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It is interesting to me that we are running a giant social experiment with people's childhoods- something we know can only be done once. Meanwhile the silicon

• munificent 10mo ago
  Society has always been running giant social experiments on the next generation. That's what a culture is.
  • bmitc 10mo ago
    What are some key examples prior to the Internet?
    • runako 10mo ago
      TV, radio, public school, computers, video games, rock & roll, rap, desegregation, etc.
      • bmitc 10mo ago
        I guess I was really looking for concrete examples and examples prior to the invention of or not related to the use of electronic technology. For your non-technological items in your list, I don't see how public school, rock and roll, and desegregation are or were remotely related to experiments being ran on children by society.
        • gretch 10mo ago
          You don’t see them as experiments because they succeeded and are now just seen as “normal”.
        • runako 10mo ago
          Public school -- new concept that caused massive changes to social behaviors and patterns of association. Nobody knew ahead of time what the results of this would be, so it was as much an experiment as letting kids access Instagram. Rock & roll -- millions of people thought that letting children listen to this African American music would corrupt their children and prove ruinous to children. Some parents demanded controls on access to this music, much as some parents are doing with Instagram today. Desegregation -- it's well worth an hour of reading if you haven't spent the time so far. Here I will just say that it was obviously a profound change in social patterns, changes to the US's legal caste system, and had to be enforced at gunpoint. Nobody knew how it would play out, like nobody really knows how using Instagram at age 15 will impact people in midlife. This led to (white) parental outcry over the prospective changes, as many (white) parents did not want to participate in this social experiment. Big changes, no real control groups, unpredictable outcomes. Experiments in a very real sense.
          • pjc50 10mo ago
            I think you've really highlighted the extent to which irrational prejudice plays a role here, as two and a half of those examples involve racism. The US is one of a small number of societies which were ever racially segregated like that. It was in its own way a (failed) experiment. (the UK has no shortage of racism, but it was never legally enforced!)
          • bmitc 10mo ago
            I think it's a stretch to call those experiments of the same kind as those being ran by modern corporations with access to enormous amounts of data and direct connections to people and the ability to later influence based upon the experiments. Who ran the rock and roll experiment? That example makes no sense. Public schools and desegregation were constructed to better society, not as some nefarious way for some corporation to improve their profit lines.
      • pyuser583 10mo ago
        Books, newspapers, concert halls, education ...
• conductr 10mo ago
  It’s more interesting to me why nobody except sv elites can come to the same conclusion themselves regarding <12 year olds on instagram and instead seem to need the government to parent their kids I hate this law and those like it, mostly because it shouldn’t be necessary for government to overstep like this. But when I look around… maybe it is
  • wmf 10mo ago
    It's a collective action problem.
    • godelski 10mo ago
      I don't think it is just that. Look at an HN thread on privacy and you will find a lot of people that do not see any issues. The problem really comes down to complexity and trust. The truth is that there never is a problem if we operate under the assumption that all actors are honest and good natured. But the reality of the world is that this is a naive assumption. All citizens should be concerned about changing objectives from their authorities. A democracy can vote in dictators and a benevolent dictator can quickly change to a malicious one (which has happened frequently historically). We also need to be concerned with non-authority threat actors, from criminals to nation-state actors competing states (and even allies for the same aforementioned reason). That's the problem. The realistic conditions we need to solve for are far more complex than the ones people operate under and we have a difficult time talking to one another about it. For a privacy conscious person it does not matter if the holder of the data is the most benevolent entity that could exist, it is if there is the opportunity for the data to be held by anyone else. Thus, no one should hold it. No matter how "worthy". Even on HN there are a large number of users who think they are not the target of hackers, and especially nation-state hackers. Of all places on the internet this should be one of the most informed on the matter and best suited to understand that being "normal" is what makes them a target, to be incorporated into bot-nets or other reasons like being used for lateral movement. It is the exact same problem: the reality is far more complex. The assumption of not being a target is based on the understanding that they are not the end target but the complexity of reality is that this is not the condition for being /a/ target. I do agree that collective action matters. But it is hard to form collective action when people do not have the motivation for action. And they don't have the motivation because they have a naive approximation of the problems at hand.
• MiddleEndian 10mo ago
  I would not let my (hypothetical) 12 year old on Instagram. I also don't want to give Instagram (or any other site, since I don't use Instagram) my ID to view content on it.