Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he's been directionally correct about all his major points in the past decade:
* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]
* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off
* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]
* Technology won't solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree.
In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win.
Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.
It's also especially vulnerable to "motte and bailey" arguments. Harassing people over competing fandoms is out of order. However, a lot of #metoo gets filed under "cancel culture" when often there is no other working means of getting redress for sexual harassment or assault other than going public, and hoping the perpetrator gets worse backlash than the victim.
However cancel culture is 100% going to evolve once you create an internet, and then leave things to the market to solve.
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!
Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.
Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.
While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
> Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst
This is a massive understatement. The ironic thing about Haidt is that his writing is heavily geared towards social media. He writes a good headline and usually has a few facts in there, but is fundamentally non-rigorous. It’s science for skimmers and people who clicked on an article already agreeing with the conclusions and so won’t challenge the “evidence” he provides no matter how weak.
I agree that Haidt is a poor champion for the cause.
He’s popular because we are seeing something real happening to our kids and Haidt is the only person who is trying to describe whatever’s going on. We agree with the conclusions because we see it in our own kids, not because of the “moral panic”. It’s a shame he gets there in such a sloppy way, but he’s describing a real phenomenon.
I, as a parent, do not need articles and longitudinal studies and double blind peer reviewed studies to tell me that the thing I can observe with my own eyes is real.
I think your statement is reasonably reflective of his web articles (especially his SubStack) but I've really enjoyed the books of his that I've read, which felt well researched and founded, especially The Righteous Mind.
> If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place
I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't have an account. But I have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram all locked down on my phone (my SO has the Screen Time code).
I did this because the best minds on earth get paid based on how much I doom scroll. If I don't do this, I routinely have times where I scroll for an hour+.
I have argued that the only solution to this is to either ban any sort compensation based on increased engagement of a social media product (probably impossible to enforce or unconstitutional if that still matters). OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. We regulate gambling because it hacks our dopamine loop (although usually associated with much more severe consequences). I think it's ok to regulate the video scroll. Start small with something like enforcing a scroll lock after 30 minutes. To enforce it, just regulate the largest companies.
> OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling.
I really don’t want the government telling me what I can or can’t do on my phone, or that an app I enjoy can’t exist. Alcohol exists, gambling exists, cigarettes exist, porn exists, cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either. I don’t want the government to be my dad. And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? These are consumption-side problems in my opinion, and individuals need to bear the responsibility rather than trying to pawn it off on big tech companies or regulators.
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
Look around the world at where democratic norms are actually being undone. It’s often the people who are most opposed to so-called ‘cancel culture’ who are busy with the undoing. But perhaps you are willing to be an unusually bipartisan wielder of the term and concede that the major instances of cancel culture in recent times are such things as Hungary banning pride parades, Trump bullying universities and deporting people for holding the wrong political views, and school libraries banning books with LGBTQ themes.
Trump and the right wing engage in cancel culture. Ben Shapiro tried to cancel James Gunn, Bill Ackman tried to cancel Ivy League graduates that protested in support of Gaza, there are many examples. The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.
> Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst
We can, and probably should, just end the discussion there. Haidt is really good at finding data to support his claims, but then failing to mention that the correlation he's describing as "definitive" is, actually, really weak. This happens throughout "The Anxious Generation," at least.
Calling him "directionally correct" when he's pretty bad at actually showing the work as to why he is correct is just saying that you think he has a good point because his vibes match your vibes.
I don't think I'm just saying that. I'd say instead:
1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high.
2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't.
(I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
One's position on "cancel culture" tends to reveal a lot about somebody's politics. Complaining about cancel culture tends to correlate highly with conservative political views. The idea is that some people can't freely express their opinions. This is the same idea that leads the likes of Elon Musk to complain about the lack of "free speech".
When right-wingers say "free speech" they mean "hate speech", more specifically "the freedom to express hate speech". And when they complain about "cancel culture", what they're really complaining about it there being consequences to their speech [1].
So if somebody goes on a racist screed and they lost their job because their employer doesn't want to be associated with such views, that gets labelled as "cancel culture".
The very same people defend cancelling the permanent resident status of somebody who simply protested war crimes committed by Israel (ie Mahmoud Khalil) with no due process, a clear First Amendment violation.
As a reminder, the First Amendment is a restriction on government activity. For some reason, the same people who were vaccine experts 2 years ago who are now constitutional experts don't seem to understand this.
The unstated major premise of your screed is that "conservative political belief" are inherently wrong, factually and morally. Not everyone agrees with that.
Is it not clear that cancel culture played a role in the broader misinformation landscape? The argument seems to be undermining itself.
Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
People are still taking shots at the cancel culture boogeyman in 2025? It's just an organic response to people not wanting evil slop shoved in their faces on an unregulated internet.
>Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
Cancel culture is a myth.
It is a label used to denigrate people and organizations who exercise the fundamental right to distance themselves from associations they find distasteful or non-beneficial.
There is not a single "cancelled" person who does not retain the ability to work and exercise their speech rights.
This is not opinion it is fact.
I welcome any attempt to prove me wrong.
I will respond with acting credits, tweets, and photographs of the cancelled person serving in a position of authority and/or being chauffeured between media appearances where they complain about being cancelled to an audience of millions.
"Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive.
> "Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive.
That sounds exactly like the same made up language of "sealioning" and "concern trolling" weaponized by the same people accusing the other side of making up "cancel culture" and "virtue signaling". Maybe you don't hold the ethical high ground and never did.
Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
Democracy protects the majority against a minority. "Cancel culture" does the same. They are bedfellows.
Liberalism is what protects a minority against the majority.
Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism).
If someone insults people or breaks norms, and there's a lot of blow back, it doesn't surprise me. Few people complain that they are forbidden from walking the streets nude with a raging erection. The majority doesn't want that kind of freedom of expression.
What this has to do with social media companies, don't ask me. I mainly care about the ability of people to make arguments without the government locking them up.
> But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text.
Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
I would guess it's the opposite of "bad best-practices", namely that there are no common best practices. Everyone intuitively understands how black-box redaction works, but the ways inadequate redaction fails is a bit technical and not intuitively obvious, so it's a task that's ripe for ignorant overconfidence.
Because it's a problem with a 50 year old UX design that we still use today and aren't changing any time soon. WYSIWYG UX is easy to use, because you can simply train the users to manipulate what they see until it visually represents the output they want. This is the predominant way we've trained users for most of the history of GUI software.
But, WYSIWYG on a 2D screen is just an inherently leaky UX abstraction when dealing with 2.5D content, e.g. layers.
The vast vast vast majority of humans are not programmers and do not view the world through the mental models programmers do.
Why SHOULD someone using a PDF reader software intuitively understand that placing a black rectangle over a document and saving it doesn't prevent someone from seeing that document?! Why the fuck does anyone doing a job need to learn a set of unique and non-generalizing mental models just to redact a document!
Imagine if paper had unexpected failure modes!
The problem is not professionals trying to do their damn job. The problem is US. The Programmers. Who consistently make garbage systems using garbage leaky abstractions and absurd assumptions and ignoring decades of user interface research because google released a new UI library written by programmers who haven't interacted with non-programmers in a decade.
I don't have kids, so I'm not in the trenches on this one. But a personal anecdote that might serve as evidence that other things are possible to everyone navigating tech and kids...
When I was a kid living in a trailer in the midwest in the eighties I asked my parents to buy me a secondhand set of 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica from our local library - for $7. It fed the same curiosity and joy of discovering new things that you would want your kid to get from resources online.
When we went on trips we always drove. And even if I didn't already have a book or books from the library that I was reading at the time, my parents would suggest I take a volume of the Encyclopedia. And sure enough if I got bored I'd break it out. (Unless it was too dark to read at which point I'd just fall sleep.)
That's all to say there are alternatives that cut the gordian knot, which kids can really dig if you frame it right. My parents were both voracious readers themselves, and it didn't take long for their reading to my sibling and I to turn into reading on our own. So when we got something that provided the novelty and agency of navigating your own way through an encyclopedia, it was a huge hit.
Of course things are very different today. And I'm not a luddite or even someone who believes that old ways are intrinsically better. But there are ways to feed the many various and often contradictory needs kids have that aren't reliant on contemporary tech.
Well thought out comment here. One of the things I've done with my kids is steered them into screen time with a learning or logical factor to it. Examples are the Chess.com app, Kerbel Space Program, flight simulators, etc.
I am surprised how common it is for younger women and teenagers to receive requests for gifting and get sexualized comments which this article mentions. I don't see a lot of people talking about it but I think it would really warp someone's mind to be under 18 and be receiving requests for foot pics, "spoiling", and more. I've wanted to put this out there for a long time but felt like no one wanted to talk about it.
I'm a woman who grew up pre-internet. I started getting catcalled on the street around 12 (and I always looked many years younger than I was). From 12 to around 30 (when I got fat) I wasn't able to leave the house without being harassed on the street.
This is just a new medium for a very old behavior.
I can imagine it would completely warp your idea of men especially if you were young and not able to put it into perspective (even very old people can’t do this). That could have a serious impact on your life.
Great read, thanks for posting. What I like about it is that while it notes Haidt's ideas get flimsier the closer they're examined, it also thoughtfully gives him credit for a more important observation — that the increasing loss of societal structure is the actual and larger problem (and seemingly the target of his next book), with social media as one of many symptoms or contributors, depending on how you look at it.
> As the U.S. Surgeon General recently explained, children’s and parents’ attempts to resist social media is an unfair fight: “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers."
This struck a chord. I struggle with addictive tendencies and I've been having to re-teach myself that stumbling is not always because "I didn't try hard enough" but because I live in a world thats optimizing for retention/subscriptions/etc...
My favorite part is how incompetent they were in handling the redaction:
"But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you."
Readit News
* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]
* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off
* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]
* Technology won't solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.
[0] https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-7.html
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-s...
[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-the-phones-stupid/
[3] https://www.sexual-culture.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones
[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/726709657/sometimes-fascinati...
This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree.
In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win.
Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.
Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.
While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
Dead Comment
This is a massive understatement. The ironic thing about Haidt is that his writing is heavily geared towards social media. He writes a good headline and usually has a few facts in there, but is fundamentally non-rigorous. It’s science for skimmers and people who clicked on an article already agreeing with the conclusions and so won’t challenge the “evidence” he provides no matter how weak.
He’s popular because we are seeing something real happening to our kids and Haidt is the only person who is trying to describe whatever’s going on. We agree with the conclusions because we see it in our own kids, not because of the “moral panic”. It’s a shame he gets there in such a sloppy way, but he’s describing a real phenomenon.
I, as a parent, do not need articles and longitudinal studies and double blind peer reviewed studies to tell me that the thing I can observe with my own eyes is real.
I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't have an account. But I have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram all locked down on my phone (my SO has the Screen Time code).
I did this because the best minds on earth get paid based on how much I doom scroll. If I don't do this, I routinely have times where I scroll for an hour+.
I have argued that the only solution to this is to either ban any sort compensation based on increased engagement of a social media product (probably impossible to enforce or unconstitutional if that still matters). OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. We regulate gambling because it hacks our dopamine loop (although usually associated with much more severe consequences). I think it's ok to regulate the video scroll. Start small with something like enforcing a scroll lock after 30 minutes. To enforce it, just regulate the largest companies.
I really don’t want the government telling me what I can or can’t do on my phone, or that an app I enjoy can’t exist. Alcohol exists, gambling exists, cigarettes exist, porn exists, cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either. I don’t want the government to be my dad. And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? These are consumption-side problems in my opinion, and individuals need to bear the responsibility rather than trying to pawn it off on big tech companies or regulators.
Look around the world at where democratic norms are actually being undone. It’s often the people who are most opposed to so-called ‘cancel culture’ who are busy with the undoing. But perhaps you are willing to be an unusually bipartisan wielder of the term and concede that the major instances of cancel culture in recent times are such things as Hungary banning pride parades, Trump bullying universities and deporting people for holding the wrong political views, and school libraries banning books with LGBTQ themes.
We can, and probably should, just end the discussion there. Haidt is really good at finding data to support his claims, but then failing to mention that the correlation he's describing as "definitive" is, actually, really weak. This happens throughout "The Anxious Generation," at least.
Calling him "directionally correct" when he's pretty bad at actually showing the work as to why he is correct is just saying that you think he has a good point because his vibes match your vibes.
1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high.
2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't.
(I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
One's position on "cancel culture" tends to reveal a lot about somebody's politics. Complaining about cancel culture tends to correlate highly with conservative political views. The idea is that some people can't freely express their opinions. This is the same idea that leads the likes of Elon Musk to complain about the lack of "free speech".
When right-wingers say "free speech" they mean "hate speech", more specifically "the freedom to express hate speech". And when they complain about "cancel culture", what they're really complaining about it there being consequences to their speech [1].
So if somebody goes on a racist screed and they lost their job because their employer doesn't want to be associated with such views, that gets labelled as "cancel culture".
The very same people defend cancelling the permanent resident status of somebody who simply protested war crimes committed by Israel (ie Mahmoud Khalil) with no due process, a clear First Amendment violation.
As a reminder, the First Amendment is a restriction on government activity. For some reason, the same people who were vaccine experts 2 years ago who are now constitutional experts don't seem to understand this.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...
Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
Frankly, it's terrifying.
Cancel culture is a myth.
It is a label used to denigrate people and organizations who exercise the fundamental right to distance themselves from associations they find distasteful or non-beneficial.
There is not a single "cancelled" person who does not retain the ability to work and exercise their speech rights.
This is not opinion it is fact.
I welcome any attempt to prove me wrong.
I will respond with acting credits, tweets, and photographs of the cancelled person serving in a position of authority and/or being chauffeured between media appearances where they complain about being cancelled to an audience of millions.
"Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive.
That sounds exactly like the same made up language of "sealioning" and "concern trolling" weaponized by the same people accusing the other side of making up "cancel culture" and "virtue signaling". Maybe you don't hold the ethical high ground and never did.
Liberalism is what protects a minority against the majority.
Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism).
If someone insults people or breaks norms, and there's a lot of blow back, it doesn't surprise me. Few people complain that they are forbidden from walking the streets nude with a raging erection. The majority doesn't want that kind of freedom of expression.
What this has to do with social media companies, don't ask me. I mainly care about the ability of people to make arguments without the government locking them up.
Isn't that the other way around? The laws (and more importantly, the rule of law) are in place to prevent the tyranny of the majority?
Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698326
Actually, it is quite weird, I wonder if some bad best-practices have been circulated.
It would be really nice if legal documents were prepared in some sort of standardized markup-like language.
so that's why new mac keyboards did away the entire F keys row?
But, WYSIWYG on a 2D screen is just an inherently leaky UX abstraction when dealing with 2.5D content, e.g. layers.
Why SHOULD someone using a PDF reader software intuitively understand that placing a black rectangle over a document and saving it doesn't prevent someone from seeing that document?! Why the fuck does anyone doing a job need to learn a set of unique and non-generalizing mental models just to redact a document!
Imagine if paper had unexpected failure modes!
The problem is not professionals trying to do their damn job. The problem is US. The Programmers. Who consistently make garbage systems using garbage leaky abstractions and absurd assumptions and ignoring decades of user interface research because google released a new UI library written by programmers who haven't interacted with non-programmers in a decade.
Why are WE still doing this?
When I was a kid living in a trailer in the midwest in the eighties I asked my parents to buy me a secondhand set of 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica from our local library - for $7. It fed the same curiosity and joy of discovering new things that you would want your kid to get from resources online.
When we went on trips we always drove. And even if I didn't already have a book or books from the library that I was reading at the time, my parents would suggest I take a volume of the Encyclopedia. And sure enough if I got bored I'd break it out. (Unless it was too dark to read at which point I'd just fall sleep.)
That's all to say there are alternatives that cut the gordian knot, which kids can really dig if you frame it right. My parents were both voracious readers themselves, and it didn't take long for their reading to my sibling and I to turn into reading on our own. So when we got something that provided the novelty and agency of navigating your own way through an encyclopedia, it was a huge hit.
Of course things are very different today. And I'm not a luddite or even someone who believes that old ways are intrinsically better. But there are ways to feed the many various and often contradictory needs kids have that aren't reliant on contemporary tech.
This is just a new medium for a very old behavior.
Deleted Comment
> As the U.S. Surgeon General recently explained, children’s and parents’ attempts to resist social media is an unfair fight: “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers."
This struck a chord. I struggle with addictive tendencies and I've been having to re-teach myself that stumbling is not always because "I didn't try hard enough" but because I live in a world thats optimizing for retention/subscriptions/etc...
"But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you."
https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/hanlons-razor