> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
Some people have always had qualities like Aaron's, and giving them tools like AI causes them to reveal themselves by virtue of becoming that much louder. Those problems are often unfixable regardless, as they are at the level of personality. What is fixable in comparison (but likely not in practice) is not inventing new ways of allowing them to hang themselves and others. But we will invent them anyway, because a promising idea cannot be left alone for long, and consequences will be suffered as a result.
As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way.
He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.
Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)
So rather than work on the first problem, which is admittedly difficult, you want to remove the outlet that helps them cope? What do you imagine to be the most immediate consequences?
I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from.
So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture.
It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.
> I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better
TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.
I regained my focus after many years and it had nothing to do with distractions for me, distractions were only a way of fighting stress that constantly appeared. The stress was the underlying issue. I worked on that in therapy (breaking away from my parents) and I can now work on what I want for hours at a time. It's because now I feel I can become my own person and do what I want while not being chained to the past anymore.
I would be careful going straight in this direction without considering alternatives. I thought for my entire life that my issues were explained by ADHD, but it turned out all the symptoms you described (procrastination, depression, lack of focus, damaged self-esteem) were not symptoms of ADHD, but of childhood trauma. ADHD was the label my parents gave me to cover up their abuse of me, and not knowing any better as a child I decided to carry that label into adulthood. That choice did more harm to me than I can convey in words.
ADHD is a real condition, but the terminology is so muddled that any number of underlying problems can manifest as lack of attention and be called "ADHD", putting off any ability to truly recover for years or decades. I should have been more suspicious when stimulant medication had no long-term effect on my performance, even though it has helped actual sufferers of ADHD. My own problem was elsewhere.
I have too much emotional attachment to progress. A lot of people made the mistake of putting too much energy into e.g. career instead of what you really want outside of a paycheck. Well, now I really am doing the thing I've always wanted, of course I suck at it, and most days I feel bad in the process.
Some people feel good about making mistakes. Though necessary for long-term success, this is a completely foreign mindset to me. I have no idea how a person can do such a thing. I tend to overreact instead.
It's not any wonder I would turn to doomscrolling in response, it seems the stakes in my mind are too high and effort invariably leads to depression (speaking from experience). It's too important to me to fail at. Maladaptive phone usage is for escaping that anxiety. I'm most likely burnt out from other attempts in the past. I don't get this feeling at all with work since I'm only doing it for money.
I would feel bad if I couldn't learn the things I really wanted to in life because the emotional toll is too high to pay, after putting in all the work to have a stable income. I still have to manage the rest of my life on top of optional things.
I prefer 3-button navigation, but it seems most of the web has decided that gesture-based navigation has won, and it's an awful experience sometimes. They assume you will always swipe down to close popup modals like full-size images, so pressing back will instead navigate out of the page. And half the time, navigating forward puts you right back on top of the modal again!
It breaks the intuition that one tap == one piece of state on the navigation stack.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
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