that behavior easier to observe. Human behavior is the exact opposite of 'isolatable' though: so much of what makes us act the way we do is the influence of outside factors. In a general sense I don't even think it really makes sense to imagine a 'single person' or 'isolated behavior', our mind exists in mutual definition with the social world around us. Indeed the successful examples I listed above are successful precisely because they take control of your environment: a secluded meditation area or a sweaty club are critical tools for changing the way someone is. As a result I think scientists often have a really skewed understanding of what motivates people, because anything they do in a controlled environment basically can never generalize by definition. Want to get kids to stop smoking? Don't treat the kids, treat the media environment they live in. But this isn't something that can be replicated in a generic/engineering/scientific manner; there's no magic recipe it's just common sense and coalition building (getting buy-in from the people who make media). But because these tools don't fit cleanly into an experimental framework they kind of get sidelined. Instead we get endless variations on nudge theory and little cognitive games to try and induce the behavior we want. Shockingly this fails time and time again. Preventing sexual harassment in the workplace simply cannot come from a PowerPoint deck or training, it will only follow from a massive overhaul in the cultural milleu. Look at any successful grassroots political movement: find people who are primed to receive your message; convince them to support you; use their support and evangelism to widen the circle to the next group of slightly less-primed people; repeat until massive; force structural/cultural change through a crush of bodies. Simple as. edit: hm okay I clicked one link in the OP and it seems this point is not very original https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-people https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/its-hard-to-change-peo...

tracker1 2y ago

I think the absolute best anti-drug program is volunteering for homeless outreach programs. You'll see the level of f'd up that a lot of people will go to and through in order to get and keep taking drugs. It also helps to humanize drug victims and homelessness.

somethoughts 2y ago

In all seriousness (although half joking) - these days it seems perhaps the best way to get people not to do something is to make them think that some "Big" corporate monopoly - with an army of lobbyists - want to sucker them into buying their mass produced product for huge $$$ profits. The movie "Thank You for Smoking" has a great scene between Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Firearms lobbyist caricatures [1]. [1] Merchants Of Death Thank You For Smoking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss0jLHvMO20

currency 2y ago

>changing people is so surprisingly hard—no matter how much you focus on the person in front of you, you’ll never appreciate the million tiny influences that made them who they are and that keep them that way. If you really want to make someone different, you might have to change the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the things they learn in school, the friends they hang out with, the role models they look up to, etc. I'm a white guy who grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, so you can imagine what my implicit biases are like pretty reliably. What helps me get away from that is access to social media sites like X, reddit, and tumblr, where I follow people who are as different from me as possible. I have updated my influences. I listen. I pay attention to my internal dialogue and reactions and try to challenge myself. >and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult. Right. It's one thing to open myself to worlds I'm not aware of. It's something completely different to try to control what someone else experiences. Another way of saying that is—as an atheist, I don't find religions interesting or useful. But I know that I'll never be able to sell atheism to anyone if their religion is a deeply meaningful part of their worldview and identity. Any attempt to do so has to start by destroying that world and that identity, and that kind of violence is anathema to anyone with the smallest bit of empathy. We are made of our influences and this essay covers that well. It's a great essay that covers so much more than smoking (or drugs). Thanks for the link.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Damn, this is something Big Tobacco could use today in the global South where they still use cartoon packaging and school donations to increase tobacco use. https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children-tobacco-indonesia/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/30/health/chain-smoking-children... https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-fctc/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/pmi-who-...

ta_9390 2y ago

> A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed. I have always belived that the widespread of cheap psychological content aimed for average people is a mental-unhealthy plague and would only make them overconfident in judging their own and others mental health, this is why we see overuse of terms like bi-polar, trauma, narcissist etc.. in social media where teenagers are active.

TheRealNGenius 2y ago

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