I hope you're right but I think you're dead wrong. Social media has not only affected the mental health of millions of people negatively, it has brought about social, political and economic harms that will affect the planet for generations.
Right, the thing it reminds me of is the long-term impact of reading to your kids at a young age, it has measurable effects equivalent to expensive professional education choices you could make later on in life, although I forget the exact comparison.
But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
Neuroplasticity wanes as people become adults. I'm not saying it's impossible, but changing ingrained patterns of thinking as an adult can be difficult or require deliberate effort and perhaps help of trained therapists.
In the absence of any evidence, it is really unclear why anyone needs to catastrophize about generations of harms.
Is there any reason to believe that "social media existing" is a worse and more enduring harm than tens of millions of people dying in the Second World War, the trauma of the survivors, the vast destruction of infrastructure,or the start of the risk of nuclear war?
Yet the post war baby boom seems to have led a remarkably fortunate life, overall.
When I lost my faith I was frequently engaged in debate by my friends and family. I was eager and willing to try and argue for the logical and moral necessity of atheism. It was never productive.
Eventually, when someone would ask me to engage in debate I would start by saying, "Is there anything you can think of that I could say that would possible make you lose your faith or decide I was right?"
The answer to this question was always "no, it is impossible for me to lose my faith". My next question was always "then what would be the point of debating?"
This was also never productive. But it was efficient.
Humans used to get on ships and sail away, perhaps never to be heard from again. We can absolutely survive several minutes of confusion around eating arrangements. "Text me when you get there." Let's all just calm down and live with a little uncertainty
There will always be other places that don’t care.
But I think it’s okay to appreciate the world around you and spend time being present while waiting for someone. We used to do this all the time. People watching is fun.
There's another aspect: these days most people don't like being told what to do. When it infringes on other people's lives like making photos I understand but anything else nope.
I couldn't imagine working in an army either. I'd never let them get away with barking at me.
People have never liked being told what to do. Even in the military, it's rare that anyone likes being told what to do. The point is that you do it anyway, because you are disciplined and believe in the chain of command, provided you aren't being asked to do something illegal.
If you don't trust your chain of command, then there are issues. But militaries are decidedly not democracies, because the military often requires swift action, and democracies move slowly by design.
That's fine, I wasn't trying to convince you. :) I was just clarifying that there isn't a human alive who actually likes being told what to do. There is usually a reason they do it anyway, but it is rarely because they like it.
(I am exaggerating, and in the sense of pleasure there are obviously submissive people, etc., but you get my point, I think)
True and I'm one of them in fact. But it's different, I'm submissive only when I want to, to whom I choose to, within limits that I set. There's a lot of safety net. Whereas people who are forced to work in the military don't have any choice.
I think being so antiauthoritarian is what makes that interesting for me. Though I'm never authoritative myself, I could never manage people either.
For sure; the container you set within which you choose to be submissive matters a lot, of course. Particularly, it matters because it lets you remain in control of how and when and what you submit to. :)
The issue of being in the military is precisely that you don't have that control, and choices are made for you. The benefit of this is learning discipline, hard work, resilience, and eventually getting to a point of being in control (whether of yourself or of others).
There are hundreds of ways this can go wrong, but it is all designed for one thing: swift action when necessary. Allowing people choice definitively makes things slower, and speed is of the essence in war. Strategy is too, of course, but decisive action matters.
And those who have no choice are nothing if not decisive when told what to do. :)
Because SCION is mostly said as a joke in the more serious carrier world.
SCION is practically speaking proprietary, and has 1 and maybe a half implementations. I have a laundry list of real problems with SCION but SCION feels like one of those entities that would get quite legal-ey if discussed publicly.
You are right. And it'd be absolutely irresponsible to expect _everybody_ to drop things on the floor and adopt a new protocol (implementation) over night.
However, it'd be equally irresponsible to ask for an innovation budget of 0 percent. The reason one bothers with new approaches is, of course, that fixing things on a conceptual level prevents many of the debugging sessions that you had to go through with the old approach. Why QUIC if there is TCP/TLS/HTTP?
IPv4 and NAT are literally _everywhere_. It's tested and well-understood (one would think). But—and that's just my opinion—I sure hope that, one day, we will not have to deal with that mess no more ...
