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This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain. It was thrown away as the uninterest

This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain. It was thrown away as the uninteresting rants of beardy old men, to make space for things like some trite dabbling with Word and Excel billed as "digitalization". So now things like History, Literature and many STEM subjects feel completely ungrounded. When my kids have some trouble understanding things and they ask me, the answer is very often something I learned studying Philosophy. So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what the overlords are doing.

deadbabe 2y ago
What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. Nothing else to it. Not sure why people should just get funding forever to constantly arrive at the same conclusion.
- pipe2devnull 2y ago
  I also agree they are bad but to simplify anything down to “it’s bad there’s nothing else to learn” seems like a gross oversimplification.
- acdha 2y ago
  “What else is there to research about disease? They’re bad, but people get infected.” These are things which shape our world, it’s worth understanding them at a level which doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker – and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always has spin-off benefits, even if that’s just providing a place for people to learn general research skills they take on to the workplace.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by how much? 5) Who uses them without harm? 6) What societal impacts, positive and negative, do they have? And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of those could be a hundred research projects. Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence, you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that just requires a lot of detailed research. For example, compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all, because "social networks bad"?
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - wpietri 2y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but spouting a little pop science jargon plus some anecdotes is not "figuring it out" for the purposes of actually fixing anything. If it were, then they "do your own research" people would have health care sorted out already.
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        [flagged]
- jacobr1 2y ago
  But what policies work in regulating them? Street drugs are bad, and outright prohibition in the war on drugs has failed for many different reasons. Figuring out how to stop incentivised organized crime, street gangs is hard. Understanding how decriminalization does or doesn't work is hard. Does giving out free needles reduce harm by preventing disease or increase harm by enabling use? What economic or social policies would indirectly help? Does high housing costs drive homeless, drive addiction so we should all be YIMBYs or does abuse, lead to job loss, lead to homelessness. The truth is very complex and hard to figure how how to fix it. Social media is a similar type of problem. You probably can't outright ban them, in democratic countries there is too much demand and there would be backlash. Even if not, underground social media would arise, as it does already in countries where it is restricted. Can you regulate it? If so, what works? Certain ages? Restrict algorithmic curation? Chang liability rules? Better educate people about the costs and benefits and good use? Enable more heavy handed censorship and content filtration? Require real names and public have strong libel laws that are enforced? What about foreign ownership or influence campaigns? Corporate advertising? Monopoly and anti-truest issues? What about standards around interoperability and federation? Should they be free, or require subscriptions? Tons of stuff to figure out.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    Ban ads would be a great start.
  - worik 2y ago
    > Tons of stuff to figure out. I am in New Zealand The people behind d this policy do not think there is "Tons of stuff to figure out." They are like many commentators here, they (think they) know it all. It is, I hope, the last gasp of the old Thatcherist guard. "There is no such thing as society...just individuals " They see everything through a materialistic lense, are desperate to reduce taxes (it is a fetish), and are doing incredible damage to the infrastructure of our society Politics, sigh The government they replaced (earnest left wing types) had some good ideas but were very centrist, paternal, and astoundingly incompetent The prognosis is not good for my home country
    - 2y ago
- worik 2y ago
  > What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. This is a social network
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    And given how often I come here in the average day, looking for something new/interesting, you could make a case for addiction...
    - Nasrudith 2y ago
      Really, if we want to make a case for addiction there is clearly an addiction to trying to claim new things as somehow addictive. It is on a dodgy basis backed mostly by sensationalism and pseudoscience that pathologizes anything which has to do with pleasure. Really they are neo-puritians wearing a mask of science.
andrepd 2y ago
Next door (PT) the right wing also wants to cut down on several things: social sciences, philosophy, sex ed. Part of (1) a crusade against what is perceived to be "the communists brainwashing your kids", and (2) an idea that schools and universities ought only to teach that which the market requires. So yes to STEM because it has economical value, and no to social sciences, arts, or philosophy because according to The Market it doesn't.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
[flagged]
- pessimizer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - kelseyfrog 2y ago
      This is a poor attempt at applying cancel culture tactics to sociology and psychology.
    - derbOac 2y ago
      Freud and other psychodynamic theorists were basically the beginning of the idea within medicine and neurobehavioral sciences that people don't always have insight into their behavior. Too much has been made of them on the basis of caricature and stereotype. Maybe in the humanities it's still dominant but I don't get that sense. It's always struck me as odd that people are fine idolizing and giving Nobel prizes to vague two-system theories of decision making ("fast and slow") but then turn around and act like Freud was the worst form of charlatan, when the former is just an empirically articulated form of the latter. Important difference but fundamentally not all that different in another way. I feel silly defending Freud but sometimes I feel like the weird vitriol and animosity toward Freud is strange. As someone pointed out, it's like the general public getting angry with physicists for ever positing luminous ether, or getting angry with biologists for entertaining Lamarckian inheritance.
      - throw4847285 2y ago
        You shouldn't feel silly. The animosity towards Freud is completely understandable, and I think, pernicious. What people want to challenge is not Freud's crankery, but the destabilizing and widely accepted idea of a human subconscious. I see it most common in a certain kind of "rationalist" that doesn't want rational methods to extend to analyzing their own behavior.
wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened. We meet every couple of weeks and it has been great. I don't in general find philosophy's answers particularly useful, but the questions and the habit of questioning has been great. I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will Hunting: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor. Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert. That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.
  - asoneth 2y ago
    > You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence. I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts. Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.
DontchaKnowit 2y ago
[flagged]
- globalnode 2y ago
  Maybe it just attracts those types of people so they can try to figure themselves out.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    If that is the case we need to force everyone who tries for such a degree to spend time with a proper psychologist. If is key.
    - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
      That goes for people who want to study psychology as well.
    - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
      also - damn near every psychologist I have ever met has been similarly fucked up in the head.
nprateem 2y ago
It's not that myopic though is it? Over the last 2 or so years breakthroughs in AI have given us access to a new level of technology. It's a rich seam to mine, so society is likely to benefit more from a state focussing its research on it instead of e.g. understanding Maori migration a few hundred years ago. A stronger economy leads to more funding for public services to support people alive today.
- spookie 2y ago
  Understanding one's past is understanding one's future.
  - boznz 2y ago
    History has been pretty well uncovered, whether people listen to it and learn its lessons is another matter (schools certainly don't teach it unless it is how the white male oppressors fucked over everyone and it is the cause of all the worlds evils). Most historical debate these days is also pretty subjective, egos-versus-egos for clicks and likes (and research money) Don't get me started on the subjective biases of social "science"
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      > History has been pretty well uncovered This is just absolutely factually wrong and betrays a total lack of understanding of the field. History manuscripts are released constantly that are investigating and discussing contents of the archive that have been sitting in a box unexamined since the time of their creation. Even if you take the outrageously limited view of history that it just exists to document the past, we make significant progress constantly. There's also no research money in the field for egos to squabble over. Research grants for historians are regularly in the "couple of thousand dollars" range.
      - boznz 2y ago
        I wish I could agree, and happy to be shot down but I am not seeing anything that is not just a re-interpretation of current facts to make history sound nicer. there has certainly been nothing uncovered this century that has changed anything and I mean anything important about the current world and the original article was about economic benefits to our country which there frankly are none. Subjective "research" IMHO is a waste of taxpayer dollars when objective research is still underfunded.
EasyMark 2y ago
I really wish classes on basic philosophy and skepticism/propaganda techniques were taught in high school as mandatory class. People need to learn to question propaganda and demand sources and logic when people try to "convince" them of "thangs and stuff". Too many youngsters trust the crap on the internet without question if it makes them "feel" good or "a part of something" or any other number of emotional responses to tiktoks and instagram tripe.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  Agree, but OTOH, how much impact would some beardy old man schoolteacher telling them not to enjoy these feel-good things really have? (Maybe quite a lot. I really don't know.)
- Spivak 2y ago
  You get philosophy at any Catholic or Jewish school simply from your theology class and "skepticism/propaganda" is usually called "rhetorical analysis" and is taught to high school Sophomores in English class. I can't speak to Protestant / "Christian" schools because theirs is a very different religion but a Catholic education is 12 years of moral philosophy and formal ethics. It's just filtered through the writings of prominent Catholic theologians whose ideas are informed by but ultimately separate from the bible. Despite being an atheist I think my theology classes were the most valuable ones I had growing up because more so than any other class, even math which would go on to study, they taught me how to think for myself. I'm sad a secular version of it isn't taught everywhere as standard curriculum.

deadbabe 2y ago

What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. Nothing else to it. Not sure why people should just get funding forever to constantly arrive at the same conclusion.

pipe2devnull 2y ago
I also agree they are bad but to simplify anything down to “it’s bad there’s nothing else to learn” seems like a gross oversimplification.
acdha 2y ago
“What else is there to research about disease? They’re bad, but people get infected.” These are things which shape our world, it’s worth understanding them at a level which doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker – and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always has spin-off benefits, even if that’s just providing a place for people to learn general research skills they take on to the workplace.
wpietri 2y ago
Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by how much? 5) Who uses them without harm? 6) What societal impacts, positive and negative, do they have? And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of those could be a hundred research projects. Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence, you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that just requires a lot of detailed research. For example, compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all, because "social networks bad"?
- dgfitz 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - wpietri 2y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but spouting a little pop science jargon plus some anecdotes is not "figuring it out" for the purposes of actually fixing anything. If it were, then they "do your own research" people would have health care sorted out already.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      [flagged]
jacobr1 2y ago
But what policies work in regulating them? Street drugs are bad, and outright prohibition in the war on drugs has failed for many different reasons. Figuring out how to stop incentivised organized crime, street gangs is hard. Understanding how decriminalization does or doesn't work is hard. Does giving out free needles reduce harm by preventing disease or increase harm by enabling use? What economic or social policies would indirectly help? Does high housing costs drive homeless, drive addiction so we should all be YIMBYs or does abuse, lead to job loss, lead to homelessness. The truth is very complex and hard to figure how how to fix it. Social media is a similar type of problem. You probably can't outright ban them, in democratic countries there is too much demand and there would be backlash. Even if not, underground social media would arise, as it does already in countries where it is restricted. Can you regulate it? If so, what works? Certain ages? Restrict algorithmic curation? Chang liability rules? Better educate people about the costs and benefits and good use? Enable more heavy handed censorship and content filtration? Require real names and public have strong libel laws that are enforced? What about foreign ownership or influence campaigns? Corporate advertising? Monopoly and anti-truest issues? What about standards around interoperability and federation? Should they be free, or require subscriptions? Tons of stuff to figure out.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  Ban ads would be a great start.
- worik 2y ago
  > Tons of stuff to figure out. I am in New Zealand The people behind d this policy do not think there is "Tons of stuff to figure out." They are like many commentators here, they (think they) know it all. It is, I hope, the last gasp of the old Thatcherist guard. "There is no such thing as society...just individuals " They see everything through a materialistic lense, are desperate to reduce taxes (it is a fetish), and are doing incredible damage to the infrastructure of our society Politics, sigh The government they replaced (earnest left wing types) had some good ideas but were very centrist, paternal, and astoundingly incompetent The prognosis is not good for my home country
  - 2y ago
worik 2y ago
> What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. This is a social network
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  And given how often I come here in the average day, looking for something new/interesting, you could make a case for addiction...
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    Really, if we want to make a case for addiction there is clearly an addiction to trying to claim new things as somehow addictive. It is on a dodgy basis backed mostly by sensationalism and pseudoscience that pathologizes anything which has to do with pleasure. Really they are neo-puritians wearing a mask of science.

andrepd 2y ago

Next door (PT) the right wing also wants to cut down on several things: social sciences, philosophy, sex ed. Part of (1) a crusade against what is perceived to be "the communists brainwashing your kids", and (2) an idea that schools and universities ought only to teach that which the market requires. So yes to STEM because it has economical value, and no to social sciences, arts, or philosophy because according to The Market it doesn't.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

[flagged]

pessimizer 2y ago
[flagged]
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    This is a poor attempt at applying cancel culture tactics to sociology and psychology.
  - derbOac 2y ago
    Freud and other psychodynamic theorists were basically the beginning of the idea within medicine and neurobehavioral sciences that people don't always have insight into their behavior. Too much has been made of them on the basis of caricature and stereotype. Maybe in the humanities it's still dominant but I don't get that sense. It's always struck me as odd that people are fine idolizing and giving Nobel prizes to vague two-system theories of decision making ("fast and slow") but then turn around and act like Freud was the worst form of charlatan, when the former is just an empirically articulated form of the latter. Important difference but fundamentally not all that different in another way. I feel silly defending Freud but sometimes I feel like the weird vitriol and animosity toward Freud is strange. As someone pointed out, it's like the general public getting angry with physicists for ever positing luminous ether, or getting angry with biologists for entertaining Lamarckian inheritance.
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      You shouldn't feel silly. The animosity towards Freud is completely understandable, and I think, pernicious. What people want to challenge is not Freud's crankery, but the destabilizing and widely accepted idea of a human subconscious. I see it most common in a certain kind of "rationalist" that doesn't want rational methods to extend to analyzing their own behavior.

wpietri 2y ago

Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened. We meet every couple of weeks and it has been great. I don't in general find philosophy's answers particularly useful, but the questions and the habit of questioning has been great. I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.

dgfitz 2y ago
I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will Hunting: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor. Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert. That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.
- asoneth 2y ago
  > You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence. I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts. Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.

DontchaKnowit 2y ago

[flagged]

globalnode 2y ago
Maybe it just attracts those types of people so they can try to figure themselves out.
- bluGill 2y ago
  If that is the case we need to force everyone who tries for such a degree to spend time with a proper psychologist. If is key.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    That goes for people who want to study psychology as well.
  - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
    also - damn near every psychologist I have ever met has been similarly fucked up in the head.

nprateem 2y ago

It's not that myopic though is it? Over the last 2 or so years breakthroughs in AI have given us access to a new level of technology. It's a rich seam to mine, so society is likely to benefit more from a state focussing its research on it instead of e.g. understanding Maori migration a few hundred years ago. A stronger economy leads to more funding for public services to support people alive today.

spookie 2y ago
Understanding one's past is understanding one's future.
- boznz 2y ago
  History has been pretty well uncovered, whether people listen to it and learn its lessons is another matter (schools certainly don't teach it unless it is how the white male oppressors fucked over everyone and it is the cause of all the worlds evils). Most historical debate these days is also pretty subjective, egos-versus-egos for clicks and likes (and research money) Don't get me started on the subjective biases of social "science"
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    > History has been pretty well uncovered This is just absolutely factually wrong and betrays a total lack of understanding of the field. History manuscripts are released constantly that are investigating and discussing contents of the archive that have been sitting in a box unexamined since the time of their creation. Even if you take the outrageously limited view of history that it just exists to document the past, we make significant progress constantly. There's also no research money in the field for egos to squabble over. Research grants for historians are regularly in the "couple of thousand dollars" range.
    - boznz 2y ago
      I wish I could agree, and happy to be shot down but I am not seeing anything that is not just a re-interpretation of current facts to make history sound nicer. there has certainly been nothing uncovered this century that has changed anything and I mean anything important about the current world and the original article was about economic benefits to our country which there frankly are none. Subjective "research" IMHO is a waste of taxpayer dollars when objective research is still underfunded.

EasyMark 2y ago

I really wish classes on basic philosophy and skepticism/propaganda techniques were taught in high school as mandatory class. People need to learn to question propaganda and demand sources and logic when people try to "convince" them of "thangs and stuff". Too many youngsters trust the crap on the internet without question if it makes them "feel" good or "a part of something" or any other number of emotional responses to tiktoks and instagram tripe.

akoboldfrying 2y ago
Agree, but OTOH, how much impact would some beardy old man schoolteacher telling them not to enjoy these feel-good things really have? (Maybe quite a lot. I really don't know.)
Spivak 2y ago
You get philosophy at any Catholic or Jewish school simply from your theology class and "skepticism/propaganda" is usually called "rhetorical analysis" and is taught to high school Sophomores in English class. I can't speak to Protestant / "Christian" schools because theirs is a very different religion but a Catholic education is 12 years of moral philosophy and formal ethics. It's just filtered through the writings of prominent Catholic theologians whose ideas are informed by but ultimately separate from the bible. Despite being an atheist I think my theology classes were the most valuable ones I had growing up because more so than any other class, even math which would go on to study, they taught me how to think for myself. I'm sad a secular version of it isn't taught everywhere as standard curriculum.