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Obesity in the US is epidemic because of food producers using your same antisocial logic. "But if we don't add sugar, people won't keep choosing our brand over
by nurple 2y ago
Obesity in the US is epidemic because of food producers using your same antisocial logic. "But if we don't add sugar, people won't keep choosing our brand over the sweeter ones, this is our most important metric." Sugar should absolutely be more regulated, it's killing people.
It's a proven fact that the sugar producers have hidden the real dangers of overconsumption for decades to protect their precious money. Same thing with cigarettes, same with apps that use psychological and/or emotional manipulation to boost their "most important metric".
Here's a metric that might be more important than money to you: the teen suicide rate has increased by 62% since the advent of social media.
So, how much of the social media company's resources get spent increasing their most important metric vs educating parents and kids on the dangers of the technology they're trying to get them addicted to? If they do it responsibly, it's going to negatively impact their most important metric, and so they don't, and instead continue profiting from the negative externalities.
How many children ending their own lives is a 10% bump in your market cap worth? Perhaps that's a ratio that should be shown on an electronic display on the walls in these companies.
- stickfigure 2y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that obesity is an epidemic because of the misguided anti-fat crusade driven by well-meaning but naive people who (still!) believe that "eat fat get fat". You can walk down the ice cream isle and see countless sorbets advertising "fat free!" as if it's healthy. We are at the tail of a huge shift to a carbohydrate-rich diet, and refined sugars are only part of the problem. Your body converts bread and starch to glucose almost as quickly. The fearmongering about social media sounds a bit like the anti-fat crusade to me. The evidence is thin yet it makes people incredibly loud and angry. And remember one of the first rules of statistics, correlation is not causality. I don't need to quote the relevant xkcd number to this audience.
- notaustinpowers 2y ago> ...obesity is an epidemic because of the misguided anti-fat crusade driven by well-meaning but naive people... Except that whole thing was literally started by sugar companies paying scientists to point the blame towards fat so their profits wouldn't take a hit. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...